RE LOG Spring '25

SPRING 2025 Ransom Everglades LOG 23 Like the Constance and Miguel Fernandez STEM Center, the 29, 000-sq.ft . space is intended to promote collaboration first and foremost, with large open seating areas anchoring each of its three floors. The bottom floor will house a multipurpose space that, like the Posner Lecture Hall, will be able to transform into different configurations – from auditorium to study area to gallery and back again. “There’s just going to be more flexibility in the new building and a lot of opportunities to do different things,” Clark said. At the same time, even though the Gensler-designed building will feature clean lines and a modern, minimalistic style, it won’t be another Fernandez STEM Center. It can’t be. “I think this will have a warmth to it,” said Head of School Rachel Rodriguez. “If we truly expect us to have a pedagogy of inquiry, we need to delve into spaces that complement it for us.” There will be glass: floor-to-ceiling windows that look out onto La Brisa’s iconic house, dense tree canopy and ample green space. But not as much as in the Fernandez STEM Center. The goal is to give each teacher the opportunity to make a classroom space that feels inviting, contemplative and customized. “How do you want a student to feel when they walk into your classroom? How are you going to distinguish yourself? Every classroom that you walk in should make you feel something,” Rodriguez said. Nero looks forward to the building because it will allow her department to do two things at once: focus on the future while holding onto the tried-and-true teaching methods of the past. On the one hand, she hopes the space will enable students to venture further into the digital humanities, applying their critical analysis skills – and creativity – to more contemporary media objects that reflect their digital lives. Or using digital tools like AI – her continued focus as the chair of the AI at Ransom Everglades Task Force – to ask new questions about old material. On the other hand, Nero hopes the building will be a haven for the kind of teaching and learning that RE founder Paul Ransom himself practiced over 120 years ago: a handful of students, in a circle, talking about a text. “Particularly in this new era, creating spaces that can allow you to focus is such a very rare commodity, and we have to work extra hard now to create those spaces,” Nero said. “Giving students this precious opportunity to explore the meaning of their existence, this opportunity that I’m not sure they’re getting in any other endeavor in their lives … that’s amazing.” For information on how to support the new humanities building, contact Director of Advancement Vicki Carbonell Williamson ’88 at 305 460 8826 or vwilliamson@ransomeverglades.org. Students gather in the Holzman Center of Applied Ethics to discuss ethical dilemmas