Collaborative Education or Eco Buddhism?

An image from Avatar, the film, taken from the Eco Buddhism Blog

The RAL (Reflexive Architecture Laboratory) is a design studio like any other but collaborative oriented. The result is that for the first time students start talking about ethics, tolerance, objectiveness in judgement, etc. Design itself has been even better than before at the RAL. It is incredible that this pedagogic technique has been ingnored for so long. The Chronicle ofHigher Education puts it this way:

Distributed and collaborative learning, with its emphasis on mindfulness, attunement to others, nonjudgmental interactions, acknowledgment of each person's unique contributions, and recognition of the importance of deep participation, can't help but foster critical thinking skills and greater empathic engagement. In that sense, collaborative learning transforms the classroom into a laboratory for empathic expression, which, in turn, enriches the educational process.

The article is by Jeremy Rifkin, the same author of The Empathic Civilization (this links to a good article extracted from the book) . I have no doubt about the effectiveness of collaborative applied to architectural education. In a wider political scope I am not so sure. John Gray, for example, thinks Rifkin's empathy becomes naive when it gets too green.

By the way, Rifkin says it was "Jane" Abercrombie at the University College London Hospitals who started this kind of education in 1950's. What about Vigotsky then?