Pedagogy 2025

Abstract

The built environment and societal norms are co-constitutive and architecture plays a fundamental role in this relationship. Architecture, therefore, can play an essential part in helping to promoting environmentally responsible communities, but to effectively do this, architectural education must challenge students to approach sustainability as a multidisciplinary, multi-locational, and multi-scalar challenge. This paper argues that sustainability design pedagogy needs to prioritizes communication skills and situated creativity and cognition. This assertion is made through a critical reflection on the experiences of a series of sustainability courses that confronted the limitations of teaching traditional, architectural performance-focused sustainability and instead explored how architectural design learning can integrate ongoing communication with various project-related stakeholders and partners, can address sustainability at multiple scales and through multiple frameworks of focus, and can draw inspiration from a range of sources – local to global. In one class, students experienced a situated epistemology working within multidisciplinary design teams in direct collaboration with various community partners and potential residents. In a second class, students worked in multidisciplinary teams to build proposals with university partners to improve sustainability learning on their campus through a series of campus interventions. In a third class, students traveled on a sustainability-focused study abroad trip to examine various sustainability agendas at multiple of scales of application. In this collection of teaching experiences certain underlying discourses echoed through all of the classes and this analysis substantiates a learning approach that is open and responsive to situated issues of ecological, social, and economic sustainability.