IN-PERSON MADRID FOCUS ON PEDAGOGY. SECTION B

Abstract

In an era of climate collapse, institutional precarity, and pedagogical reorientation, traditional modes of design education for the built environment increasingly struggle to address the complexity and uncertainty of this moment. Draft Ecologies is a transdisciplinary pedagogical framework I have developed that treats the classroom, studio, and research site as ecological systems shaped by exchange, stewardship, and emergence. Drawing from devised theatre, ensemble performance, spatial dramaturgy, and anti-racist pedagogical practices, the framework enacts learning through working in draft, relational authorship, embodied experimentation, and collaborative inquiry, approaching knowledge as formed through encounter rather than delivered as fixed content. This paper examines Draft Ecologies through two case studies. First, MAKING, a two-week graduate Interior Architecture intensive at the Rhode Island School of Design in Summer 2025. Working with an interdisciplinary cohort, the course approached making as inquiry, positioning materials, spatial interventions, and collaborative structures as methods of thinking. Through iterative assignments, ensemble methodologies, session agreements establishing the classroom as a co-authored container, and a culminating full-scale installation requiring radical redistribution of authority, the classroom operated as a spatial and relational ecology where students developed agency through experimentation, embodied research, and collective cultural production. A companion case study, Entangled Ecologies, extends this framework toward more-than-human and elemental orientations. Both are supported by student survey data and faculty observations. I argue that ecological pedagogy is not simply content taught within the built environment, but a restructuring of the spaces, relations, and conditions through which we learn to shape it, where materials, bodies, and systems co-author possible futures amid planetary and institutional precarity