adjective / ˈbrækɪʃ / from middle Dutch and Middle Low German “brack”, salty
(of water) slightly salty, as is the mixture of river water and seawater in estuaries.
BRACKISH
Who We Are:
BRACKISH is a diverse collective of RISD Landscape Architecture students who deploy landscape architecture pedagogy as a conduit for addressing complex socio-environmental issues, to advance inclusivity in our field, and as a powerful catalyst to arm local students with the skills to become future leaders in the field.
BRACKISH
OUR STORY:
Our founders Corey Watanabe and Naomi Canino, graduates of the RISD Landscape department saw a profound disconnect between the cloistered world of high academia in Providence (RISD and Brown University) and the reality of day-to-day life in the communities of Providence.
Environmental injustices including unequal access to green spaces, unequal exposure to industrial pollutants and other environmental hazards were particularly jarring during the COVID-19 pandemic where people were quarantined to the confines of their neighbourhoods.
We started working with local high school students to reclaim agency over their school grounds and surrounding community, creating a BRACKISH space where students of the RISD Landscape Architecture department would facilitate an intentional platform of co-creation with local high school students, elevating the voice of the local community within design academia whilst arming the youth of the city with tools for understanding and transforming the landscape around them.
BRACKISH
Our Curriculum:
Our curriculum reflects our values of inclusivity and our goal of working to alleviate environmental injustices in the local Providence community via a collaboration with the local youth. The curriculum thus focuses on facilitating active co-learning opportunities in a non-hierarchical manner as opposed to a top-down approach of knowledge transference.
With regard to subject matter, our community workshops have run the gamut of landscape pedagogy, introducing high school students to fundamental landscape architectural measuring and representation techniques, strategies to increase ecological complexity whilst working to create coastal resilience, and urban-greening strategies that create more liveable neighbourhoods.
By bringing students on sites such as the Tillinghast Farm-RISD Beach salt marsh estuary, the RISD Nature Lab as well as the Landscape Architecture Studio, the BRACKISH Curriculum works to immerse students in spaces and sites of knowledge-formation that are often difficult to access or hidden to most high school students in the city.
In the past two years, BRACKISH worked together with the Green Team Youth of Groundwork Rhode Island to co-create curriculi for local high schoolers that specifically work toward a better understanding of coastal systems and coastal resilience.