Learning through relationality: A curated conversation between popular education and design pedagogy
Abstract
This paper is part of an ongoing collaboration between a French design school and a food-producing farm engaged in peasant struggles, conceived as a “rural third place”. Each year, design students immerse themselves on-site, testing their knowledge through collective experimentation. Our heterogeneous pedagogical team—composed of design professors, the farming couple, and a collaborating designer—is in a continuous learning position, exchanging perspectives on education. Because relationality is central to this experience, and to equiponderate all voices, we decided this paper should take the form of a curated conversation. We explore the intersections and tensions between popular education practiced on the farm and formal design education: What commons sustain our collaboration? Where do our paradigms friction? How might popular education address blind spots within design pedagogy? Beyond position statements, this plurivocal experiment seeks to expand academic discourse by legitimizing marginalized forms of knowledge.
Keywords
Out-of-school teaching; Popular education; Situated knowledge; Curated conversation
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.2187
Citation
Berger, E., Blanchard, F., Chabré, F., Hébrard, T., and Kamoun, E. (2026) Learning through relationality: A curated conversation between popular education and design pedagogy, in Simeone, L., Gray, C. M., Verhoeven, A., de Götzen, A., Bakırlıoğlu, Y., Zohar, H., Stead, M., and Buwert, P. (eds.), DRS2026: Edinburgh, 8–12 June, Edinburgh, United Kingdom. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.2187
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Included in
Learning through relationality: A curated conversation between popular education and design pedagogy
This paper is part of an ongoing collaboration between a French design school and a food-producing farm engaged in peasant struggles, conceived as a “rural third place”. Each year, design students immerse themselves on-site, testing their knowledge through collective experimentation. Our heterogeneous pedagogical team—composed of design professors, the farming couple, and a collaborating designer—is in a continuous learning position, exchanging perspectives on education. Because relationality is central to this experience, and to equiponderate all voices, we decided this paper should take the form of a curated conversation. We explore the intersections and tensions between popular education practiced on the farm and formal design education: What commons sustain our collaboration? Where do our paradigms friction? How might popular education address blind spots within design pedagogy? Beyond position statements, this plurivocal experiment seeks to expand academic discourse by legitimizing marginalized forms of knowledge.