Design Connections Partnership (DCP)
DCP has been in ten New Haven public schools in grades 1-5. This multi-year, multi-grade project is part of the mathematics curriculum.
Each year, the program looks to serveapproximately 25 classroom teachers and their 600 students, 10 math coaches, and 10 art teachers.
The DCP goal is to use architecture and design as a problem-solving tool to integrate math and science learning with sequential and comprehensive art and design-based learning in order to:
create standards-based Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) lessons
introduce STEM-related careers
develop 21st Century skills – collaboration, creativity, communication, and critical thinking
encourage students to apply academic concepts in authentic tasks
foster students' sense of community and civic involvement
Current Programs
New Haven's Cultural Landscape: its changing people and places (NHCL)
Published by the ARC in 2001, and reprinted in 2010, NHCL was created for New Haven's fifth grades to help address performance standards in social studies and the visual arts. In 2025 we will upgrading and reprinting these materials.
Teaching students about their communities by using the urban landscape anchors the learning experience by connecting it the visible, tangible context of students' everyday lives. Students are introduced tot he inherent complexity of the world around them while learning basic lessons about the environment, social groups, ethnic groups, history, art, architecture, mathematics, geology, technology, industry, economics, planning, politics, government, and more.
The NHCL publications include a Teacher Edition, and oversized Student Workbook that includes line drawings of the 25 buildings that illustrate New Haven's history.
Beyond Amistad: African-American Struggle for Citizenship, 1770-1850
Eighty school teachers participated in two, one-week workshops to study the history of New England slavery using Connecticut's historic sites, people, and resources to illuminate slavery and freedom.
Viewing the celebrated Amistad incident of 1839-41as a catalyst and turning point, this institute explored architectural sites in Connecticut that underscore the centrality of the pre-twentieth-century African American struggle for equal rights to the larger American narrative.
The workshops were developed in partnership with the Yale University Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, and funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities "We the People" initiative.
The Hartford Connection was developed over 4 years as a collaboration of historians, scholars, teachers, and architects. The result is a textbook manuscript that places architecture and landscape in a comprehensive social and historical context.
In addition to exploring features of the built environment as architecture, HC uses these buildings to illustrate the region's growth over four centuries from a frontier village to a complex, interdependent, urban region.
It is structured chronologically to supplement the CT middle school history curriculum. Presented with generous illustration, carefully selected primary sources, context-minded and age-appropriate prose, and tested, hands-on design activities, HC offers CT students a view of Hartford as a city and metropolitan region as it functions locally and as it relates to the state, the nation, and the world.
Funded in large part by the National Endowment for the Humanities, HC is a partnership with Trinity College, the CT State Library, the Old State House, and the Capitol Region Education Council.
The Hartford Connection (HC)
Design Connections (DC)
The foundational programs created by the ARC include units of study involving projects and activities centered in the students' neighborhoods and community through an examination of local architecture, design, and urban planning.
The Design Connection Partnership, currently underway in New Haven Public Schools, grew out of the diverse programs grouped under the Design Connections general category.