The readers are edited by Nicola Antaki, Matthew Ashton, Emilio Brandão, Sara Brolund de Carvalho, Anette Göthlund, Matilde Kautsky, Elke Krasny, Karin Reisinger, Ashraf M. Salama, Meike Schalk, and Rosario Talevi and will appear between February and June 2025.

As a field, “environmental learning” has sought to advance an understanding of the environment through spatial practices—such as art, architecture, craft, design, and planning—by ways of learning, often employing immersive, embodied, and experimental pedagogical formats. With the attention currently given to lifelong learning by universities and intergovernmental organizations (UNESCO, EU, UN Sustainable Development Goals), we see an opening towards activating and developing environmental learning pedagogies for spatial subjects in contexts of formal, informal, and non-formal learning.

The conference Learnings/Unlearnings took place between September 5–7, 2024, at the art venue Färgfabriken in Stockholm. It developed out of the research collaboration,  A Full Loop of Performance: From the Perspectives of Young People, Through Environmental Learning, to the Reviewing of Legal Frameworks in Multi-actor Constellations, and Back Again, involving researchers and practitioners from KTH School of Architecture and Konstfack, University of Arts, Crafts and Design’s Department of Visual Arts and Sloyd Education, and visiting artists and researchers in the fields of architecture, art, craft, design, pedagogy, politics, and social work. It draws on existing environmental learning cultures for advancing new perspectives on the urgent issues of social justice in the (built) environment and learning from resourceful material practices.

The event brought together over one hundred speakers, practitioners and researchers, from various backgrounds exploring the link between spatial practices and pedagogies, through analyses, reflections, instructed conversations, explorative workshops, panels, exhibits, performances, policy proposals, and other approaches. It also engaged Färgfabriken’s Youth Council to conduct interviews with the conference guests during the three-day event, and the group of five teenagers from Hovsjö Youth Center, who have participated in A Full Loop as co-researchers from the start, to act as “friendly critical observers” at the conference.

The conference addressed the urgency of “environmental learning” and probed possibilities of lost knowledge, pedagogical formats, media and practices, spatial and material conditions, theories, and policy frameworks. We asked the questions:

How could environmental learning make public spaces and third places more accessible and engage a broader section of society in their creation and transformation? How could knowledge that is developed in art, design and architecture practices, in collaboration with particular groups, be made operational for educating future spatial practitioners and educators? How would collaborative activities with concerned actors feed into policy making to improve our “designed living environments” regarding social justice?

The conference was organized into ten paper sessions, two curated panels, seven workshops, and three keynote conversations, over three days. Each Reader gives an account of one session, often combined with a workshop, keynote conversation, or panel.

Embedding Environmental learning histories

The first session explored environmental learning as an art pedagogy that formed during the 1960s, attributed to the design educator Ken Baynes, art educator Eileen Adams and the social historian and anarchist writer Colin Ward in Britain. In Sweden it was popularized through the work of art teacher Elly Berg speaking of Stadsstudier or “urban environmental education.” The movements’ historical underpinnings however extend beyond this period with the appearance of specific experimental outdoor learning environments like Denmark’s Bygglek (building-play) dating back to the 1940s, which encouraged children to engage in 1:1 scale building activity, and Sweden’s staffed playgrounds, Parklek (park-play) which emerged as a place-based pedagogy. The first documented Parklek opened its doors already in 1914 in Norrköping. Finland witnessed the development of a robust culture of art-based environmental education from the 1960s that survived periods when culture, education and social projects experienced severe funding cuts in other parts of the world. Finland even established Environmental Education (EE) and Sustainable Development Education (SDE) in their national school curricula in 2003. This panel asked: How has the rich tapestry of environmental learning histories influenced contemporary learning practices? Reader 1 Performing the Archive is edited by Sara Brolund de Carvalho and Meike Schalk and includes case studies, historiographic insights drawing from the realms of architecture, art, craft, and design pedagogical studies, reflections on sources, evidence, and overlooked or forgotten histories of civic environmental learning.

Conversing Environmental Learning Discourses

The two strands of Conversing: Resources, Frameworks and Concepts, and Revealing, Re/Imagining, Reframing and Rewriting scrutinized the multifaceted realm of theory and discourses that both shape and broaden the conception of environmental learning. Contributions included in-depth investigations into cases that show the continuous interplay between the environment, our reciprocal influence on it, and learning. Contributions addressed experiments and studies of situated-, emancipatory-, decolonizing and out-of-school learning, learning for design justice, intersectional inequalities and learning, pedagogies of the “global South” and “good practice” examples of formal-, and informal-, as well as lifelong learning in spatial practices. Reader 2 focusing on Resources, Frameworks and Concepts for environmental learning is edited by Anette Göthlund and Meike Schalk. Reader 5 addressing Revealing, Re/Imagining, Reframing and Rewriting as critical discursive practices is edited by Elke Krasny, Karin Reisinger, and Meike Schalk. Papers recognize the geographical situatedness of discourses that engage with the exploration of theoretical perspectives and debates in the understanding of environmental learning from diverse cultural standpoints.

Building and Playing

The broad theme of Building and Playing was divided into two tracks, 1) Processes, Props, Materials, Media, Techniques and 2) Spaces and Places of Environmental Learning. They ask, where does learning happen, and in what contexts? What are the props and materials, the physical environments, the atmospheres, and circumstances that enable pedagogical spaces and places to emerge? With an expanded perspective on learning environments beyond designated pedagogical spaces, or places such as classrooms, this theme focuses on settings, intentional and unintentional locations where people gather or just “hang out,” including youth community centers, museums, and sports facilities, offering ample opportunities to address environmental learning and its connection to democratic processes. Contributions engaged with media and techniques that have facilitated instances of environmental learning and provide examples and insights from diverse pedagogical activities and projects. In the Processes, Props, Materials, Media, Techniques track, Reader 3 taking Enhancing Learning and Participation Through Environments and Public Spaces as its topic is edited by Ashraf M. Salama and Meike Schalk. Reader 6 Transgressing, Conversing, Performing is edited by Emilio Brandão, Anette Göthlund, and Meike Schalk. Reader 8 Stories of Mediation and Media is edited by Karin Reisinger and Meike Schalk.

In the Spaces and Places of Environmental Learning track, Reader 4 Material Community Practices is edited by Nicola Antaki, Emilio Brandão, and Meike Schalk, and Reader 10 Engaging Educational Buildings is edited by Matthew Ashton, Matilde Kautsky, and Meike Schalk. The Readers in this theme reflect on ethical and value-based considerations tied to diverse learning environments, i.e., in terms of accessibility and inclusion. Furthermore, discussions on norm-critical and norm-creative settings for un/learning aim to expand on critical insights and to enrich the vocabulary in the field of environmental learning.

Ruling and Unruling Spaces

This session brought together educators, researchers, and members of architectural interest organizations, concerned with equality and diversity rules. It took up the experiences in the development of cross-sectorial collaborations and inter-institutional curricula and the conflicts that were encountered in these collaborative and institutional settings. Questions asked included: What are our policies and instruments, on various levels (UNCRC, UNs SDGs, local policies, and university structures) to effect environmental learning? How have policies impacted or failed to create caring, democratic, and just environments? What forms and infrastructures of facilitation and interfaces do we have in place, and what protocols would we need to change for mediating between policy, practices, roles, and different actors more effectlively? Reader 7 Environmental Learning Policies is edited by Anette Göthlund and Meike Schalk.

Educating the Future Practitioners and Educators of Spatial Practices

This session addressed concerns with human-made environmental destruction, coloniality, and intersectional inequalities. The urgency of these issues emphasizes the need for lifelong learning with the environment in both formal and informal contexts. What curricula, pedagogical formats, and codes of conduct can support learning to care for the environment? How to decolonize education? What are the frameworks of disciplinary technologies and pedagogical practices in the formation of practitioners and educators in spatial practices? How are normative disciplinary and professional roles produced and re-reproduced, and how can spatial practitioners act upon them? Do their frameworks need to be renegotiated, and how can this be done? Reader 9 Educating Otherwise is edited by Rosario Talevi, Meike Schalk, and Elke Krasny. Contributions interrogate the contemporary forces which shape the conditions for the formation of practitioners and educators in spatial practices within wider political and economic structures and modes of operation from within or outside institutions. Educators, researchers, and practitioners explore the development of curricula that facilitate learning from other-than-human perspectives, and foreground examples that show careful pedagogical approaches.