Teaching Beyond the Curriculum

Abstract

A call for a culture of care has arisen as an antidote to the challenges of our time: climate change, economic inequity, and a global pandemic. This call is grounded in a feminist discourse on the essential nature of care labor to sustain a world of mutual flourishing, and a critique of power: the imbalance of who and what we care for, reveals who we believe deserves a future. despite its economic invisibility in our society. For designers, care work might include construction, repair, and maintenance, or participatory practices that center the needs of a site’s community. These ideas underlie Landscape Design and an Ethic of Care, a course for students in architecture, urban design, planning, and landscape architecture. This paper, like the course, seeks to illustrate how the classroom serves as a test site for modeling an ethic of care in a community of learning as we explore the theory and practice of design with care. First, I will identify define a pedagogy of care in relation to Joan Tronto’s 4 stages of care: recognition of need, willingness to respond, direct action, and responsiveness. Then I will describe how this pedagogy reimagines student participation in typical design theory activities: reading discussion and case study research, as collaborative and reflective practices. This cross section through the course illustrates care-work as a tool for critical analysis, and as a constructive method for imagining and seeding a new culture of mutual flourishing within the design classroom – and perhaps, future design practices.