Teaching Beyond the Curriculum

Abstract

The Design-Build Methodology becomes very popular in design schools nowadays. In this paper I try to reveal practical method which transforms student’s ecosystem challenges into motivation as a dynamic approach. It helped to set the important goals of education for awareness and environmental thinking. The dynamic pedagogic practice was conducted as part of landscape architecture studies, in Israel. The school environment included variety of students’ background, ages and much differentially in ecological awareness. Add to that the course lack of resources and extremely short time. The process was documented through the years of its evolvement. Architectural and landscape planning, similar to many other creative fields, is not a linear process but across the board. The importance of group interaction and working as part of a team is essential for deep understanding. This is one of the conclusions of the dynamic experience. It was revealed as one of the foundations for the acceleration in order to achieve the education aim. Many other non-direct achievements happened while the core process enabled itself to its eco-system. For example, the high environmental sensibility while eco-thinking design and the dynamic changes in group inter-relation while the three stages of the process etc. Eventually, this paper comes to present the stages of the methodology, the ‘seed’, the ‘sprout’ and the ‘structure’ enhancing the possibilities to localizes them similar to how it happens in a natural micro-ecosystem environment.