In the evolving landscape of higher education, a radical reimagining of course design is gaining traction, one that transcends traditional classroom boundaries by embedding learning deeply within place and sensory experience. A pioneering project spearheaded by transdisciplinary scholars offers a visionary example through the construction of a speculative syllabus—an ambitious and unconstrained framework devised far from institutional limitations. This approach not only redefines pedagogy but also transforms the act of learning into a richly embodied, multisensory encounter with the environment, specifically the dynamic littoral zone of the North Sea.
The concept of collaborative syllabus building, a practice where students actively contribute to shaping course content, has been explored in earlier studies for its empowerment of learners and enhancement of motivation and satisfaction. However, the project under discussion takes this collaboration a step further by situating syllabus design outside the usual digital or academic settings, opting instead for the raw and unpredictable conditions of a beach environment. This shift enabled the team to liberate their thinking from financial and logistical constraints, embracing an improvisational methodology that hinged on manual manipulation of physical note cards rather than digital tools, catalyzing a fluid and organic curriculum development process.
Working amid the sand and surf introduced a novel dimension to their pedagogical process. The transitory nature of the beach context imposed physical challenges—such as the risk of windy dispersal of note cards—but also inspired an innovative approach: frequently reshuffling and reordering cards by hand allowed the curriculum to evolve continually, acknowledging the variability and adaptability inherent to the environment they sought to engage with. This hands-on approach is metaphorically and practically linked to the speculative nature of the syllabus, which is designed to pivot and respond rather than prescribe fixed content and sequences.
Central to this endeavor is the dissolution of entrenched educational dichotomies. By relocating the classroom to the beach, the boundaries between teacher and student dissolve, along with dualisms such as body and mind or human and nature. The multisensory activities conducted—ranging from deep listening to swimming and beachcombing—engendered an immersive learning atmosphere that foregrounded presence, play, and curiosity, qualities often stifled in conventional academic environments. This embodied pedagogy fosters not only cognitive engagement but also an affective connection to place, catalyzing a mode of learning that transcends intellectual abstraction.
Such place-responsive learning directly challenges the “god-trick” of disembodied knowledge critiqued by scholars like Donna Haraway, which assumes objective detachment from context. Instead, the project insists upon situated cognition, where understanding is inseparable from temporal and spatial dimensions, and cognition remains entangled with sensory and emotional registers. This ontological shift foregrounds the body as a locus of learning and recognizes the inseparability of cognition and place, thus augmenting transdisciplinary inquiry.
Moreover, the project builds on ecological and systems thinking by viewing human and nonhuman actors as co-participants in educational praxis. This approach resonates with Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ conceptualization of “school” as a living organism modeled after striped dolphin pods—units of survival and learning that operate intergenerationally and symbiotically. The speculative “School for the North Sea” envisioned by the researchers is not merely metaphorical but serves as a template for sustained, reciprocal interaction among human learners and their ecological context, operating through a relational ontology that values care, attentiveness, and co-evolution.
This vision manifests concretely in the design of a workshop—“Training the senses towards ecological thinking”—which operationalizes the speculative syllabus by inviting participants into direct, unmediated engagement with the seaside environment. Through activities emphasizing sensory attunement and embodied awareness, participants experience firsthand the dissolution of conventional boundaries between learning, environment, and community, fostering a form of knowledge production grounded in experience and relationality.
The workshop exemplifies a liminal space where the distinctions between teachers and learners blur, institutional hierarchies fade, and collaborative knowledge-making flourishes. The process of co-designing and co-teaching reflects a democratization of pedagogy, reminiscent of action research methodologies but radicalized by location and sensory immersion. This pedagogical experiment hints at how higher education might evolve to meet contemporary societal and ecological challenges through more holistic and integrated forms of learning.
Ecological thinking, as articulated by the team, rejects simplistic binaries and embraces complexity and interconnection, situating learning within a broad spectrum of relational ontologies. This intellectual stance aligns with broader movements within environmental humanities and posthumanist theory, which emphasize the entanglement of humans with their environments and the mutual shaping of knowledge and place.
The methodological innovations described underscore the importance of flexible, adaptive tools in speculative curriculum design. The humble note cards, physically manipulated in response to environmental contingencies, symbolize a break from rigid, top-down pedagogical models. They serve as catalysts for iterative thinking and continuous reconfiguration, embodying a form of pedagogy that is as dynamic and fluid as the coastal zone it seeks to engage.
Furthermore, the project’s situating of syllabus building as part of an exploratory research agenda rather than a mere academic exercise broadens the scope of curriculum development. It becomes a site of inquiry itself, a living experiment, and a catalyst for new forms of transdisciplinary knowledge production that transcend disciplinary silos.
This curriculum-building endeavor also reflects an implicit critique of conventional educational systems that often prioritize cognitive abstraction over sensory and affective engagement. By foregrounding the relational and embodied aspects of learning, the project opens pathways toward pedagogies capable of fostering ecological sensibilities, social responsibility, and cross-species empathy—critical qualities in an era marked by environmental crisis.
Overall, this initiative demonstrates how integrating place-responsive pedagogy with speculative syllabus design can catalyze new educational paradigms. It reveals the potential for educational environments that are not merely spaces of knowledge transmission but living ecosystems where knowledge, emotion, and place converge adaptively and meaningfully.
The project’s ramifications extend beyond the particularities of coastal study, offering a replicable model for embedding ecological awareness and multisensory engagement across disciplines. It challenges institutions to reconsider the structures, assumptions, and materialities that frame learning.
By reimagining education as a participatory, place-entangled process, this work contributes vitally to debates on academic innovation and sustainability pedagogy. It exemplifies how co-creative and embodied methodologies can foster transformative learning experiences, equipping students not only with knowledge but with the capacities for attentive, responsive, and ethical engagement with the world.
The “School for the North Sea” remains, for now, a speculative construct, but its principles and practices offer a compelling blueprint for higher education’s future—a future in which knowledge is inseparable from care, place, and multispecies kinship.
Subject of Research:
Transdisciplinary place-responsive pedagogy and speculative syllabus co-creation.
Article Title:
Co-creating transdisciplinary place-responsive pedagogy: attuning to place and edu-crafting speculative higher education.
Article References:
de Groot, T., Arenberg, A., Fountoulaki, M. et al. Co-creating transdisciplinary place-responsive pedagogy: attuning to place and edu-crafting speculative higher education. Humanit Soc Sci Commun 12, 1045 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-025-05352-3
Image Credits: AI Generated
