3 Where Living and Learning Meet: Bringing the Classroom into the City

Integrative Curriculum Design

We began designing the curriculum (which included defining assessment criteria as well as learning outcomes) by first determining what affective/cognitive/critical knowledge was needed to solve messy wicked social problems and what skills/tools could concurrently be taught and showcased in practice. Working closely with city staff, we identified a number of the city’s issues of interest. The cohort then self-organized and selected the issue they were most passionate about solving. Issues such as affordable housing, sustainable transportation, urban design and public space activation, climate leadership, and social enterprise and social procurement were all on the table.

Key cognitive domains focused on applied knowledge; moving from the practicalities of sustainable community development to connection, regeneration, integrated planning, adaptation, reconciliation, and diversity, from local to global processes. If we guided the students through the problems they were facing, we wanted them to apply a myriad of lenses and theories, principles, and practices from a variety of disciplines such as architecture, art, science, nature, ecopsychology, anthropology, and dialogic inquiry. Curriculum content and design included upcycling (designing for cradle-to-cradle circular economies; see McDonough & Braungart, 2013), biomimicry (borrowing genius from nature’s designs to innovatively solve human problems; see Benyus, 1997; Harman, 2014), design thinking using makerspace (taking problems into fluid, constructive spaces of innovation, curiosity, risk-taking, and empowerment combining empathy, creativity, and rationality; see Doorley & Witthoft, 2012), bricolage (combining on-hand materials to craft the new; see Kincheloe & Berry, 2004; Wiseman, 2007), and open space technologies (allowing time and space for spontaneous, self-organizing conversations around important issues; see Owen, 2008).

While sustainable community development can be approached theoretically, it is primarily about relationships and interrelationships– with the land, with other human communities, and with our fellow creatures. “No single element in the world is not bonded to, flying away from or catalytic with another element in the world…every ecosystem is an astonishing meeting, this conversation between various dynamics that contribute to the central conversation of life” (Whyte, 2012). A primary motive of ‘relatedness’ implies that competencies developed by a systems approach that stresses an indissoluble unity of people and place in ‘conversations’ with one another is necessary for us to handle the pressing challenges facing modern societies. However, “More often than not (in education), emotional or intuitive understandings are marginalized, considered too personal and unruly, or are discounted entirely” (Leighton, 2014, p. 139). Yet, Orr (2004) reminds us that, “There is no way to separate feeling from knowledge. There is no way to separate an object from a subject. There is no good way and no good reason to separate mind or body from its ecological and emotional context,” (p. 31) and to think otherwise constitutes “crises of perception” (Macy & Brown, 1998, p. 4). To mitigate this, we firmly rooted more embodied and embedded practices into our design so that the living world and learning had a chance to meet through the daily practice of ‘being in place’ by walking and writing about the city. Students learned to slow down, deeply listen and observe, notice, and feel their surroundings as they captured their impressions of the place through journaling, sketching, photography, etc. These ‘conversations’ with the world facilitated an understanding of the depth and sense of this place, beyond anything we could have possibly taught in any classroom.

The first assignment, called The Lay of the Land, had two parts. The first, due prior to the residency, was a short, introduction written from the perspective of the student’s sense of their home place that was accompanied by a photograph, drawing, or some other visual representation of the lands they were from. Guided by questions such as, Where is the place you live? What is this place like? What do you love about this place? What is your relationship to it? How has it shaped you or have you shaped it?, students were asked to examine their relationship to their communities to help “place” themselves both geographically and socially and provide a glimpse into their worldviews, values, beliefs, influences, etc. This assignment was intentionally designed to both literally and figuratively help the cohort better understand and appreciate the diverse places each member was ‘coming from.’ The second part of this assignment (due in the studio at the residency) required students to bring an artifact — something small (e.g., something that could fit into their hands and, of course, their luggage) — that best represented what they loved about where they lived and their relationship to that place (As environmental educators, we were, of course, careful to ask students to avoid any inadvertent destruction of habitat if they were retrieving natural objects.). After each student shared their written introductions and photographs the first morning of class, they proceeded to take their individual artifacts and use bricolage to improvise and create something of a unifying design from these diverse objects around the notion of ‘community,’ thereby creating something of a collaborative design greater than the sum of its parts. The nature of bricolage is such that the placement of one thing next to another can sometimes create new connections and insights where none existed before; therefore in the making, more, and often unexpected, meaning arises. As the week progressed, and with the accrual of more knowledge and insights, students, in effect, became bricoleurs by revisiting their initial design to continue to shape and rearrange things and add and collage in things they had found to create a kind of creative, mixed media discourse between themselves, the artifacts, and their emergent understandings. Here the metaphor of community took on a life of its own without any further instruction from us.

Continuing with the emphasis of the importance of embeddedness and place, each day, an hour was set aside within the curriculum (scheduled strategically after the lunch break) for students to individually go out and walk and write about the city. The instructions for this assignment, called Terra Incognito, were to traverse this unknown territory, find a place that appealed, and go there every day (in all kinds of weather) to sit and listen, reflect, and write in their journals. Given the complexity of the issues involved in sustainable community development and the need for transformative learning on multiple levels, including personal movement and reflective practice was important for integrating and synthesizing learning. It allowed for new connections that were found at the intersection between the inner and outer worlds they wandered to be formed. Walking the city, sitting in place, slowing down, and deeply listening brought about a more conscious, participatory engagement with the world. Thought was allowed to open from the inside, connecting to the outside in rich, subtle, complicated ways, encouraging sensitivity and awareness, while striking a balance between rational thinking and the deep imagination. This was evidenced in the student journal pages that were in one and a half pages increments that were submitted three times over the course duration. We, humans, are open systems conditioned to relationship and, according to anthropologist and cyberneticist Bateson (1979), are designed as such to receive, interpret, and respond, in patterns of repetition between incoming signals and flow through information and energy and throughput/feedback in an endless spiral of give and take. This type of recursive, reflective practice stimulates a kind of soaking in of information that brings new connections and an enhanced ability to identify the permeability and interrelatedness of the local and global, people and community, species and biomes, urban and rural, and past and future, often creating new and original thought in the process. We encouraged students to consider the widest range of expression for their individual pages – writing, map-making, drawing, poetry, rubbings, photographs, sketches, pasted-in found ephemera, etc. – as they studied the deep meaning of the city in its full grit and glory.

Happily, we found that these ‘conversations’ helped students enter the sensorial present and awaken to the sounds and silences, structures and patterns, light and atmosphere, and people and energy of the cityscape. This exercise allowed them an opportunity to better attune to the lived experience of what was happening on the ground. What might have started out as a kind of surface reporting or descriptive chronicling of events, soon turned toward the personal with surprisingly deep excavations and, sometimes, revelations. These reflections afforded us a glimpse into what was stirring for individual students so that we could help closely track and kindly encourage their progress toward increased self-awareness and awareness of others throughout the course.

Building upon their residency journey, students created and curated a vivid social media presence (in this case, Pinterest) as a substantive approach to showing their perceptions and approaches to community development. Tapping into the power of visual storytelling, they posted interesting and evocative photographs after their daily encounters with the city along with additional links and videos connecting what they were learning to other innovative research from sustainable-minded cities and places. Pinterest allowed the students the immediacy of uploading and sharing a rich array of resources during the course and to continue doing so long after the course ended. Acting as a kind of ‘living library’ to chronicle their city experience, it also became an archive of resources to draw from for their final assignment and a way we could assess their individual interest and participation in using multiple forms of media and techniques.

With Studio Time, we used another critical reflective practice to begin each morning. A writing prompt that arose from class discussions or that was crafted as a natural segue into that day’s curriculum was offered. In response, students wrote intuitively and freely in their journals for 10 minutes. Not only did this type of journaling act as a way to slough off extraneous and distracting thoughts, but it also cleared the way for students to hear their own voices and allow space for something to write itself through them. Importantly, timed writing ‘primes the pump’ (Goldberg, 1986) for further creativity and the flow of ideas, inviting what wants to surface to do so. Journal writing comes closest to reproducing how we think and how consciousness evolves (Rainer, 1978) and can be liberating when compared with the tight restrictions placed on so many other forms of writing, particularly academic. As students get to know themselves better through writing, they are more likely to make space for an ongoing, internal relationship that leads them toward the larger implications of their lives and their work (and what is unfolding in both realms) as well as allows them to bear witness to their own changes with a deepened sense of self-awareness. Demonstrations of self-awareness was not only part of the assessment criteria for learning outcomes pertaining to positive human interaction and developing leadership skills, but is also an essential competency when working with others toward shared goals and outcomes in community development as it not only allows us to bring our full selves to the table, it also allows us to bring a more conscious approach to problem-solving and collaboration overall.

As mentioned above, human-centered design thinking (Maguire, 2001; Manzini, 2015; Sanders & Stappers, 2008;), makerspaces (Doorley & Witthoft, 2012), and open space technology (Owen, 2008) were used to help each team cohort develop innovative, socially-responsible approaches to the complex city issues they were investigating. Makerspace, an all-day, design-thinking exercise, also involved city staff participating alongside the students as they moved from developing empathy around their city’s challenges to ideation to playing and tinkering to the final creation stage. Limited to using only the materials provided by their instructors (for example, kits including a range of things from cardboard to cotter pins, elastic bands, jumbo straws, doweling, clothespins, muffin cups, and playdoh) and under tight time constraints, teams developed prototypes of their collaborative ideas to address diverse stakeholders’ needs and seek new, arts-based perspectives for old problems. In the end, the students made their colorful, resourceful solutions visible through highly innovative art in a final Gallery Walk at the end of the day that was open to city officials and their staff. To further highlight the importance of inter- and transdisciplinary research and knowledge, we held an evening event, called ‘The Human Library,’ where students ‘read’ people instead of books. Human libraries were designed in Denmark in the year 2000 (http://humanlibrary.org/) as a positive framework to hold wide-ranging conversations where real people were put on loan to readers. At human libraries, barriers and prejudices are challenged through 20-minute dialogue sessions where difficult questions are anticipated and welcomed. Students ‘checked-out’ and ‘borrowed’ a variety of people they might not normally have an opportunity to talk with including the mayor, a social profit representative working for the homeless, a street installation artist, a city planner, a local businessperson, a place-maker, a First Nations man working in provincial government, an architect, a horticulture therapist, an academic, etc.

All of these creative curricular activities, along with in-class lectures, numerous guest lectures, and field trips allowed students to gain the necessary rich experience, skills, and leading-edge practices for integrative planning and informed decision-making as evidenced by the student final panel presentations the last day of the residency. Working from the premise that students construct knowledge on a continuum of creativity from childhood to maturity and are not empty vessels to be filled (Piaget & Inhleder, 1969) by innovative curriculum or enthused teachers, we knew that students choosing a graduate program were also, more often than not, seeking change in their lives in some capacity. Each arrives with rich and diverse experiences and vast stores of a priori knowledge, a willingness to roll up their sleeves and dig into the messiness of the issues, and to work in a kind of radical collaboration with one another in fairly short order. Every morning, to honor the wisdom and enthusiasm in the room, we flipped the classroom to provide each student the opportunity to briefly teach the class something of significance to them, which helped build their confidence. This took the format of five minutes of ‘anything goes’ and resulted in students teaching us games, offering instruction for hands-on skills, showcasing a past or current work project, playing an important piece of music to them, reading a poem or part of an article of interest, etc. While each offering was unique to that student, repeatedly, the sessions illustrated the need for diverse ways of knowing, seeing, and experiencing the world in order for true collaboration and appreciation to take hold. Of course, we also all learned something new. As the classroom became more tensile and safe over time and as students wrestled with the edges of their own agency and the needs of the community through the issues at hand (perhaps aided, in part, by this type of rehearsing each morning and learning by doing through makerspace and open space), they appeared more fluid in their thinking, more willing to make mistakes and learn through experimentation, and more willing to improvise and even change direction midstream if need be.

Through their encounters with self and others, through writing, moving, sitting, reflecting, making, tinkering, prototyping, and presenting, we noticed the students were being compelled to act on behalf of the city and its inhabitants, were becoming more confident about taking action (and making plans), and, in effect, were actualizing their knowledge in response to the challenges they faced. Their increased ability to track and synthesize a flow of ideas in order to clarify, critically co-create, analyze, and further synthesize and reason was apparent in the culmination of ideas and insights found in their rich, relevant, multimedia draft presentations at the end of the week. Their final research assignment was evaluated by a panel comprised of city planners and academics from the university who critiqued each team’s preliminary thinking and ‘work-in-progress’ to date in preparation for the final course where further refinement of their research would take place online.

In the beginning, we had very differing views about what to integrate and how much. The first author is also a poet and thus wanted to bring in poetry to punctuate teaching points throughout the classes. The second author was somewhat uncomfortable with this but decided, in the interests of collaboration, to flow with this, in her opinion, unusual way of teaching. In the end, it proved to be a very moving experience with the second author closing the final class with one of her favorite poems. The classroom was intended to be an inviting space, so we thoughtfully curated with beautiful fresh flowers, refreshments, food, and plenty of resources such as topical books, magazines, and art materials that could be used anytime. Each morning, the students arrived to a new quotation on the board that was intended to spark further conversation. We considered pacing and timing, planned and unplanned spaces for reflection and dialogue, and checking in, all very important for continued personal care and transformation. Lectures moved from the very personal anecdotal to the more standard knowledge sharing and reiterating. At last, we reached our stride over the last three days where we could easily model an authentic, transparent, and interdisciplinary teaching practice and more integrated, synthetic knowledge sharing. Teaching in this way, moved us from feelings of service to joy.