Contextual Background
Within and beyond my teaching practice I am heavily concerned with the the impact the architectural discipline has on planetary wellbeing. It is something I have always planned to more heavily emphasise in my teaching, through overarching project themes to individually planned sessions and workshops. However I am often frustrated by the difficulty of conveying the impact of the built environment on the planet to students when it is all too easy to default to damaging practices for the sake of aesthetics or construction simplicity. It can also be difficult to articulate the nuances and complexity of our responsibility to the climate and global ecologies, both because of my own ignorance and because of the sheer scale of the subject.
Evaluation
Much of the environmentally concerned teaching I currently do is in reaction to proposals brought by my students. For example in tutorials I may offer more sustainable construction materials or processes for them to explore, or suggest they consider working with natural conditions such as sunlight or prevailing wind, rather than rely on artificial technologies. These are important lessons but are too narrow in scope to help students understand the broader context they are operating within in order to effect meaningful change. I have also run a project in which students analyse and critique the CSM building in order to understand its environmental impact amongst other successes and failures. This task was useful for mixing embodied experience and wider research which informed student opinions, but these were often focussed heavily on personal experience, lacking an understanding of the building’s position within the wider crisis. Given I am teaching Stage 1 students it feels like an opportune moment to establish knowledge and attitudes which can guide their education and professional work. I want to take a more proactive approach to the subject in which students can feel empowered to be agents in shifting current industry biases.
Moving Forward
First and foremost I feel I need to further my education in the area in order to plan for more climate conscious learning. I am actively participating in activities created by the Spatial Practices Climate Forum as well as planning to undertake Carbon Literacy training as part of UAL’s Climate Action Plan. I would like to encourage students to have an activist mindset when considering the climate; the CSM architecture courses have always had a reputation for political and social discourse but this is often confined to the MA where more sophisticated projects can be explored. However I feel that the climate should be treated as a primary consideration across the whole school in all projects. It is within project briefs that I feel I could have the most impact, by asking students to explore planetary wellbeing as the basis for a project – rather than an afterthought – it will shift the view of the environment as something to be considered after design towards a principle reason for it. Finally I want to bring more specific educational activities into tutorial sessions, these may come in the form of readings or videos such as those curated by George Barker on the Planetary Film Archive so that there is something for us to collectively discuss and reflect upon. I hope this will give students a broad understanding of the intersectional complexity of the climate crisis and give them the confidence to apply this within their personal projects.
References
CLIMATE FORUM (no date) CLIMATE FORUM. Available at: https://climate-forum.com/ (Accessed: 1 March 2024).
Planetary Film Archive (no date) Planetary Film Archive. Available at: https://www.planetaryfilmarchive.com (Accessed: 1 March 2024).
UAL (2023b) Climate Action Plan, UAL. Available at: https://www.arts.ac.uk/about-ual/climate-action-plan (Accessed: 1 March 2024).
UAL (2023a) Change the way we teach, UAL. Available at: https://www.arts.ac.uk/about-ual/climate-action-plan/change-the-way-we-teach (Accessed: 1 March 2024).