Teaching Fieldwork in Landscape Architecture in European Context; Some Backgrounds and Organisation

Abstract

Fieldwork is an intrinsic part of landscape architecture education because it confronts the students with the landscape in real life, shows realised projects, enables different experiences, and provides a direct confrontation with the historical context of the discipline. Here the main goal is to give a first overview of teaching of fieldwork, compare that with other publications, and analyse pedagogical and didactic backgrounds in landscape architectural education in Europe. This study is based mainly on existing publications and complemented with our own experiences with fieldwork in teaching. The research method is based on accumulating existing knowledge on the subject and the principles of case study research. After a short overview of pedagogy and didactics in the context of teaching in design disciplines and how this relates to teaching landscape architecture, we work out the organisation of teaching in the outdoors. The conclusions focus on what can be learned in the outdoors that you cannot be learned indoors. Learning to see, to experience the landscape in real is part of “learning by doing” in which drawing, sketching, measuring plays a key role. In the long run pedagogy and didactics of fieldwork should be developed as domain-specific field of knowledge as part of design education in general.