Skip to main content
Add as a preferred source on Google

Stanford Begins Construction on New Facility for Graduate School of Education

  • By Matt Jones
  • 03/23/23

Stanford University in Stanford, Calif., recently celebrated a groundbreaking ceremony for a new home for the university’s Graduate School of Education, according to a university news release. The project entails the renovation of the current Education Building and the construction of a new facility. These two structures will be connected to the existing Barnum Center for Family and Community Partnerships via a 13,500-square-foot courtyard (including an outdoor classroom and garden) to create a three-building, 150,000-square-foot GSE campus.

The new space will feature a wide variety of teaching, conference, convening, and community spaces. It will also allow room for growth with changing technologies and project-based work, according to the news release. It will play home to the Stanford Teacher Education Program and the Stanford Accelerator for Learning.

“The new campus [is] a tangible representation of all that’s happening at the school,” said Dan Schwartz, Graduate School of Education Dean, at the ceremony. “It will help facilitate new research aimed at solving some of the biggest challenges in learning…It will foster collaborations to take education into a currently unimaginable and brighter future. In the end, the campus will do what architecture does best: orchestrate social interaction.”

The construction and renovation are scheduled to take a total of about two and a half years. A significant portion of the project’s funding comes from philanthropic support from a variety of donors.

“The Graduate School of Education’s new, expanded home will be a very highly visible beacon of the promise and the potential of education,” said University Provost Persis Drell. “It will draw students, faculty, researchers, and practitioners from diverse fields who share the desire to improve outcomes for every kind of learner at any stage of their educational journey.”

About the Author

Matt Jones is senior editor of Spaces4Learning. He can be reached at [email protected].

Featured

  • S4L Announces 2026 Education Design Showcase Winners

    Spaces4Learning is thrilled to announce the winners of the 2026 Education Design Showcase! Now in its 27th year, the annual awards program honors innovative solutions in planning, design, architecture, and construction across K–12 and higher education.

  • Porter Family Center

    Porter Family Center for Innovation and Academics

    Established in 1999, the Education Design Showcase is a vehicle for showing off innovative — yet practical — solutions in planning, design, architecture, and construction. The Porter Family Center for Innovation and Academics has been recognized with an EDS 2026 Project of Distinction award in the category of New Construction.

  • Architectural Power for the Modern Campus Landscape

    For generations, an outdoor classroom only required a textbook and a patch of grass. Today, not only has the laptop replaced the printed pages, the rise of agile learning has turned campuses into study halls with students listening to lectures and researching topics from quads, gardens, and plazas. The challenge for architects and facility managers is to provide connectivity without cluttering the landscape with visual eyesores or creating safety hazards with extension cords.

  • University of Kansas Breaks Ground on Entrepreneurship Hub

    The University of Kansas in Lawrence, Kan., recently held a groundbreaking ceremony for the new KU Entrepreneurship Hub, according to university news. The Hub is part of the university’s School of Business and will include spaces for experiential learning and programming.