SCUP Annual International Conference

In his introduction to the workshop, here in Montreal, Creating a Sustainable Campus Community Through Integrated Planning, Kelly Cain introduced workshop attendees to the concept of the "shadow curriculum" in order to understand the importance of the campus within which students learn to what they learn. It's an important concept, and not just with regard to sustainability, but to the learning mission of our institutions. Regarding sustainability, however, here is a quote about that from the person from which he got the concept, Tom Kelly:

[W]hile our attention focuses on formal curricula . . . our students are learning a great deal from the way our institutions are structured, their patterns of consumption and production of waste, and the relationships they have with the local, regional, and international community. This shadow curriculum is a constant, repetitive, and often unconscious educational force . . . in many cases working against the very principles of environmental literacy that we seek to engender in our students.

One way to bring that home is to consider what I have been telling parents for more than two decades: "By the time your kid takes driver's ed, they've been learning how to drive—from you—for at least a dozen years." Ouch: Riding in the car while you drive has been your kids' "shadow driver's ed."

In a similar vein, David Orr called campus architecture "crystallized pedagogy" in his book, Earth in Mind: On Education, Environment, and the Human Prospect.

My point is that academic architecture is a kind of crystallized pedagogy and that buildings have their own hidden curriculum that teaches as effectively as any course taught in them. What lessons are taught by the way we design, build, and operate academic buildings?

The first lesson is that architecture is the prerogative of power and not that of those who teach or learn. Implicit in this view is the assumption that architecture does not influence the flow of ideas, the quality of learning, and the human relationships in which learning is embedded. Therefore, faculty and students are rarely consulted on whether or what to build or where. From this, they learn that power can impose what it wishes on the academic landscape without having to explain much.

The second lesson is that architecture and building design are merely technical and are thus best left to people with technical competence. It follows that ethical, ecological, or aesthetic aspects of building do not matter nearly as much as technique and technology. In deference to expertise, then, we learn passivity toward the "built environment." This may explain our subsequent failure to protest the spread of ugliness and banality across the landscape as well as our apparent obliviousness to how these cheapen our lives and diminish our prospects.

From the design and materials used in construction, a third lesson is learned: The environmental and energy costs of building to not mater much. Academic buildings are seldom designed to maximize solar gain or energy efficiency, to minimize unpriced environmental costs of materials, or to utilize local materials. This, we learn the carelessness that accompanies waste and inefficiency, as well as callousness to the degradation of other places from which materials and energy originate.

Fourth, a "successful" building is one that quietly serves the educational process, but requires no mindfulness of those who use it. From this we learn passivity and disengagement from our surroundings and the irresponsibility invited by never having to know how things work, or why, or what alternatives there might have been. The same building in which sophisticated theories are propounded unobtrusively teaches its occupants that it is OK to be oblivious to the most basic aspects of life support.

Fifth, the process teaches us about the limits of imagination. It is assumed, without anyone ever saying as much, that intellect can be nurtured in sterile places largely devoid of imagination. Therefore, creativity in academic architecture is mostly confined to facades replete with lots of opportunity to stretch the educational experience across disciplinary boundaries and across those dividing the realm of thought from that of application, It is an opportunity to work collectively on projects with practical import and to teach the art of "good work." It is also an opportunity lower lifecycle costs of buildings and to reduce a large amount of unnecessary damage to the natural world incurred by careless design.

Labels: shadow curriculum, sustainability