Reflection

In this blog post I intend to respond in part to Learning Outcome 4 : Synthesise your findings and present a critical evaluation of your project in a coherent, context-sensitive manner. 

As Gray and Malins’s explain (2004) – and as I have learnt from the woods – learning / analysis / making / reflecting have happened concurrently during this process. The approach I have taken has felt mossy, messy, humid and cyclical. Neither firm or linear.  So you might also find learning outcome 4 across a range of blogs:

• Early synthesis and evaluation of workshop one within : Sensing
• Reflection and analysis of methods within : Action
• Reflections and analysis from the Research Participants : Pause.

Returning to my Cycle diagram, the work now is to unearth strategies and actions from this research. Exploring future shapes for the School in the Woods.

In the process of doing this, I also asked my colleague Xiyao Chen to input their thoughts on this research, and their own experiences of working with the woods with our students. So the resulting actions have been influenced by Xiyao’s input as a core member of the MA course team.

What have the woods received from us
I re-enter the woods and ask for some guidance. I am wondering what the woods thought about this work, and my relationship with them. I am wondering how we might take seriously on our MA the value that these more-than-human systems provide our curriculum.

Could the woods be an Associate Lecturer on our MA, their hourly rate going back into their nourishment and care. I worked within the woods for 28 hours last term in service to this work. That would be £1680.

But is it money, or is it about reciprocity of time, attention and the care taken? As Kimmerer describes in her writing The Honourable Harvest:

Ask permission of the ones whose lives you seek. Abide by the answer.

Never take the first. Never take the last.

Harvest in a way that minimizes harm. 

Take only what you need and leave some for others.

Use everything that you take. 

Take only that which is given to you. 

Share it, as the Earth has shared with you. 

Be grateful. 

Reciprocate the gift.

Sustain the ones who sustain you, and the Earth will last forever.

(Kimmerer, 2013, chapter 17)

On returning to the intentions of this participatory exploration (Origin blog post) and reviewing all the learning from this four months, a series of principles emerge. I am finalising this stage of the work by sketching out what might be next for our School in Woods. 

There are three dimensions we could start to think about the above:

• Learning from – from inside other buildings, or within formal structures, learning can be taken from the woods which will enrich our understanding of eco-social justice in design
• Learning with – situating our practices alongside the woods, in informal fluid and unplanned ways to explore the potential learning exchanges.
• Learning in – basing our bodies and minds inside the woods as we work, research, talk, think.

Cyclical Collaborator: A compass for the MA	– Visiting woods at the start and end of a learning journey encourages practice of reflection and mindfulness. – Witnessing and experiencing the seasons change, supports students to situate their own learning and emotional experiences through cyclical lense. – Students can situate the concepts they were exploring at the start of the course in practical terms (what is ethics and care in design practice? What is reciprocity and pluriversality as an anti-colonial design practice?) – Students who have been shown ways of engaging with this space in relation to their curriculum are then more likely to re-enter these spaces for support and inspiration on their own terms and in their own time (Xiyao Chen’s observations from last term) – This is a creative and thoughtful methodology and philosophy, not an event. – In a similar way to how studio practice is directed by the tools within, the woods holds new invitations for tools and materials for students projects, new creative possibilities through both abundance and limitation.
Non-verbal Reciprocity : The woods as our teachers	– Language differences between us can reduce our abilities to communicate the full extent of our ideas and emotions, the woods supports us without words – There is an emotional resonance between the students and the woods. A space of contemplation, calm, oxygen, memory and care. – Reduce the hierarchies between the human and more-than-human world by exploring tutorials and classes developed in collaboration with the wisdoms of the plants. – Being next to and in these spaces help us find new realms within our consciousness. The woods are a reading list for knowledge and ideas. Do academic sources need to be peer-reviewed to be legitimate? are the trees sources of academic support? – Reduce the teacher-led curated agenda
Distributed Joyousness : Lets all the spirits free	– Students and the woods are the leaners/teachers/leaders here, and teachers sit alongside them as equals. – Everyone brings their own methods for togetherness into the woods. they bring their own positions and perspectives. A more informal, joyous, communal and spontaneous spirit. – The woods connect to stories of childhood, this in turn invites more depth of understanding to our cultural stories and our positionalities.
Generosity	– The woods are not ours, what are we leaving behind? Planting? Clearing? Nurturing? – And how can we share these relationships beyond our MA? Local schools, other students? people less able to access these spaces? No need for a toolkit which constrains it, maybe there is a need for a methodological guide that liberates and distribute it. – Ask the woods for their advice

On talking with Xiyao, we discussed how a next step for this work might be the creation of a physical methodology, guiding humans (of all ages) in understanding how they could co-learn alongside and within the woods. But I have also reflected on this being a very situated and personal piece of research. There is nothing in this learning that is telling me to commodify or expand this as a UAL learning offer.

Sources of further inspiration:

• Tree School : International movement rooted in the work of Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti (DAAR Decolonising Architecture and Art Research)
• natRural Lab : An architecture school in the rural Mexico started by Carlos Cobreros at Tec de Monterrey Campus Querétaro
• Talca Escuela de Arquitectura : At the University of Talca in Chile, learning and practice rooted alongside rural communities
• UAL Forest School : Using the forest as a tool to explore the climate and ecological emergency
• Hooke Park : Architectural Association’s woodland campus in Dorset, UK. It contains a growing educational facility for design, workshop, construction and landscape-focused activities.
• Forest School Movement : Born in Scandinavia, developed into a network of child-development practitioners who teach children and families about learning within the woods.

Final reflections:

What is a decolonised relationship with nature, research and the body? 

The previous post talks about decentralisation and pluriversality as principles to underpin a socially and environmentally just learning culture, but in the words of Yasmin Ostendorf-Rodríguez “That also means questioning the authority that gets to decide what is valid or not, and who is given a voice, who is able to curate and who gets their names on the wall” (Ostendorf-Rodríguez, 2023).

This Action Research set out to work authentically in a participatory research process with students, the woods, and with my own body. These three collaborators have been asking questions about:

1. How the woods might help us confront the colonised language, pedagogy and learning methods we use at LCC.
2. How removing the built environment of a university building might dismantle the power dynamics between the teacher and the taught
3. How the body in which we learn be more consciously explored within our pedagogy as we seek to dismantle the systemic structures that oppress and exploit
4. How the emotional lives of our learning community could be somehow held / supported / reflected by the cyclical nature of this woods

The woods were very generous in holding space for us over the past four months through this exploration. I have used the term Participatory Action Research cautiously as a framing term for this approach. And I want to take this moment to reflect on that.

What is true participation? Who is most invested?

I worked with students who were almost at the end of their MA. And we all consented to working together. This way of working, as an fully equal member of the learning community felt liberating and enriching. The learning felt fluid between us, without hierarchy. All three of us felt this.

As alluded to to in my positionally statement, It feels remiss not to acknowledge the intractable power dynamics at play, which I cannot fully unfurl or remove. Anti-colonial practices need to explore where power lies and what power does. As Ostendorf-Rodríguez questions above – who is given a voice? who decides? (Ostendorf-Rodríguez, 2023). As their course leader, I am paid to teach, assess and grade these students. And as they reach the end of their MA, this assessment process becomes more dominant in their lives. As three researchers – who all dream about equity between us – how could we undo the traps of power and privilege bestowed upon the one white British person paid to be here.

Both my collaborators were born into countries previously colonised by Europeans. Both are simultaneously facing the tyranny of the British Government as they live with the financial and emotional hardship of trying to extend their student visas, and/or find employers who’d sponsor them for thousands of pounds a year. Always on the back-foot in this country, and never fully safe. We love our International students at UAL, but do we actually care for them?

We faced these truths together with compassion in our bodies and words. And within this collaboration I believe we began to separate the roles we play at UAL from our identities as creative practitioners and women in the world. But I am left with many questions: To what extent are the students collaborating with me because I hold power over them? How much am I seeing the value in this research through the lens of the privileges I hold? Could I ever participate fully in true student / teacher participatory work when these institutional frameworks so clearly separate us?

Learning from the woods – where systems of reciprocity and mutuality surround and sustain us all – I think about interdependence. These processes require not only trust, but also deep care, a sort of sacrifice and selflessness. Unconditional friendship. True love.

To work in true and meaningful ways with our students we would first need to remove the prohibitive cost of higher education. If this isn’t possible, then we establish informal spaces outside these institutional hierarchies and paywalls where learning together is joyous, communal and spontaneous. Unknowable. Unmapable. So maybe our School in Woods needs new roots.

Who decides what is valuable research?
Who decided what a valid research process looks like?
Who names it?
Who decides whose body is more knowledgeable than another?
Is instinctive and intuitive work valid? is it only valid if someone has peer reviewed it?

It is important to note too here, who wasn’t present within my research, and therefore question how any of the insight shared could be representative of our learning community as a whole? The students who were not part of this work might hold a very different view of the woods, and their value. As I stated in my positionally statement :
_ not everyone feels safe in the woods
_ not everyone’s bodies and minds can comfortably process the smells and sensations of natural landscape
_ not everyone can walk freely and easily in an uneven landscape
_ not everyone feels comfortable getting dirty, muddy and cold
I am aware this research is subjective, biased and flawed.

There are many other voices missing too from experts and friends who would be central in the development of an alternative Art School in the Woods. pressures of time and life play a role in the limitations of this work for me, but it is a step towards something that I will not stop.

References

• Evernden, N. (1995). The social creation of nature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press.
• Jones, L. (2020). Losing Eden: Why Our Minds Need The Wild. Penguin.
• Kimmerer, R.W. (2013). Braiding Sweetgrass. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. Minneapolis, Minnesota: Milkweed Editions.
• Lenette (2024) PAR (Video).mp4 
• Ostendorf-Rodríguez, Y. (2023). Let’s Become Fungal! Valiz.
• Pethick, E., Martinez, P., and How, W. (2022). Artistic Ecologies. MIT Press.

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