Central to the teaching philosophy of Field Studies is the idea of embodied critical thinking. The experiences and individual knowledge of students are a fundamental starting point. Learning and collective forms of knowledge emerge through encounters and through activities that materialise at the periphery of the school, at the point where it comes into contact with the world.

In practice, teaching does not follow a fixed format but changes according to context and needs. Residencies and seminars can take the form of interventions, durational projects, summer schools, research and writing weeks, temporary collectives, libraries, assemblies or civic classrooms. The body, experience, place and relation become part of the production of knowledge. Different ways of sensing, thinking and participating are part of this field, with neurodiversity and difference understood not simply as a condition to accommodate but as a first affordance, as our state of being, and a primary source of knowing.

Field Studies approaches learning as an ecology, shaped by the relations between people, places, ideas, environments and the material conditions in which study takes place. Its activities remain open to what emerges from these relations rather than being organised in advance.

Field Studies offers a form of study that is radically open and not oriented towards predetermined learning outcomes. Learning happens in a space that is alive, produced according to terms and conditions that are continuously renegotiated by the people who enter it. Perhaps its guiding metaphor is the archipelago: not a singular territory, but a series of landings connected by the practices of its students and the relationships they form.

No previous certificates or degrees are required to join Field Studies. Students can join individual teaching residencies and seminar programmes, or enrol on a longer-term basis to develop an independent research project with support from tutors.

Field Studies does not offer institutional accreditation. It is interested instead in what forms of study, knowledge and collective life might become possible when the assumptions of higher education are themselves open to question.

Field Studies has two core teaching strands, Terms and Conditions and Figures of Eight. Each is a school in itself. Terms and Conditions is a series of intensive teaching residencies that moves between cities, themes, practices and encounters. Figures of Eight is a critical studies seminar programme that works through repetition, return and sustained collective inquiry. Together they form the Studium Generale, a wider field of study through which students can move between different forms of learning and compose their own course of study.