If You Build It

If You Build It follows designer-activists Emily Pilloton and Matthew Miller to rural Bertie County, the poorest in North Carolina, where they engage high school students in a year-long course in design-and-build construction that they hope will transform both the community and the students’ lives. Living on credit and grant money and fighting an uncooperative school board, Pilloton and Miller struggle to maintain hope for their vision of a new kind of classroom in which students develop the skills to design skateboards, furniture, supermarkets—and their own futures. (86 mins., DCP)

Please join us after the film for a conversation about innovative teaching strategies in central Ohio with Aimee Kennedy, Battelle’s vice president of education and STEM learning, and Jeff Terwin, the Wellington School’s head of upper school, led by Shelly Casto, the Wexner Center’s director of education.

Cosponsored by AIA Columbus and Ohio State’s Knowlton School of Architecture.