Pedagogical Dimensions for Sustainability in Holistic Architectural Education

Built forms are one of the major sources of GHG emissions and account for around one-third of the nation's annual electrical energy use. Creating and sustaining a built environment is a collective responsibility. While this task is jointly shared by different stakeholders, the profession of architecture is one of the prime contributors through a variety of thoughtful decisions and concerted actions at different levels, beginning with education. For a nation aiming toward becoming a trillion-dollar economy, there is an increasing need for finding innovative solutions and creating sustainable practices which further accentuates the attention required toward the aspects of quality in the education of an architect for a multi-disciplinary learning environment. The role which the graduates will play in the design of our environment will gain even more prominence with the emerging nature of complexities toward sustainability. Hence, academics have an important role toward creating awareness and facilitating necessary framework for the achievement of SDGs. Holistic architectural education reflects diverse learning attributes that are inclusive of the challenges and possibilities of a genuine human experience. The curriculum must play a conscious part in the definition and development of quality in a graduate as the ways of thinking will eventually culminate into ways of practicing. Before a graduate can begin to contribute toward the design of our environment through the practice of the acquired education, it is the education of practice that needs a critical exploration of the characteristics of interdisciplinary formulations. The calls for reforms in education must include the awareness of the global twenty-first-century skills. Through a study of literature and methods of discourse analysis on contemporary explorations of transformative practices, this paper focuses on a discussion of the pedagogical dimensions of a holistic education that connects the theory and practice of collaborative education. Our findings indicate that criteria of quality in learning can be achieved through amalgamation of appropriate learning theories and models like transformative learning and Burns model.