UC Davis

This research explores practical changes to Western environmental design education informed by discourses and practices within critical pedagogy, feminist theory, and applied folklore. I employ a new framework responding to the critiques of Western conventional environmental design pedagogy for recirculating and reinforcing technocratic approaches and exclusive policies, plans, and designs, as well as student demands to substantively reform course curricula to value BIPOC perspectives and contributions to the field to re-envision an undergraduate capstone sustainable design course at the University of California, Davis. The results demonstrate how educators can value personal experience, a sense of belonging, and a commitment of care to empower students and pluralize narratives, epistemologies, and materialities in an environmental design classroom. Qualitatively analyzing student projects and self-reflections from the classroom case study, this framework evaluates how these pedagogical changes encourage students to pluralize narratives and epistemologies that counter the dominant canon and imagine and experience alternative processes for producing more socially, racially, and ecologically just designed and built environments.