ABSTRACT
In the second part of the book, we turn our attention to the education of architects. The majority – but not all – of the authors in this book, were educated as architects, and the majority – but not all – both teach and research architecture today. We are bound together not only by a shared concern for the role of architecture and architects in the climate crisis, but also by our shared responsibility to do something about it in our daily practice as educators. The five chapters in Part 2 consider the role of education in nurturing sustainable and critically reflective architectural thinking. The chapters have been chosen because of the remarkable innovation they demonstrate, and the practical insight that they offer other teachers confronting the challenge of creating equitable learning environments. In the five chapters that follow, you will find appeals for paradigmatic change as well as examples of how that change can be enacted. In common between our authors are appeals to dramatically change not only the content but also the form of architectural education: to dismantle colonial and anthropocentric worldviews that are entrenched in the academy, and to nurture instead communities of equity and empathy. Architectural education is pedagogically complex, perhaps more so than the education of future practitioners of allied disciplines in the creative arts, built environment, design or engineering disciplines Students of architecture are expected to earn both an academic and a professional degree; whenever professional or accrediting bodies like the ARB, RIBA, ACSA or AIA propose additions to architecture curricula (and in most recent years, those additions are often to do with climate, energy, materials, health and safety), educators face a challenge to find sufficient teachers with appropriate knowledge, hours in the schedule and credits in the curriculum.
