Welcome to Learnings/Unlearnings Reader #4: Spaces and Places of Environmental Learning: Material Community Practices guest edited by Nicola Antaki, Emilio Brandao and Meike Schalk. The Reader includes contributions from the section “Building and Playing: Spaces and Places of Environmental Learning” from the conference Learnings/Unlearnings: Environmental Pedagogies, Play, Policies, and Spatial Design, which took place in Stockholm in September 2024. The Reader explores environmental learning as a practice of care, bringing together authors who examine how care is embedded in the tools we use—and the ways we plan and design those tools—to support meaningful environmental engagement. They also ask: How do the methods we choose shape the kinds of learning that emerge? What positionalities, assumptions, and relationships become visible through these methods? How might we navigate and address the tensions and power dynamics that arise? With contributions by  Nicola Antaki, Pia Palo, Marco Adelfio, Emilio Brandao, Effrosyni Roussou, Eeva-Maarja Laur, Sadia Sharmin, Ziana S. Madathil, and Zuzana Tabaková.

Available here:

https://urgentpedagogies.iaspis.se/up-reader-051-ar-learnings-unlearnings-material-community-practices/

From the conference call:

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 conference 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. 

Reader #5 gathers contributions that explore “performance” as a pedagogical mode of transgression, conversation, transformation, and intervention. Performance here goes beyond staged action, becoming a method of learning that unfolds in embodied encounters, collective practices, and material improvisations. To perform pedagogy is to risk uncertainty, to enter a dialogue with others—human and more-than-human—and to disrupt the boundaries of disciplines, institutions, and everyone’s roles. The papers in this collection move between theatre plays, nomadic workshops, feminist media practices, absurd architectures, children’s games, and institutional fictions. They demonstrate how performance generates forms of knowledge that are situated, relational, and actively resistant to capture by conventional academic frameworks. Whether through play, storytelling, dialogue, or spatial experimentation, these contributions highlight how performing pedagogy can create cracks in normative structures, making space for care, solidarity, sharing, and imagination. Together, they propose performance not as representation, but as a lived practice of unlearning and reworlding.

This article aims to demonstrate how research in communication design can contribute to disseminating community practices in economically disadvantaged contexts, such as in social housing neighbourhoods. This study stems from the ECHO research project, where the main mission is to understand and document two self-initiated community practices in the social housing neighbourhood of Balteiro, in Vila Nova de Gaia, Portugal, to disseminate them and foster their replication in similar social contexts. It begins with a literature review on the role of design on behalf of communities, focusing, in particular, on the concepts of social design and universal design, which substantiate the relevance and pertinence of the issue under study. Then, it describes the case study of Balteiro. It presents the methodologies adopted in this research, namely the interviews conducted to learn about the history of the two community practices. This provided the basis for developing a preliminary study for an online platform and a series of documentary films. This study proved the importance of involving designers in this dissemination process through multidisciplinary teams. The research work in the field should be close to the community, the institutions and the different social actors involved to understand the complexity of the study context and define how design should operate. The empirical experience from this study has shown that work in the social area should be developed locally, focused on small communities or informal organisations, and aware that results are achieved slowly and gradually.