Nestled beneath the shade of a 26-acre old-growth forest and adjacent to a creek in Westside Atlanta now sits an outdoor classroom, standing as a symbol and resource for environmental education and stewardship — while honoring the surrounding neighborhood.
On Saturday, April 12, West Atlanta Watershed Alliance (WAWA) held its ribbon-cutting ceremony for its outdoor classroom project in partnership with a student-led research team from Georgia Tech during its 18th annual Urban Forest Fest.
The project had been in development since 2022 and now connects with WAWA’s Outdoor Activity Center via a trail. Students from Georgia Tech sought to create an Afrofuturism-inspired outdoor classroom through their Vertically Integrated Project (VIP) course offering, which sees students take an idea centered around sustainability and tackle it over the course of the semester.
“The students did all of it — with input from advisors and collaboration with WAWA — but they did all the designs, and they led the build with guidance from a handful of professional builders,” said Jennifer Hirsch, senior director of Center for Sustainable Communities Research & Education (SCoRE) at Georgia Tech and instructor for the VIP that produced the classroom.
The classroom features a clear canopy that lets light shine through the structure, along with an oral history from surrounding residents of the neighborhood placed on QR codes.
The ribbon-cutting ceremony was a success, coupled with a cool but otherwise beautiful Spring day.
“We’re in a forest right now; everything has just started turning green; Spring has come. It’s alongside a trail,” said Tiger Peng, a student at Georgia Tech involved with the oral history part of the project, describing the atmosphere of the opening.
Peng, like other students involved with the project, comes from a non-environmental studies background but still sees the value in the course and space. He added that the project also helps Georgia Tech — known for its STEM graduates — be seen as an accessible community resource.
“I’m actually studying computer science; I joined because the name of VIP sounded interesting,” Peng said. “Maybe it was through the influence of the VIP, or maybe it was the course that I was always going to take, but I started becoming more interested in community engagement and the importance of gathering everyone’s knowledge and skills and effort and care… and I feel like this project has really crystallized that.”
The oral history part of this project was started before he and others came into the project fold — a recurring theme given the three-year development timeline of the classroom that saw multiple VIP classes undertake it.
“[The VIP course] is completely outside the scope of all my other classes. It’s very much you figure out this new thing that you have to do, you figure out how to do it, and you hit the ground running every time… you have to pick up a new skill and apply it right away,” Peng said.
Brian Roberts, a student lead on the design and construction team, acted as a liaison between the students and the professional construction advisors. He joined the project in the Fall of 2023 and saw the project morph from a stage to more of the covered space like it is today.
Roberts credits the course for bringing together driven people and having a network of strong construction advisors available to himself and his teammates. He added that intentional outreach to WAWA at each design step was key to making everyone happy with the end result.
“With a project like this it seems so daunting to manage the construction. But I am so surprised at how effective things can be with simple communication and building a network of people who understand the mission and are driven to achieve it,” Roberts said. “…We tried to listen as best we could and communicate what our thoughts were, and just go back and forth.”
As a previous intern at an organization focused on reusing materials, Roberts was able to apply those concepts to the Afrofuturism components of the classroom build.
“We see that in the reuse of materials. Part of our structure — the lightest part on the roof — is actually material that has been used twice. It was used once for a construction competition; we dismantled it, used it as bracing for the initial structure, then we cut it down and used it for supports for the roof,” Roberts said. “That’s a strong testament of the outdoor classroom’s reuse and sustainability.”
Hirsch said the student-led project was formed through natural collaboration with longstanding community partner WAWA, who wanted to lean into the aspects of sustainability and pass on the knowledge of Afrofuturism.
“My undergraduate research class was looking to find a community partner who was interested in taking some of the concepts behind the Kendeda Building for sustainable design… and seeing them in a neighboring community,” Hirsch said.
The Kendeda Building is one of the most sustainable buildings in the U.S. and is located at Georgia Tech. It is the first “living building” in the Southeast to be certified under the Living Building Challenge.
After talking with longtime partner WAWA and its education director, Darryl Haddock, the idea for the outdoor classroom emerged, with the Afrofuturism aspect of the project coming into play afterward.
Despite trekking through multiple design iterations and permitting red tape, the community-built project persisted and is now open as a resource for both students and residents in the neighborhood.
Note: The writer of this story was previously a graduate student assistant fellow at Georgia Tech under an office run by Hirsch but has no connection to the classroom project nor the VIP course.
