Planetary Pedagogy - Outline

Learning with Owls, Apprenticing to Trees: Participation and Power in More-than-Human Pedagogies

Why Does This Matter?

Why Is Planetary Pedagogy Significant?

Planetary communities, or Gaia itself, are in crisis, at least from a human standpoint.

Human-centred design, grounded in human knowledge, innovation, socio-cultural learning, and pedagogical systems, has contributed to this damage.

Nonhuman beings hold relevant knowledge, skills, and innovation capacities, so effective pedagogy should engage these capacities for shared benefit.

What Is Missing in Current Pedagogy?

There are no frameworks that consistently position nonhuman beings as designers and leaders in design.

Architectural and design pedagogies increasingly claim alignment with planetary, ecological, and more-than-human concerns, yet most remain anthropocentric.

This pattern becomes clear when we apply the Steps of More-than-Human Participation.

The steps show that participation without power redistribution is tokenism.

Current pedagogies cluster at the lower degrees of the steps. Moving upward requires rethinking the notion of pedagogy in terms of co-learning.

This limitation persists because formal educational programmes lack data, tools, and teaching methods.

Human educators also struggle to develop these approaches and gain support because few success stories show clear practical impact.

What Opportunity Does This Create?

The opportunity is to redefine learning as the expansion of design potential by making hidden or hard-to-reach regions of possibility space accessible.

What Are the Research Question and Hypothesis?

• Research question: How can design education promote systemic transformation in support of justice and thriving for all life?

• Hypothesis: beneficial system change is possible through mutual co-learning with nonhuman agents.

• not as a catalogue of good studios,

• but as a diagnostic and constructive intervention into architectural education.

Approach

We propose a nonhuman-led design approach. In this approach, design is a way to seek better futures that is not limited to humans. Better design should support thriving. Because planetary resources are limited, thriving also depends on justice and on balancing the needs and capabilities of participating agents.

Collective, Distributed, Planetary, and Gaian Conception of Learning

From Pedagogy and Teaching to Co-Learning and Niche Construction

Nonhuman exclusion is structural.

Design education overestimates human expertise.

The Steps of More-than-Human Participation can help to:

• Assess co-learning.
• Foreground the capabilities, expertise, and leadership of nonhuman beings.

Methods

Review architectural education in terms of more-than-human participation.

Assess the potential benefits of greater participation through changes in possibility space.

Use case studies to make the argument concrete.

Results

What Do Current Pedagogies Do in Practice?

Structure this section as a review of architectural education by degrees of participation.

Lower Degrees: Symbolic and Representational Inclusion

Nonhumans appear as:

• themes,
• metaphors,
• ethical prompts,
• background environmental data.

Typical pedagogical moves:

• speculative studios,
• narrative exercises,
• short projects with no feedback loops.

Diagnosis using the Steps of More-than-Human Participation:

• participation is claimed,
• power remains entirely human,
• outcomes do not change in response to nonhuman action.

Intermediate Degrees: Habitat Provision and Mitigation

Pedagogies focus on:

• habitat provision,
• mitigation,
• welfare-oriented design.

Improvements over symbolic inclusion, but:

• humans define needs,
• humans define success,
• nonhumans remain clients, not participants.

Diagnosis using the Steps of More-than-Human Participation: these approaches redistribute care, but they do not support autonomy or recognise nonhuman expertise, contributions, and innovation.

What Changes When Participation Broadens?

Pedagogical consequences of moving up the Steps of More-than-Human Participation:

Knowledge and Evidence

Shift from metaphor and precedent to:

• behavioural evidence,
• ecological data,
• long-term observation.

Implication for co-learning: the need to engage with uncertainty, partial knowledge, and failure.

Agency and Feedback

Designs must be:

• open to modification,
• responsive to nonhuman action,
• evaluated over time.

Pedagogical implication: assessment cannot rely only on drawings or narratives. It must also include feedback from nonhuman stakeholders or co-leaders.

Authorship and Success Criteria

Moving up the steps destabilises:

• the figure of the individual designer,
• fixed briefs,
• human-centred notions of optimisation.

This creates friction with:

• accreditation frameworks,
• studio calendars,
• inherited assessment cultures.

Where Do Deep Design Lab Cases Sit on the Steps/Design Potential Matrix?

Position Deep Design Lab examples in relation to degrees of participation.

For each example:

• where it sits on the steps,
• what enables that position (methods, tools, institutional conditions),
• what prevents it from moving further.

Demonstrate:

• how nonhuman behaviour alters design decisions,
• how evidence constrains speculation,
• how pedagogy can support higher degrees of participation without claiming full nonhuman control.

What Do These Findings Mean?

Discuss the role and possible misuses of the steps.

The Steps of More-than-Human Participation do not assume linear progress or universal desirability of top rungs. They are not a moral hierarchy.

The steps are not a demand for total nonhuman control.

Practical Steps for Planetary Pedagogies

Planetary pedagogy cannot be achieved through content alone. It requires organisational, institutional, deliberative, and experimental capacity for participation at higher steps.

The Steps can help human educators to:

• identify tokenism (including romanticism, superficial engagement, and other limits of lower steps of participation).
• articulate transformative ambitions.
• define realistic pathways for change.

More politically inclusive steps increase methodological risk and institutional friction, but they also expand what design education can address.

Contribution to Knowledge

More-than-human design pedagogy is not only possible; it is necessary.

The steps can serve as a tool for clarity and accountability.

If architectural education is serious about planetary futures, it should operate beyond the lower degrees of participation it currently normalises.

The systemic framework that treats design potential as a measure of success can unify, assess, and maximise beneficial co-learning across ways of being, human disciplines, and communities of practice.