In the course of my research, I came across a really good source that didn’t actually pertain to an of my questions, but interested me nonetheless. It comes from a textbook called Handbook of Public Pedagogy: Education and Learning Beyond Schooling, which covers how pedagogy can come in all sorts of forms and examines how the public engages in it’s own sort of pedagogy. There was a really cool article called Earthships as Public Pedagogy and Agents of Change, written by Mischa Hewitt, an architect who focuses on sustainable building practices, and Kevin Telfer, a journalist.

Architecture as Pedagogy

Something I naturally picked up while researching Earthships was that they are less scientific advancement and more political statement. Michael Reynolds, the creator of the entire concept, was attempting to put his green-anarchist principles into action. In that way, Earthships act as a attempt to signal where their builders stand in relation to society. In many ways, researching Earthships is a strong way of dipping your toes in to the bigger picture of sustainability philosophy. The Earthship Foundation runs actual weeks long programs to educate prospective builders/owners in the methods and reasons behind Earthship designs. They also tend to be very adaptable, meaning that every new builder can bring in their own perspectives, education, and philosophies and add them to the greater knowledge bank of the Earthship.

Another interesting tidbit about Earthships as pedagogy is many Earthship projects are extremely open about their practices and communities. Most of the ones I’ve come across attempt to do public outreach as a public activism, while also their existence standing as a passive activism. I am always interested in different methods of education, and I can’t think of many other projects that choose to quite literally build their curriculum or philosophy into the very stones (Or in this case, Tires) of their foundation.

Pedagogy in sustainability

Coming out of that, an interesting avenue to turn down is how we look at our pedagogy for the cause of sustainability. In my previous posts, I’ve criticized the sort of nationalized and top-down approach to sustainability activism. Too much of it is based on reaching as many people as possible, and I would say that a good amount of it seems to be focused less on education and more on politicization of the issues; less about teaching the opposition, more about rallying the base to get on the train we want them on. While this is important, I think we really have to look at how we use activism to educate the public. This Earthships example is a great idea of a very low level, grass roots approach. I am of the firm belief that good pedagogy requires the human touch; the communal relationships are just as important as the information being transferred in the process of education. When the educator is abstracted out of the human level (Say, a story on the news or a petition in a tweet) there’s a natural force exerted against people that don’t already have some engagement and agreement in the topic. It’s a much safer and productive learning environment among friends than amongst strangers.

There are some issues here, of course. Direct on the ground action is often a thankless job. This sort of grass-roots educational movement also generally can’t be enacted from the top-down; I don’t know why, but it seems like most of the time top-down organization of the local level often aren’t very productive. It’s also just a lot harder to foster local community in the modern world, where community is no longer locked by geography in the same way it was even fifty years ago. The best approach I can offer is that it requires people to feel empowered to reach out into their own local environments and give activist outreach a shot.

Where do the politics come in?

There is simultaneously a strange and popular idea that education is either inherently non-political or supposed to erase the bias of its context (Authors, times, etc). This is untrue in probably every single context imaginable. The very act of education is the imprint of your own biased experiences into the mind of others. We can’t escape the politics, but at the very least we should make them either readily apparent or easily digestible. Education, or at least the education I believe in, is built on a framework of compassion. It’s just as important to understand the student and meet their needs as it is to be correct.