SLU news

How to run international teacher and student exchange in remote mode?

Published: 06 May 2020
Streetlife in the Buenos Aires area

When SLU Landscape teachers and students started into the third year of SLU’s Linneaus Palme Partnership with the University of Buenos Aires (UBA), the coronavirus compromised their work stays planned for this spring.

Argentina closed its borders, access is since prohibited to UBA’s Architecture and Urban Design Faculty (FADU), Argentinians are in total lockdown. Nevertheless, the exchange continues: two SLU students, Amanda Backlund and Evelina Bengtsson, are studying in remote mode, alongside their Argentinian peers. Digital platforms support lectures and crits. Time zone difference shifts course moment to afternoons and evenings. Instead of field studies on site, students use digital tools to ‘access’ sites, reports from previous fieldwork, and archive material. This reveals both the possibilities of remote site exploration and its limitations – ephemeral site qualities, topical voices, serendipitous discoveries will not inform this year’s work. Two UBA students are expected to integrate SLU’s courses after the summer break, hopefully in real life. Meanwhile SLU and FADU-UBA faculty teach online. Together, they continue combining SLU’s landscape knowledge with UBA’s urban design knowledge, to address urban transformation in fragile water landscapes. 

The achievements have now been published at FADU-UBA in the comprehensive report entitled Tácticas y Estrategias, in Spanish, including SLU Landscape staff’s writings and student projects in English. The report also launches a larger research commitment into knowledge co-transfer between Global North and Global South. It is driven by SLU and UBA teachers along the lines of the Beyond Best Practice approach forged by SLU Landscape scholars.

 


Contact

Lisa Diedrich, Professor

The Department of Landscape Architecture, Planning and Management, SLU

lisa.diedrich@slu.se, +46 40-41 54 24