The agency of site has long underpinned landscape architecture, where sitedness is a discipline-defining concept. As landscape educators, we teach our students to embrace sites as rich palimpsests whose layered histories and unique characteristics drive the design process. We ask students to engage multiple ways of knowing site, grounding rigorous spatial analysis in firsthand phenomenological experience. We encourage an empathy for site that respects identity and values difference, embracing each site’s specificity as generative of design. The nuance and care with which the discipline engages sites might lead us to ask: What if we approached our students in the way that we approach sites? What if we applied what we teach to how we teach?

Read the full article at Taylor & Francis.