Keynote Conversations – Environmental Pedagogies, Play, Policies, and Spatial Design
5 September 2024, 6 September 2024, 7 September 2024
Thursday, September 5, 4:30 PM – 6:30 PM: Anna Keune and Ashraf M. Salama. Reserve your spot.
Friday, September 6, 6:00 PM – 8:00 PM: MYCKET [Mariana Alves Silva, Thérèse Kristiansson, Katarina Bonnevier] and Henrika Ylirisku. Reserve your spot.
Saturday, September 7, 2:00 PM – 3:30 PM: Nicola Antaki and Elke Krasny. Reserve your spot.
Language: English
Drop-in subject to availability.
Included in Färgfabriken’s entrance fee.
During three days, you have the opportunity to meet researchers and practitioners who are engaged in issues of education and learning in and through the built environment. Here, environmental learning is explored as a subject and practice for the future.
Urban pedagogy 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 formats. With the attention currently given to lifelong learning – by UNESCO, EU, UN Sustainable Development Goals – and Designed Living Environments, we see an opportunity towards activating and developing the field in formal and informal settings for learning with the environment. The conference draws on historical and existing environmental learning cultures for advancing new perspectives from resourceful material practices to considerations of social justice in art, design and the built environment educations.
These Keynote Conversations are open to anyone interested, subject to space. They are also part of the three-day academic conference Learnings / Unlearnings.
Together with invited guests and conference delegates the conference addresses history, discourses, playing and building practices, methods, pedagogies, and policies of environmental learning:
- to understand how historical and political conditions of various geographies have shaped spatial practice educations;
- to discuss theory and discourses that can broaden our conceptions of environmental learning;
- to explore props and materials, physical and digital environments, atmospheres, and circumstances that enable pedagogical spaces and places to emerge;
- to inquire how the disciplinary frameworks of formal learning impact on the formation of educators for architecture, arts, crafts, design, and planning;
- to ask what curricula, pedagogical formats, and codes of conduct do we need to learn to care for the environment and the learners?
Further, what policies impacted or failed to create caring, democratic, and just environments?
What infrastructures of mediation and facilitation do we need to negotiate between policy, practices, and different actors?
The conference and the open conversations are organized by Meike Schalk at KTH, and Anette Göthlund and Miro Sazdic at Konstfack, with Emílio da Cruz Brandão and Sara Brolund de Carvalho at KTH. They are supported by the research project “A Full Loop of Performance”, funded through Formas. For more information, please visit the conference homepage.
Keynote topics and speakers
Designing learning environments for broadening participation: Insights from the Learning Sciences
Anna Keune
This talk takes a socio-material focus on STEM learning, illuminating three guiding design principles for the design of learning environments for all: (1) The need for diversity of materials through a study on collaborating with fiber crafts for computer science learning, (2) the urgency for design for empathy in relation to research on AI ethics learning through arts-based practices, and (3) the importance of design for recognition through a longitudinal study of how the placement of a piano impacted a young woman’s degree choice. The talk foregrounds materials’ active participation in learning, revealing their role as major catalysts for STEM participation. Designing learning environments with materials in mind, promises to expand entry points and forms of participation in STEM.
Anna Keune, PhD, is Tenure Track Assistant Professor of Learning Sciences and Educational Design Technologies at the Technical University of Munich, Germany. Her research and teaching stands at the intersection of learning sciences and design. In various collaborative constellations she studies creative design technologies in school and out-of-school settings to understand the materiality of STEM learning and gender equity in STEM.
Hidden Realities & Disrupted Norms – An Emerging Decolonised Pedagogical Landscape in Architecture and Urbanism
Ashraf M. Salama
Decolonizing architectural pedagogy is imperative, yet a definitive framework remains absent. This talk addresses this gap by establishing a comprehensive framework that integrates theoretical discourse with practical teaching strategies. It emphasizes inclusivity, social responsibility, and context specificity, aligned with Sustainable Development Goals and professional competencies. A decolonized pedagogy must incorporate Indigenous knowledge, promote cultural sensitivity, and ensure social justice. The talk demands an anti-racist, anti-colonial curriculum that rigorously critiques the biases within the established architectural canon. It urges the academic community to challenge the canon and deconstruct the Western-centric focus, advocating for a redefinition of architectural knowledge toward building a more pluri-epistemic and socio-culturally inclusive discipline and profession.
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. 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).
Troll Visions
MYCKET – Mariana Alves Silva, Katarina Nonnevier, Thérèse Kristiansson
Dear fellow creature, this talk comes from a place of waste, wounds, and wonders. Our generation was born on a dump. Fruit trees still grow here, sea birds fill their bellies with plastic. Do you hear how silent the spring is? The wild boars grub, the plantation foil flutters around the black moldy branches of the hybrid poplar. “Whatever planet, let’s go!!” Kind of. What is the alternative? “Whatever planet, let’s go!” or TrollVision for Future is a series of three digital multimedial fairy tales, TrollVisions, targeted towards and made in collaboration with three different professional groups; architects and planners, preschool and art pedagogues and cultural bureaucrats. The TrollVisions communicate the reciprocal relationship between humanity and nature. Through artistic means, the TrollVisions provide concrete tools for the professional groups to use within their respective contexts with the aim to imagine a world in which we all have a chance to survive.
MYCKET collaborations wasfunded in 2012 by artists, designers and architects Mariana Alves Silva, Dr. Katarina Bonnevier and Thérèse Kristiansson. Based on equity and social sustainability they practice at all scales (art, furniture, performance, architecture, public space, spatial and urban planning) and are informed by the more-than-human, the carnivalesque and queerness.
Mapping and rethinking the tradition of environmental art education
Henrika Ylirisku
Environmental topics and education were integrated into art education in the Finnish school curriculum as early as the 1970s, and since then, arts-based environmental education has developed into a distinctive and internationally recognized part of Finnish visual art education. Join us as we journey back in time to explore how this environmental tradition was created and how it has evolved and taken varying forms over the decades in relation to phenomena in the society and the arts. This talk also invites us to consider how we can cherish the environmental tradition in arts education while critically rethinking its theoretical and philosophical foundations. In the face of eco-social crises, how can we challenge in art education the dominant anthropocentric views of human-nature relations and acknowledge the complex, more-than-human relationality that extends beyond what is merely lovable and pleasant?
Henrika Ylirisku, DA (Doctor of Arts) is an art educator and an artist-researcher, currently working as a postdoctoral researcher in the Faculty of Educational Sciences, University of Helsinki, Finland. Henrika’s practice intersects arts and art education, environmental education and multispecies research. In her current research, Henrika is examining shifting nature-culture relations and the atmospheres of young people growing up in the environmental crisis.
Radical classrooms: Civic pedagogies in Mumbai and Paris
Nicola Antaki
How can young people be involved in (re)designing their environment as a wide-reaching learning activity, to democratise spatial production and develop agency? This talk presents two consecutive civic pedagogies: the first, a collective design practice with NGO Muktangan Love Grove School students and the Mariamma Nagar community in Mumbai (2012-2021); and second, the co-design of an EcoLab with La Courtille Middle School students and the local neighbourhood in Saint Denis, Paris (2022-ongoing). The talk explores how alternative alliances and transversal methodologies can try to decolonise learning, unusual relationships develop new communities of practice and infrastructures of care. Further, through evolving collective design practices and pedagogies, site-specific boundary objects emerge as situated materialities, artefacts and mediators, telling stories of place and people and bringing them together.
Nicola Antaki is an architect, a post doc researcher at Paris La Villette, and an educator at the London School of Architecture specializing in civic learning, co-design and design for social change. Her prize-winning 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 pedagogy that includes school children in the design of their environment.
Learning with Care: Being with a Wounded Planet
Elke Krasny
The pedagogy of cruelty, which Rita Segato speaks of in order to analyze modern colonial patriarchy, uses the regime of capital to transform care into a source of cheap labor and the planet into a resource of cheap nature. Even though there is today growing awareness of the critical condition of the planet the pedagogy of cruelty continues to wage war on care and war on nature. Exhaustion and depletion are planetary wounds in need of care and healing. A feminist analysis of this cruel pedagogy of patriarchy raises the question of what learning with care can do in order to imagine being with a wounded planet otherwise. This lecture focuses on recent feminist practices in architecture, the arts, curating, and urbanism that are bringing into existence ways of being with a wounded planet. The ways in which these practices resist the death-making pedagogy of cruelty and insist on the liveliness of life-making despite of it all inspires hope for learning with care in order to be with a wounded planet otherwise.
https://www.fkw-journal.de/index.php/fkw/issue/view/89,Elke Krasny, PhD, Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Most recent publications include: Living with an Infected Planet. Covid-19, Feminism, and the Global Frontline of Care (2023); Feminist Infrastructural Critique. Life-Affirming Practices Against Capital, edited together with Sophie Lingg and Claudia Lomoschitz, (2024).
This is a collaboration within the Architecture Triennale, a new platform for exploration and long-term collaboration between architects, artists and social actors. The triennial is initiated by Färgfabriken as a recurring forum for architecture and urban development, a meeting point for everyone regarding questions about the built environment and the future.
Partners
