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| Conference overview
As educational environments continue to evolve and support increasingly diverse learning needs, the importance of re-evaluating their purpose, design and use remains essential if communities wish to foster pedagogical space that is both inclusive and equitable. There are many concepts and methods that allow for a re-appraisal of formal, informal and non-formal learning environments. These include environmental learning (Adams, 1989; Ward and Fyson, 1973), situated pedagogies (Dewey, 1899; Kitchens, 2009; Perez-Martinez, 2019), place-based education (Gruenewald, 2003; Yemeni, 2023), and civic pedagogy[1] (Coleman 1998; Antaki et al 2024). Such intersecting and interdisciplinary approaches have enabled theorists, practitioners and learners to advance critical understandings of the central role that space, place and belonging has for educational process, whether it be located within, beyond or on the edges of the institution.
To realise this, built environment professionals and creative practitioners, as well as educationalists and policymakers, have long advocated for learning to happen beyond institutional walls to facilitate learners' engagement with the different environments they inhabit, both designed and natural. These methods extend from the local to the global, yet tend to emphasise the experiential, material, and spatial, while prioritising values of cooperation, and social and environmental justice (Dodig et al, 2025).
At the same time, the physical site of the learning institution, whether it be school, museum or university, continues to be scrutinised to understand how educational space responds to increasingly diverse user needs, as well as supporting social and ecological imperatives. To this end, historians, theoreticians and practitioners ask how questions of materiality, design, space and pedagogy intersect to support or restrict student agency, learning, wellbeing and community engagement (Brookes et al, 2025; Syeed, 2022).
This call for abstracts invites contributions by those working with education to explore the links between environmental learning, spatial practices and pedagogy, as a subject and practice for the future. In doing so, it aims to bring together diverse voices from different fields to share understandings of how educational environments work, whilst raising awareness of what is needed for these ideas and practices to thrive. We welcome suggestions for a variety of formats, such as workshops, papers, and performances, delivered individually or in groups. We ask participants to situate their abstracts in relation to one of the following three strands:
I: Institutional Space. Learning can happen anywhere: sometimes in classrooms, sometimes outside of them, in corridors, playgrounds, streets, natural environments or museums. Yet the institutional environment – its architecture, organisation, and material culture – has long shaped how learning is imagined and enacted. Institutional Space invites contributions that critique, frame and/or explore the sites, spaces and practices of formal education. From studios, classrooms and exhibition spaces to campuses, residential settings, forests and more. We welcome proposals that trace how formal learning institutions have been designed, built, and adapted over time, and how these spaces have reflected or resisted wider social, cultural, and political visions.
II: Edge Conditions. Increasingly, educational institutions around the world are seeking meaningful ways to collaborate and innovate with external partners – including but not limited to charities, cultural organisations, businesses and community and civic groups – to share expertise, widen participation and exchange knowledge. This strand explores what we term Edge Conditions - the sites, spaces, or places of learning on the margins, shared by institutions and external partners. We invite contributions that examine how spatial practices can activate thresholds found beyond institutional space, drawing on themes of reciprocity, participatory practice, spatial experiment, or place-based pedagogy. We seek work that questions and unsettles these boundaries, creating new, decolonial imaginaries of civic and institutional engagement.
III: Civic Space. Learning spaces are also situated outside or beyond formal institutional boundaries. Here we invite explorations of environmental learning led by grassroots, civic organisations and networks not limited to civic pedagogy, ecological pedagogy, and situated pedagogy. Whether participatory art practice, humanitarian work, ecological research, political activism, youth club, performance, or activity led by citizens or collectives, we are interested in abstracts that explore the link between civic spatial practices and pedagogies. Here we invite reflections on the autonomous, the community-led, and the informal, and how space and material ecology influences learning.
Notes
1. Civic pedagogy as a term comes originally from the field of political education, but has more recently come into use in the fields of architecture and urban studies, through the understanding that spatial decisions are political.
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