Learnings/Unlearnings: Environmental learning, spatial design, and participatory pedagogies within institutions and beyond

Conference in London, September 3-5, 2026

Call for abstracts

Conference overview

As educational environments continue to evolve and support increasingly diverse learning needs, the importance of re-evaluating their purpose, design and use remains essential if communities wish to foster pedagogical space that is both inclusive and equitable. There are many concepts and methods that allow for a re-appraisal of formal, informal and non-formal learning environments. These include environmental learning (Adams, 1989; Ward and Fyson, 1973), situated pedagogies (Dewey, 1899; Kitchens, 2009; Perez-Martinez, 2019), place-based education (Gruenewald, 2003; Yemeni, 2023), and civic pedagogy[1] (Coleman 1998; Antaki et al 2024). Such intersecting and interdisciplinary approaches have enabled theorists, practitioners and learners to advance critical understandings of the central role that space, place and belonging has for educational process, whether it be located within, beyond or on the edges of the institution.
 
To realise this, built environment professionals and creative practitioners, as well as educationalists and policymakers, have long advocated for learning to happen beyond institutional walls to facilitate learners’ engagement with the different environments they inhabit, both designed and natural. These methods extend from the local to the global, yet tend to emphasise the experiential, material, and spatial, while prioritising values of cooperation, and social and environmental justice (Dodig et al, 2025).
 
At the same time, the physical site of the learning institution, whether it be school, museum or university, continues to be scrutinised to understand how educational space responds to increasingly diverse user needs, as well as supporting social and ecological imperatives. To this end, historians, theoreticians and practitioners ask how questions of materiality, design, space and pedagogy intersect to support or restrict student agency, learning, wellbeing and community engagement (Brookes et al, 2025; Burke, 2005; Syeed, 2022).
 
This call for abstracts invites contributions by those working with education to explore the links between environmental learning, spatial practices and pedagogy, as a subject and practice for the future. In doing so, it aims to bring together diverse voices from different fields to share understandings of how educational environments work, whilst raising awareness of what is needed for these ideas and practices to thrive. We welcome suggestions for a variety of formats, such as workshops, papers, and performances, delivered individually or in groups. We ask participants to situate their abstracts in relation to one of the following three strands:

I: Institutional Space. Learning can happen anywhere: sometimes in classrooms, sometimes outside of them, in corridors, playgrounds, streets, natural environments or museums. Yet the institutional environment – its architecture, organisation, and material culture – has long shaped how learning is imagined and enacted. Institutional Space invites contributions that critique, frame and/or explore the sites, spaces and practices of formal education. From studios, classrooms and exhibition spaces to campuses, residential settings, forests and more. We welcome proposals that trace how formal learning institutions have been designed, built, and adapted over time, and how these spaces have reflected or resisted wider social, cultural, and political visions.

II: Edge Conditions. Increasingly, educational institutions around the world are seeking meaningful ways to collaborate and innovate with external partners – including but not limited to charities, cultural organisations, businesses and community and civic groups – to share expertise, widen participation and exchange knowledge. This strand explores what we term Edge Conditions – the sites, spaces, or places of learning on the margins, shared by institutions and external partners. We invite contributions that examine how spatial practices can activate thresholds found beyond institutional space, drawing on themes of reciprocity, participatory practice, spatial experiment, or place-based pedagogy. We seek work that questions and unsettles these boundaries, creating new, decolonial imaginaries of civic and institutional engagement.

III: Civic Space. Learning spaces are also situated outside or beyond formal institutional boundaries. Here we invite explorations of environmental learning led by grassroots, civic organisations and networks not limited to civic pedagogy, ecological pedagogy, and situated pedagogy. Whether participatory art practice, humanitarian work, ecological research, political activism, youth club, performance, or activity led by citizens or collectives, we are interested in abstracts that explore the link between civic spatial practices and pedagogies. Here we invite reflections on the autonomous, the community-led, and the informal, and how space and material ecology influences learning.

Research questions include:

  • How can environmental learning[2] enable sites and spaces, both within and beyond the institution, to become more accessible, equitable and ethical?
  • How can knowledge, shaped through collaborative art, design and spatial practices be used to enhance civic engagement, widen participation in higher education as well as built environment professions? What can be gained from these practices?
  • What are the histories, theories, methods or practices that help us understand how educators have developed environmental learning? How have they facilitated student engagement, both within the institution and beyond it?

Contributions may include investigations into histories, theoretical discourse, policies, tools and methods, case-studies, and practice-led research. They may includecreative projects, conversations, performances or interdisciplinary inquiry that examines how curricula, pedagogical practice, and spatial design intersect to influence teaching, learning, and creativity within or beyond institutional contexts. We are interested in receiving abstracts that recover marginalised or lost perspectives – voices and experiences overlooked in dominant narratives of institutional or extra-institutional life, whether of students, teachers, communities, or alternative pedagogies. Proposed themes may crosscut and be combined.

We are hosting two formats:

  • Papers or performances of 15 minutes/1,500 words
  • Workshops of 75 minutes

Submission requirements

Please send in a 300 word abstract that includes the following

  • A working title and an image in relation to your research, project or workshop
  • The strand that you wish to address (institutional space/edge conditions/civic space)
  • The format you wish to present (paper, workshop or performance)
  • A biography of 50 words for each author
  • Referencing system: Chicago style

Papers and presentations for plenary sessions may be selected for a roundtable debate on urgent topics instead.

Applicants may submit one or more submissions but will only be offered one place (i.e. for the paper/performance 15mins or workshop 75mins or roundtable).

Keynote Speakers

Jos Boys (The DisOrdinary Architecture Project, UK)
 
Akil Scafe-Smith (Resolve Collective, UK)
 
Pelin Tan (University of Batman, Turkiye)

Scientific committee

Emilio Brandao (KTH and Chalmers, Sweden), Reem Charif (University of the Arts London), Magnus Ericson (Iaspis – International Programme for Visual and Applied Arts, Sweden), Lee Ivett (London School of Architecture), Torange Khonsari (Architectural Association), Ruth Lang (London School of Architecture), Åsa Ståhl (HDK-Valand – Academy of Art and Design, Gothenburg), Kim Trogal (UCA Canterbury), Manijeh Verghese (Open City) and others to be confirmed

Organising committee

Nicola Antaki (London School of Architecture), Kieran Mahon (University of the Arts London) and Meike Schalk (KTH Stockholm)

Key dates

Deadline for abstracts: 15 March 2026 to learningsunlearnings@gmail.com
Notification of acceptance: 30 March 2026
Conference dates: 3-5 September 2026 (London, UK)

About the conference

The conference has developed out of a collaboration between the London School of Architecture (University of the Built Environment), KTH Royal Institute of Technology, and University of the Arts London, and builds on the Learnings/Unlearnings proceedings held in Stockholm in 2024. The conference is to be held within and without the institution, aiming to reach a broader audience to spark interest in the urgent topic of environmental learning and to connect to different stakeholders.

References

  • Adams, E. (1989) ‘Learning to see’, Children’s Environments Quarterly, 6(2/3), pp. 42–48. Available at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41514538 (Accessed: 7 July 2025).
  • Antaki, N., Belfield, A. and Moore, T. (2024) ‘Radical Urban Classrooms: Civic Pedagogies and Spaces of Learning on the Margins of Institutions’, Antipode, 56(5), pp. 1509–1534. doi:10.1111/anti.13039.
  • Brookes, et al. (2025) Schools Without Walls. Urgent Pedagogies: Learnings/Unlearnings Reader #1. Available at: https://urgentpedagogies.iaspis.se/learnings-unlearnings-performing-the-archive/
  • Coleman, J. (1998) ‘Civic Pedagogies and Liberal-Democratic Curricula’, Ethics, 108(4), pp. 746–761.
  • Dewey, J. (1899) School and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
  • Dodig, et al. (2025) Built environment education for children and youth: scoping the field. Urgent Pedagogies: Learnings/Unlearnings Reader #2. Available at: https://urgentpedagogies.iaspis.se/learnings-unlearnings-resources-frameworks-and-concepts-for-playful-built-environment-learning/
  • Gruenewald, D. (2003) ‘The Best of Both Worlds: A Critical Pedagogy of Place’, Educational Researcher, 32(4), pp. 3–12. doi:10.3102/0013189X032004003.
  • Kitchens, J. (2009) ‘Situated Pedagogy and the Situationist International: Countering a Pedagogy of Placelessness’, Educational Studies, 45(3), pp. 240–261. doi:10.1080/00131940902910958.
  • Perez Martinez, S. (2019) Civic pedagogy: Learning as critical spatial practice. Critical Spatial Practice. Urgent Pedagogies: Learnings/Unlearnings Reader #1. Available at: https://urgentpedagogies.iaspis.se/learnings-unlearnings-performing-the-archive/
  • Syeed, E. (2022) ‘The Space Beyond Equity: A Blueprint of Radical Possibilities in School Design’, Educational Policy, 36(4), pp. 769–795. doi:10.1177/08959048221087207.
  • Yemini, M., Engel, L. and Ben Simon, A. (2023) ‘Place-based education – a systematic review of literature’, Educational Review, 77(2), pp. 640–660. doi:10.1080/00131911.2023.2177260.
  • Ward, C. and Fyson, A. (1973) Streetwork: The Exploding School. London: Routledge.

Footnotes

  • [1] Civic pedagogy as a term comes originally from the field of political education, but has more recently come into use in the fields of architecture and urban studies, through the understanding that spatial decisions are political.
  • [2] ’Environmental’ is here conceived in a broad sense and from the perspective of learning from, for and with the environment, whether human-made or natural.
            

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