Changing Times & Educating our Future Landscape

C H A N G I N G T I M E S A N D E D U C AT I N G OUR FUTURE landscape architects

Landscape architecture students participating in an Urban design-led urban studio public space co-design workshop

As June is Youth Month, it felt appropriate to reflect on landscape architecture education, particularly around the changes I have observed in the last few years. Sometimes it feels as though I was at university just the other day, although if I think back to when I was in first year, I remember saving my essays to a stiffy disk. A 32MB flashdrive was exciting technology and Instagram was half a decade away from being invented… yikes! Somehow in the time between when I was a student and when I started lecturing, education had changed. For me, the most noticeable difference was the shift from classes based around the lecturer disseminating their wisdom to students, to a student-centred approach where the lecturer plays the role of facilitator or (my favourite) designer-of-learning-environments to a group of students whose experiences and insights play an important role in the production of knowledge in the classroom.

If I had written this article in January, I would have said that design studios have not changed significantly in the last 50 years. But sitting in my working-at-home office (aka my dining room), after a morning of Zoom studio sessions and WhatsApp video crits, I would say even the studio classroom is not untouched by change. The developments in education are what makes it so exciting and dynamic and why I have remained in the education sector longer than I think I had ever anticipated. Even the current urgent shift to remote teaching is highlighting exciting possibilities for the future of education and is challenging lecturers to creatively reimagine what learning looks like in the 21st century.

Pandemics aside, education in South Africa has been a particularly dynamic space in recent years. The #FeesMustFall and Decolonising Education movements from 2015 to 2017 shook higher education awake to issues that had been lying dormant for decades. These movements left a legacy of challenging the status quo and critiquing the dominant view’s right to define who is on the margins. Lecturers across South Africa continue to redesign learning within diverse, Global South contexts. I have had to confront my position of privilege and my own teaching practices that may exclude diverse views. These shifts have prompted other changes in my thinking around education. I used to imagine that there were certain ‘criteria’ that a student needed to have in order to become a landscape architect, but I no longer believe this to be true. As Auguste Gusteau in Pixar’s Ratatouille exclaimed: “Anyone can cook!” (and be a landscape architect). I have begun to think about this process of anyone becoming a landscape architect. Students inherently come to landscape architectural education from a variety of backgrounds and bring with them rich experiences and diverse knowledge. Instead of trying to categorise students’ prior knowledge into categories of (ir)relevance, what if all their previous experiences are valuable and valued? I imagine landscape architecture as a Jackson Pollock painting and students as multi-coloured paints that have their own paths and trajectories and lead them to splashing onto the canvas of landscape architecture painting. As they engage, question and learn, they add new layers of paint to the artwork, thereby transforming it. Some of the students I taught at CPUT had begun their studies in different fields such as nursing, dental technology or civil engineering before changing their focus of study to landscape architecture. These different perspectives added to the diversity and richness of the class. Although I have not been at UCT for long, I have already seen evidence of the success of drawing in students from undergraduate degrees such as fine arts, EGS and Engineering. The students I work with have the agency and potential to realise change in education and transform our profession and practice. Bringing different ways of thinking to landscape architectural education makes it richer and ultimately makes the profession more resilient.

Christine Price

Professional landscape architect and lecturer in the landscape architecture programme at UCT