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/

This chapter rethinks the role of the architect, seeing them as someone embedded in the network of relationships that negotiates between different agencies, points of view and disciplines. It suggests foregrounding existing and possible relationships of mutual dependencies that have the potential to build caring alliances. In those reciprocal networks, the architect, often described as a facilitator, negotiator or mediator, becomes an active node that navigates between multiple stakeholders to create inclusive spaces. This attentive and proactive approach, theoretically framed by Meike Schalk, is unfolded in reflections on polyphonic educational processes instigated by Kasia Nawratek at the Manchester School of Architecture and in participatory practices of Copenhagen-based architectural office arki_lab run by Jeanette Frisk.

Format: Performative round table conversation 

A conversation between co-researchers (young people, youth leaders, artistic practitioners, researchers) investigating ‘Cultural Commons’ by reflecting upon the sensitive balance between giving support, paving the way for youths, and letting go. Conversing about negotiations, different levels of control and the difficulty of dealing with open processes.

How is friction and/or coexistence embodied, felt, sensed, performed, manifested, made knowable in artistic practice and research?

With attention to the perspectives of young people and the underlying social power structures they encounter in their everyday lives, this contribution explores the frictions within our ‘collective body’ during a series of common workshops, excursions, and conversations.

This text is about talk. By talk we mean gossip, complaints, conversations, and other marginalised communicative processes that are often overlooked  – idle  – in architecture and urban studies. Why do we bring up the notion of “idle talk”? Drawing on our separate research on gender, ethnographically– and practice-oriented studies, we share the assumption that it is necessary to challenge dominant ways of knowing that often take for granted what and who should be formally included in the circulation of information. We therefore compiled the annotated bibliography that follows by asking: how might idle talk reveal issues in the material world other than those foregrounded by established ways of communicating, recording, and archiving?

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.

The panel session "Poetic ‘knowledging’ through metaphors: research in the making" (Session W1 – Talks) was organized by the PhD course APPROACHES 2024-2025 (resarc.se)

Participants in the course presented their papers.

APPROACHES: Theory and Research Methodology in Architecture, a doctoral course run by KTH (Meike Schalk) with UMA (Ebba Högström, Roemer van Toorn), and TU Delft (Janina Gosseye) in collaboration.

Narratives about the ‘failure’ of large-scale post-World War II housing are now guiding major physical, social, and economic changes in neighborhoods all over Europe. This is true even in Denmark and Sweden, which have long been known for their welfare states and benevolent housing policies. Today, however, both countries have enacted new national anti-segregation measures that call for major physical and social changes to neighborhoods built in the postwar era, even as the opinions of local communities and residents of such neighborhoods have been only sparsely heard – if at all. By working with the method ‘witness seminars’, we – as the research collective Aktion Arkiv – foreground residents’ perspectives and their collective resistance: the effects and affects of top-down changes. While sharing their lived experiences and actions, residents say that architects and planners can ‘simply say no’ and thereby refuse to participate in these actions.