Learnings/Unlearnings: Environmental Pedagogies, Play, Policies, and Spatial Design

Conference at Färgfabriken, Stockholm

September 5-7, 2024

organized by KTH School of Architecture and Konstfack – University of Arts, Crafts and Design, with Färgfabriken

Scheme and Book of Abstracts

Thursday, September 5
Registration from 15:00 CET
15.30 Wellcome and introduction
16.00 Keynote conversations with Anna Keune and Ashraf M. Salama
18.00 Mingle

Friday, September 6
9.00 Coffee
9.30 Parallel paper sessions 1
11.00 Coffee break
11.30 Parallel workshops I
13.00 Lunch
14.00 Parallel paper sessions II
15.30 Coffee break
16.00 Parallel paper sessions III
17.30 Refreshments
18.00 Keynote conversations with MYCKET and Henrika Ylirisku
20.00 Dinner

Saturday, September 7
9.00 Coffee
9.30 Parallel panels
11.00 Coffee break
11.30 Parallel workshops II
13.00 Lunch
14.00 Keynote conversations with Nicola Antaki and Elke Krasny
15.30 Concluding debate with coffee and cake

Detailed program

The Call

  • How could public spaces become more accessible to a broader segment of society, especially young people, through environmental learning?
  • How could knowledge that is shaped through collaborative art, design and architectural practices with young people be made operational within pedagogies of the built environment, and the training of future educators? 
  • How could the dialogue with concerned actors feed into policy making to improve the quality, diversity, and inclusion of our designed living environments?

This call for abstracts welcomes suggestions for a variety of formats, such as workshops, paper sessions, panels, and artistic interventions. 

Deadline for abstracts: May 15, 2024 – Notification: June 1, 2024

Keynote addresses by Nicola Antaki, Anna Keune, Elke Krasny, MYCKET, Ashraf M. Salama, and Henrika Ylirisku

As a field “Environmental Learning” has sought to advance an understanding of the environment through spatial practices — such as art, architecture, craft, design, and planning — by ways of learning, often employing immersive, embodied, and experimental pedagogical formats. In this call we address “environmental” from a broad perspective of learning with, for, and from the environment. With the attention currently given to lifelong learning by universities and intergovernmental organizations (UNESCO, EU, UN Sustainable Development Goals), we see an opening towards activating and developing environmental learning pedagogies for spatial subjects in contexts of formal, informal, and non-formal learning. 

We invite contributions by practitioners and researchers working with education within the built environment that explore the link between spatial practices and pedagogy, through analyses, reflections, instructed conversations, explorative workshops, exhibits, performances, policy proposals, or other approaches.  

This call, has developed out of the research collaboration, A Full Loop of Performance: From the Perspectives of Young People, Through Environmental Learning, to the Reviewing of Legal Frameworks in Multi-actor Constellations, and Back Again involving researchers and practitioners from KTH School of Architecture and Konstfack – University of Arts, Crafts and Design’s Department of Visual Arts and Sloyd Education, and visiting artists and researchers in the fields of architecture, art, craft, design, pedagogy, politics, and social work. It draws on existing environmental learning cultures for advancing new perspectives on the urgent issues of social justice in the (built) environment and the learning from resourceful material practices.

We invite researchers and practitioners to join us in developing Environmental Learning as a subject and practice for the future. The conference seeks to address, but is not limited to, the following themes and questions. Themes may crosscut and be combined:  

1 EMBEDDING: Environmental Learning Histories and Cultures

Environmental learning as an art pedagogy appeared during the 1970s and 1980s, attributed to the design educator Ken Baynes and art educator Eileen Adams in Britain. In Sweden it was popularized through the work of art teacher Elly Berg speaking of stadsstudier or “urban environmental education.” The movements’ historical underpinnings however extend beyond this period, with Denmark’s Bygglek, dating back to the 1940s, which encouraged children to engage in 1:1 scale building activities, and Sweden’s staffed playgrounds, Parklek, which emerged as a place-based pedagogy. The first documented Parklek opened its doors already in 1914 in Norrköping. Finland witnessed the development of a robust culture of art-based environmental education from the 1960s. In the 1980s and the 90s, when institutions in other parts of the world experienced spending cuts for cultural, educational, and social projects, the movement survived here. Finland established Environmental Education (EE) and Sustainable Development Education (SDE) in their national school curricula 2003.

This theme invites explorations into the rich tapestry of environmental learning histories and cultures. How have they influenced contemporary learning practices? Contributions may include case studies, historiographic insights drawing from the realms of architecture, art, craft, and design pedagogical studies. We welcome reflections on sources, evidence, and the often overlooked or forgotten histories of environmental learning of marginalized geographies and peoples.

2 CONVERSING: Environmental Learning Discourses

This strand explores the multifaceted realm of theory and discourses that both shape and broaden our conception of environmental learning. We encourage in-depth investigations into cases that show the continuous interplay between the environment, our reciprocal influence on it, and learning. Contributions may address experiments and studies of situated-, inter-generational-, emancipatory-, and out-of-school learning (Resnick in 1987), community and inter-cultural pedagogies, learning for design justice (Constanza-Chock, 2020), intersectional inequalities and learning, pedagogies of the “global South” and “good practice” examples of formal-, and informal-, as well as lifelong learning in spatial practices.

We invite contributions that recognize the geographical situatedness of discourses that engage with the exploration of theoretical perspectives and debates in the understanding of environmental learning from diverse cultural standpoints.

3 BUILDING AND PLAYING: Processes, Props, Materials, Media, Techniques, Spaces, and Places of Environmental Learning

This theme asks in what context and where learning happens? What are the props and materials, the physical environments, the atmospheres, and circumstances that enable pedagogical spaces and places to emerge? With a broad perspective on learning environments beyond pedagogical spaces, or places such as classrooms, this strand focuses on learning settings, intentional and unintentional locations where young people gather or just “hang out,” including youth community centers, museums, and sports facilities, offering ample opportunities to address environmental learning and its connection to democratic processes.

Contributions may engage with media, and techniques, that have facilitated instances of environmental learning, and provide examples and insights from diverse pedagogical activities and projects. Additionally, reflections on ethical and value-based considerations tied to diverse learning environments, especially in terms of accessibility and inclusion, are welcome. Furthermore, we invite discussions on norm-critical and norm-creative settings for un/learning, aiming to expand on critical insights and the vocabulary and discussions in the field.

4 ENVIRONMENTAL LEARNING AND EDUCATING: The Educators of Spatial Practices

Environmental learning addresses concerns with human-made environmental destruction, coloniality, and intersectional inequalities. The urgency of these issues emphasizes the need for lifelong learning with the environment in both formal and informal contexts. What curricula, pedagogical formats, and codes of conduct, do we need to learn to care for the environment? How to decolonize education? What are the frameworks of disciplinary technologies and pedagogical practices in the formation of educators for architecture, arts, crafts, design, and planning? How are normative disciplinary and professional roles produced and re-reproduced, and how can spatial practitioners act upon them? Do these frameworks need to be renegotiated, and how can this be done? 

Contributions may interrogate the contemporary forces which shape the conditions for the formation of the educator in spatial practices within wider political and economic structures and modes of operation from within or outside institutions. Contributions may explore the development of curricula that facilitate learning from other-than-human perspectives, and foreground examples that show careful pedagogical approaches.

5 RULING AND UNRULING SPACES: Environmental Learning Policies

When working with young people, careful ethical considerations are crucial, and often an ethical approval process needs to be initiated. These reviews, however, are sometimes experienced discriminating by the subjects who are concerned. In public spaces and third places, what are our policies and instruments, on various levels (The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child – UNCRC, UNs SDGs and local policies) that both protect young people in public spaces, i.e. from physical and verbal violence and enable them to appear and take part in society? How have policies impacted or failed to create caring, democratic, and just environments? What forms and infrastructures of mediation, facilitation and in-between layers do we have in place, and what do we need that negotiate between policy, practices, roles, and different actors?

Presentations may take the form of papers, workshops, policy roundtables inviting multiple actors to converse around specific questions regarding policies, their applications, performances, their effects and affects.

We are hosting two formats 

  • Papers and performances of 15-20 minutes 
  • Workshops and panels of 90 minutes  

Key dates 2024 

15 May         Please send your abstract of 300 words including a title and an image (in relation to your research or project) plus author(s)’ bio(s) of 50 words no later than May 15, to: info@caravanize.nu

01 June        Notification of acceptance 

Fee              There will be a small fee for refreshments and lunches (tba)

Keynotes

Nicola Antaki is an architect, researcher and educator specializing in civic learning, co-design and design for social change. Her practice-led PhD research (UCL, 2019) was situated in Mumbai, India between 2011 and 2018, looking at the links between architecture and learning, and developing a design pedagogy that includes school children in the design of their environment. It won several prizes. As an architecture tutor at the London School of Architecture she focuses on encouraging critical praxis through site situated and community integrated means in response to the current social and climate crisis. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher at Paris La Villette architecture school working on a European research project on everyday community resilience and ecological transition.

Anna Keune, PhD, is Tenure Track Assistant Professor of Learning Sciences and Educational Design Technologies and TUM-IAS Rudolf Mößbauer Fellow at the Technical University of Munich, Germany. Her research and teaching stands at the intersection of learning sciences and design. She investigates high and low-tech educational design technologies to advance knowledge about STEM learning, transforming what counts as participation and expanding who participates. In various collaborative constallations she studies creative design technologies  in school and out-of-school settings to understand the materiality of STEM learning and gender equity in STEM. Her research is guided by constructionist, posthumanist, and participatory theoretical commitments.

Elke Krasny, PhD, is a cultural theorist, urban researcher, curator, and author. Her work specializes in architecture, contemporary art, urbanism, feminist museology, histories and theories of curating, critical historiographies of feminism, politics of remembrance, and their intersections. She is Professor of Art and Education at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Using the framework of political care ethic developed by Joan Tronto, Krasny works on developing a perspective of critical care for architectural and urban practice and theory. Her most recent books on care include Living with an Infected Planet: Covid-19, Feminism, and the Global Frontline of Care (2023), Curating with Care and Curating as Feminist Organizing (both ed. with Lara Perry, 2023), Radicalizing Care (ed. with Sophie Ling et al., 2022), and Critical Care. Architecture and Urbanism for a Broken Planet (ed. with Angelika Fitz, 2019).

MYCKET collaborations was founded in 2012 by artists, designers and architects Mariana Alves Silva, Katarina Bonnevier, PhD, Thérèse Kristiansson. MYCKET works from a set of interacting perspectives; queer, feminism, class, anti-racism, the more-than-human. Their artistic research practice, which often takes place together with others in large networks, has generated a breadth of results; large-scale theatre productions, permanent public spaces, costumes, works of art, exhibitions, animations, performances, text and theory production, education and lectures. Recent projects include The Secret Garden, ArkDes, Stockholm, installation in collaboration, 2024; Norra Folkparken, Haninge municipality, 2023, structural plan for a new housing district based on spatial equality policy, and Troll perceptions in the Heartlands – artistic research to widen our imagination capacity, 2021-2024.

Ashraf M. Salama, PhD, is Professor of Architecture and Urbanism and Head of Architecture and Built Environment at the University of Northumbria, Newcastle, UK. He is co-Director of the UIA Architectural Education Commission and UNESCO/UIA Validation Council for Architectural Education. With 2.5 million euros funding record, he has published over 200 articles, chapters and authored and co-edited 17 books. His recent books include The Routledge Companion to Architectural Pedagogies of the Global South (2023), Architectural Excellence in Islamic Societies (2020/24), Transformative Pedagogy in Architecture and Urbanism (2009/21). He is the Chief Editor of Archnet-IJAR: International Journal of Architectural Research and the 2017 recipient of the UIA Jean Tschumi Prize for Excellence in Architectural Education and Criticism.

Henrika Ylirisku, DA (Doctor of Arts) is an art educator and artist-researcher, working as a university lecturer of art education at Aalto University, Finland. Henrika’s practice intersects arts and art education, environmental education and multispecies research. Lately, she has published on the theoretical groundings of environmental art education, and on multispecies forest relations. Henrika is a member of Children of the Anthropocene research group, which examines shifting nature-culture relations and the atmospheres of young people growing up in the environmental crisis. She enjoys movement-based practices and has developed artistic walking methodologies, inspired by the working methods of environmental and performance arts.

Conference committee: Magnus Ericson (Iaspis, Stockholm), Karin Reisinger (Academy of Fine Arts Vienna), Vera Marin (founding member of De-a Arhitectura Association and ATU – Urban Transition Association and lecturer and researcher at Ion Mincu University of Architecture and Urbanism, Bucharest), Rosario Talevi (architect, curator, editor, educator, and founding member of Floating [University], Berlin)

Organization: Meike Schalk (KTH), Anette Göthlund and Miro Sazdic (Konstfack), Emílio da Cruz Brandão and Sara Brolund de Carvalho (KTH)

Venue

Färgfabriken, https://fargfabriken.se/en/
Address: Lövholmsbrinken 1, 11742 Stockholm
Closest tube station: Liljeholmen, 5 minutes walk
Closest tvärbana station (tram): Trekanten or Liljeholmen

Glossary

A

Allemansrätt [Swedish]/ The Right of Public Access

Allemansrätt is a code of conduct that gives everybody equal access to landscapes and natures and the freedom of movement, connected to the responsibility of handling environments carefully. In some cases, it overwrites the right to private ownership. The concept is known at least since medieval times, but in Sweden, the term was established in governmental inquiries, in the 1940s. Learning to use a landscape with care involves observation, the acquisition of an ability to read landscape, to get to know an environment, to understand possibilities and limits for moving around, sleeping over, resting, picking edibles or material from the ground, to be informed about what can be left behind and what not, where and when and with what material to light a fire, etc.

This means that there are temporal, seasonal, geographical, and situational differences at stake that ought to be registered at any time visiting and considered when deciding what/not to do in a landscape to both access and maintain it. Donna Haraway’s suggestion of response-ability as our capacity of responding to our environments can be invoked here, relating people to the landscapes through their practices of care and response-ability. 

Allemansrätten is a spatio-ethical concept with social and economic implications. It is non-commercial but supports subsistence perspectives such as picking berries, fishing, drinking water from wells. As a concept, it is potentially expandable to imagine spatial situations beyond landscapes where it can foreground ecologies, rights and responsibilities in public environments, and in both virtual and physical spaces. In the broadest sense, open-source applications, part of creative commons, can be seen as constituting a more recent form of Allemansrätt (see FLOSS). Their use allows for discussions on rights and data protection in the digital space.  

Read more on Allemansrätt here: https://www.naturvardsverket.se/allemansratten/ (accessed 16 February 2024).   

Haraway, Donna (2026). Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press, 89.

By Meike Schalk

D

Dérive Notebook

A dérive notebook entails sets of directions and questions allowing walkers to take unexpected routes and focus on aspects of their surroundings that usually escape attention. The directions are also there to nudge walkers to perceiving what feels uncomfortable and comfortable in public space: If I only walk pressed against the wall of buildings, how does that make me feel? Or, if I start following a passer-by on the street, when do I start feeling like a stalker?

By Elizabeth Calderón Lüning

F

FLOSS Technologies

FLOSS stands for Free/Libre and Open Source Software and is a combination of two different technology movements — the free software movement and the open source software movement. The free software movement focuses on the freedom of computer users to use the software, examine, and modify the code within the software and to redistribute copies of the software with or without modifications. The open-source movement has a more pragmatic view, where the focus lies in the openness of the code, not specifically connecting this to questions of freedom and justice. With the term FLOSS, both these views are represented. FLOSS tries to find a neutral form for describing technologies accessibility, openness, and inclusivity. 

By Anette Göthlund

Following

Following is a research method developed in the Full Loop project. It is based on registering collective and creative learning processes that question traditional authoritative knowledge transfer. It is designed to disrupt epistemic hierarchies, especially when learning together with young people.

Following puts young people at centre, as competent and actively knowing subjects in artistic co-creative activities. Following young people in their learning means recording how they name, materialise, and shape the worlds they are part of. It means letting their realities emerge and supporting them in trusting that their experiences and knowledges are meaningful, and sharing their specific concerns. Following emerges in collective learning situations. It enables transformations in relational-spatial explorations and meaning-making processes that happen on the young participants’ terms, so that they become the authors of their own learning experiences.

By Miro Sazdic Löwstedt

K

Knowledge and Learning 

Knowledge is basically defined as the possession of information or the possession of the ability to locate desired information. Learning is defined as the process of acquiring knowledge. Knowledge, however, only becomes knowledge-able through performance; knowledge is performed. Knowledge is situated, relational, and embodied. Different contexts and different bodies produce, present, and represent different knowledges. Knowledge is performed differently depending on time and geography, and depending on who the knowledge-performing subject is, and to which community they belong. Learning can also be considered a practice of knowledging, i.e. collaborative and co-created processes of culture, matter, and meaning-making.    

  

Haraway, Donna (1988). ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective’. Feminist Studies, Autumn, 1988, Vol. 14, No. 3, 575-599.   

hooks, bell (1994). Teaching to transgress: education as the practice of freedom. New York: Routledge   

Lenz Taguchi, Hillevi (2010). Going beyond the theory/practice divide in early childhood education. Introducing an intra-active pedagogy. New York, NY: Routledge.  

By Anette Göthlund

L

Learning Event

Thinking about learning as an event connects to the idea that knowledge is performed — a learning process always in the making. Gilles Deleuze describes processes as becomings, not to be judged by some final result, but by the way they proceed and their power to continue. In the “philosophy of difference” assigned to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, the event is described as an intermezzo, something that appears in a space in-between, when dichotomies transverse (for example those that separate science and art, theory and practice). Thus, a learning event is a ‘happening’ and not about copying or reproducing what others know — the learners must produce the knowledge by themselves to be able to learn.

Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix (1988). A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism & Schizophrenia, London: The Athlone Press.    

Deleuze, Gilles (1995). Negotiations. 1972–1990, New York: Columbia University Press.   

Dahl, Thomas(2019). The poiesis and mimesis of learning. In Østern, Anna-Lena & Knudsen, Kristian Nødtvedt (eds) (2019). Performative approaches in arts education: artful teaching, learning, and research. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. 

By Anette Göthlund

M

Memories of the Future – an Open-source Application

Memories of the Future is an open-source and browser-based application developed by the Design Research Lab at the University of the Arts, Berlin. The application is geo-map based and allows the users to geo-tag a location and add information to that point, and to add sound files, pictures, or text to the point. Other users can also comment on the geo-tagged points. The app was developed as a community research tool for creating and sharing location-based knowledge. The information sourced by the app is private by design, since you can only access the information with a set password, that is decided upon by the project group. For more information see: https://memories-of-the-future.de/#/ 

By Anette Göthlund

P

Platform Economy

Digital platforms that are helping us move through the city on E-Scooters, deliver our food directly to our homes, let us find our way through ubiquitous GPS maps, organize childcare or cleaning services, rent out our flats to tourists, are becoming everyday infrastructures of cities. The platformization of the urban, signifies a shift in the municipal economy, where proprietary, private technology firms are having an increased say in residents’ everyday lives. The digitally-enabled socio-technical shift, understood as platform urbanism, is creating new forms of social, economic and political interactions (Caprotti, Chang, & Joss, 2022).  

Understanding platform urbanism, can be difficult, since the technologies, their data extractivist behaviour and their defining algorithms are hidden (black boxed) making the scrutiny of the technology close to impossible. We can however start understanding this shift by looking at the politics of platforms — by seeing platforms as “architectures that are thoroughly part of the urban” (Fields, Bissell, & Macrorie, 2020). By engaging with the material, social and somatic implications of platforms in cities, we can start studying platform urbanism beyond the technological black box.  

Caprotti, Federico, Chang, I.-Chun Catherine, & Joss, Simon (2022). Beyond the smart city: a typology of platform urbanism. Urban Transformations, 4. doi:10.1186/s42854-022-00033-9 

Fields, Desiree, Bissell, David, & Macrorie, Rachel (2020). ‘Platform methods: studying platform urbanism outside the black box’. Urban Geography, 41(3), 462-468. doi:10.1080/02723638.2020.1730642 

By Elizabeth Calderón Lüning