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| Welcome to Learnings/Unlearnings Reader #1: Performing the Archive, with contributions by Anne Pind, Amy Brookes, Fiona MacDonald, Kieran Mahon, David Roberts,Camilla Carlsson, Sol Pérez-Martinéz, Henrika Ylirisku, guest edited by Sara Brolund de Carvalho and Meike Schalk.
Also Reading shares texts, research and work developed and published outside the Urgent Pedagogies.
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| Design Exercise Book, Orchard Primary, Lambeth. Photo: David Roberts
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| Learnings/Unlearnings: Performing the Archive
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| Anne Pind, Amy Brookes, Fiona MacDonald, Kieran Mahon, David Roberts,Camilla Carlsson, Sol Pérez-Martinéz, Henrika Ylirisku
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FILED AS Theory (Series of UP—Readers) |
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CATEGORY Archive, Climate Change, Community-based, Decolonization, Ecology, Educational programme, Feminism, Land, Mapping, Research |
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| Welcome to Learnings/Unlearnings Reader #1: Performing the Archive, guest edited by Sara Brolund de Carvalho and Meike Schalk. The reader includes contributions from the section “Embedding Environmental Learning Histories” from the conference Learnings /Unlearnings: Environmental Pedagogies, Play, Policies, and Spatial Design, which took place in Stockholm in autumn 2024. Drawing from the realms of architecture, craft, design, art- and play pedagogies, Reader #1 addresses historical case studies, art works, and historiographic insights, providing a critical lens from which to view contemporary practices within the field.
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| In addition to natural hazard vulnerability, the lack of access to basic infrastructure and financial services imposes restricted production and consumption conditions for this population, as well as limits technological innovations that for some privileged experts, would be promising for reducing our environmental degradation [2]. Hence, when thinking along the United Nation’s promise of “leaving no one behind” for a sustainable future, one must think – What is really possible in marginalized, peripheral, poor contexts?
In my diverse experiences in social projects in Brazil, I came to face situations where from the lack of options, these populations have been actively resisting their existence through informal and creative ways of production, consumption and education. Ways that have been excluded from the respect of government officials and policymakers, but that we can learn from to ressignify our modus operandis that have overpassed the bearable impact on the planet.
I bring to the discussion the practice of mutirão, a word with indigenous roots from Tupi-Guarani mutyrõ (within many other variations), freely translated to English as “common work”. The practice, with debated origin [3], has been present in diverse cultural contexts and geographical regions, suggesting a common intrinsic human trace of solidarity [3], but that aggregates different layers of political and social challenges. Deteriorated by the growing individualization of work configuration, some practices of mutual help survive their remote past’s heritage [3], yet incorporating new complexities of contemporary urban configuration.
In Brazilian cities, despite the legal effort to make cities accessible [4], these challenges include housing deficit, lack of basic services such as sanitation and electricity, and restricted land access [5]. In the overall neglect of this urban ill by some government officials, it creates a condition that obliges people to find informal ways of occupying the city – usually in configurations such as favelas, and ocupações. In these scenarios of poor infrastructure assistance, climate vulnerability is enhanced, being common phenomena of landslides, extreme rainfall and floods that cause significant dwelling damage and human loss. Yet invisibilized by officials, the segregated people find political and social strength by unification of their voices, knowledge and workforce abilities in a territory that is not assisted by formal governance. They collectively construct housing, infrastructure, and collective spaces in labor that are generally non-remunerated, non-hierarchical, and do not aim for a financial profit. Therefore, the mutirão incorporates a political view of anti-hegemonic activity that is contrary to capitalist work relations [6].
To bring this into practical terms, I share a practice of an informal occupation located in Santa Maria, a city in south of Brazil, that is in a current legislative process for the State to formally allow 53 families to live where they have been for the past seven years – “Vila Resistência” – in direct translation – “Villa of Resistance”. The name coherently suggests their will of power, as 15 of the pioneer families came from a situation of eviction from a past land they occupied, and in the current site, they have already been through at least three direct threats of removal [7]. The disputatious situation introduces other various conflicts these organizations encounter, and their need to urgently resist to be able to live.
In addition to natural hazard vulnerability, the lack of access to basic infrastructure and financial services imposes restricted production and consumption conditions for this population, as well as limits technological innovations that for some privileged experts, would be promising for reducing our environmental degradation [2]. Hence, when thinking along the United Nation’s promise of “leaving no one behind” for a sustainable future, one must think – What is really possible in marginalized, peripheral, poor contexts?In my diverse experiences in social projects in Brazil, I came to face situations where from the lack of options, these populations have been actively resisting their existence through informal and creative ways of production, consumption and education. Ways that have been excluded from the respect of government officials and policymakers, but that we can learn from to ressignify our modus operandis that have overpassed the bearable impact on the planet.
I bring to the discussion the practice of mutirão, a word with indigenous roots from Tupi-Guarani mutyrõ (within many other variations), freely translated to English as “common work”. The practice, with debated origin [3], has been present in diverse cultural contexts and geographical regions, suggesting a common intrinsic human trace of solidarity [3], but that aggregates different layers of political and social challenges. Deteriorated by the growing individualization of work configuration, some practices of mutual help survive their remote past’s heritage [3], yet incorporating new complexities of contemporary urban configuration.
In Brazilian cities, despite the legal effort to make cities accessible [4], these challenges include housing deficit, lack of basic services such as sanitation and electricity, and restricted land access [5]. In the overall neglect of this urban ill by some government officials, it creates a condition that obliges people to find informal ways of occupying the city – usually in configurations such as favelas, and ocupações. In these scenarios of poor infrastructure assistance, climate vulnerability is enhanced, being common phenomena of landslides, extreme rainfall and floods that cause significant dwelling damage and human loss. Yet invisibilized by officials, the segregated people find political and social strength by unification of their voices, knowledge and workforce abilities in a territory that is not assisted by formal governance. They collectively construct housing, infrastructure, and collective spaces in labor that are generally non-remunerated, non-hierarchical, and do not aim for a financial profit. Therefore, the mutirão incorporates a political view of anti-hegemonic activity that is contrary to capitalist work relations [6].
To bring this into practical terms, I share a practice of an informal occupation located in Santa Maria, a city in south of Brazil, that is in a current legislative process for the State to formally allow 53 families to live where they have been for the past seven years – “Vila Resistência” – in direct translation – “Villa of Resistance”. The name coherently suggests their will of power, as 15 of the pioneer families came from a situation of eviction from a past land they occupied, and in the current site, they have already been through at least three direct threats of removal [7]. The disputatious situation introduces other various conflicts these organizations encounter, and their need to urgently resist to be able to live.
In addition to natural hazard vulnerability, the lack of access to basic infrastructure and financial services imposes restricted production and consumption conditions for this population, as well as limits technological innovations that for some privileged experts, would be promising for reducing our environmental degradation [2]. Hence, when thinking along the United Nation’s promise of “leaving no one behind” for a sustainable future, one must think – What is really possible in marginalized, peripheral, poor contexts?
In my diverse experiences in social projects in Brazil, I came to face situations where from the lack of options, these populations have been actively resisting their existence through informal and creative ways of production, consumption and education. Ways that have been excluded from the respect of government officials and policymakers, but that we can learn from to ressignify our modus operandis that have overpassed the bearable impact on the planet.
I bring to the discussion the practice of mutirão, a word with indigenous roots from Tupi-Guarani mutyrõ (within many other variations), freely translated to English as “common work”. The practice, with debated origin [3], has been present in diverse cultural contexts and geographical regions, suggesting a common intrinsic human trace of solidarity [3], but that aggregates different layers of political and social challenges. Deteriorated by the growing individualization of work configuration, some practices of mutual help survive their remote past’s heritage [3], yet incorporating new complexities of contemporary urban configuration.
In Brazilian cities, despite the legal effort to make cities accessible [4], these challenges include housing deficit, lack of basic services such as sanitation and electricity, and restricted land access [5]. In the overall neglect of this urban ill by some government officials, it creates a condition that obliges people to find informal ways of occupying the city – usually in configurations such as favelas, and ocupações. In these scenarios of poor infrastructure assistance, climate vulnerability is enhanced, being common phenomena of landslides, extreme rainfall and floods that cause significant dwelling damage and human loss. Yet invisibilized by officials, the segregated people find political and social strength by unification of their voices, knowledge and workforce abilities in a territory that is not assisted by formal governance. They collectively construct housing, infrastructure, and collective spaces in labor that are generally non-remunerated, non-hierarchical, and do not aim for a financial profit. Therefore, the mutirão incorporates a political view of anti-hegemonic activity that is contrary to capitalist work relations [6].
To bring this into practical terms, I share a practice of an informal occupation located in Santa Maria, a city in south of Brazil, that is in a current legislative process for the State to formally allow 53 families to live where they have been for the past seven years – “Vila Resistência” – in direct translation – “Villa of Resistance”. The name coherently suggests their will of power, as 15 of the pioneer families came from a situation of eviction from a past land they occupied, and in the current site, they have already been through at least three direct threats of removal [7]. The disputatious situation introduces other various conflicts these organizations encounter, and their need to urgently resist to be able to live.
Various histories and historiographies of learning have focused on play, emancipation, civic action, and their spaces, often seeing their material and institutional manifestations, as well as performances and experiences of learning, as entangled. This Reader reflects upon archival sources, and overlooked or forgotten histories of civic environmental learning and engagement, with contributors asking what impact these histories have on pedagogical practices and environments today?
The Reader’s contributions are organized chronologically, offering insight into specific pedagogical approaches and educational programmes. Starting with Anne Pind's artistic exploration of Fogelstadgruppen (the Fogelstad group) and their Citizen School for Women founded 1925 (after women gained the right to vote in Sweden in 1919), which connects environmental care with suffrage, and the desire for education. Her text underscores the importance of diverse narratives and experiences in creating a fabric of civic engagement and transformative learning, while departing from her personal experience of repressive pedagogy. Pind contrasts the restrictive nature of traditional schooling with the innovative and supportive approach taken at Fogelstad, influenced by Swedish first wave feminism, which emphasized collective learning and personal storytelling. Her visual and literary work references the artist Åsa Elzén’s archival project focusing on Fogelstadgruppen’s relationship to earth, ground, and fallow knowledge (2019-2021).
The second contribution by Amy Brookes, Fiona MacDonald, Kieran Mahon, and David Roberts continues with the study of an open-air school building and school typologies from 1925 in the UK, including participatory archival research with children exploring their own school’s architecture. The building was physically transformed several times over many years, in line with shifting ideological imaginations of learning, and today houses a secondary school for Muslim pupils. The pedagogical aim of the workshop with the children was to raise awareness of the plurality of our built environments throughout history, of different geographies always in relation to their local actors, and to bring this knowledge to design education and practice into the here and now. References to other school building types all over the world served as examples for designing and building 1:1 spatial situations. The group draws on Ahmed Ansari’s approach of “Decolonization of Design,” arguing that one can reach back to historical understandings of past being and their changed nature in the present to recover essential ontological features that would point to a new futural state (2018).
Camilla Carlsson’s contribution looks at the transformation of play spaces, with particular focus on the Parklek (park-play) format in Sweden, from 1940 to 2020. The movements’ historical underpinnings extend beyond this period, with the appearance of specific experimental outdoor learning environments like Denmark’s Skrammellegeplads (junk-playground), which encouraged children to engage in 1:1 scale building activity. Parklek, Sweden’s staffed playgrounds, emerged as a place-based pedagogy in the beginning of the twentieth century, and from today’s perspective can be viewed as a format that was firmly embedded in the structures of the Nordic welfare state. Camilla Carlsson, who is an artist with long-standing experience working with children, writes of the importance of play environments in urban settings, emphasizing the value of play for people of all ages, and connecting it to artistic processes and imaginations. Her artwork Layers of Play constitutes an archive which captures five decades of the history of the Fagerlid Parklek, a local play environment in Hökarängen, Stockholm, and foregrounds its significance for the neighborhood even today.
Educational architectures received increased attention during the 1960s and 1970s—a phenomenon art historian and curator Tom Holert described with the term Education Shock, in his exhibition at Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin (2021), where politics and policy measures to democratize education and its expected societal effects were widely debated. Holert’s exhibition forms an archive of “past futures, unfinished projects, abandoned experiments and forgotten but hugely impactful educational reforms” (Holert 2021, 10). The following contributions take recourse to political and pedagogical designs and counter-designs that sprung from the global atmosphere of departure during these years. They explore environmental learning as a public education and 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. Sol Pérez Martínez’ historical research takes us to the UK between 1968–88, and the grassroot organization Urban Studies Centres (USCs), initially advocated by Ward and the planning journalist Anthony Fryson. USCs formed a network for public education and citizen involvement in architecture and planning that sought to empower citizens to influence their surrounding environments. Pérez Martínez uses the term “Situated Pedagogies” to describe the approach adopted by these organizations, combining considerations for the environment, education and equity, and highlighting the pedagogy and collaborations behind the goal of increased civic engagement.
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. In the fifth contribution Henrika Ylirisku maps the tradition of environmental art education from its formation in Finland in the 1960s until today. A school reform in the 1970s made art the first subject to integrate environmental education as one of the core content areas in Finland. Her paper takes us from a socially conscious and culturally critical approach, to a shift toward art pedagogies emphasizing personal aesthetic experience and environmental sensitivity in the 1980s, and finally to a diversification into various parallel strands since the 1990s that also embrace an emphasis on promoting social justice and societal activism as integral parts of art education. Recent initiatives include feminist, posthumanist, and new materialist theories to decenter human exceptionalism and question binaries between nature and culture.
All papers in this Reader handle history as a resource for future educational design.
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| The project responds to the call Designed Living Environment—Architecture, Form, Design, Art and Cultural Heritage in Public Spaces, and is funded by Formas—a Swedish Research Council for Sustainable Development with the Swedish National Board of Housing, Building and Planning; ArkDes; the Swedish National Heritage Board; and the Public Arts Agency Sweden, under the grant agreement number 2020-02402.
Thank you to Färgfabriken in Stockholm, especially to Karin Englund and Anna-Karin Wulgué for hosting Learnings/Unlearnings.
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Urgent Pedagogies is an IASPIS project.
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