ipping the Sript regrning the arhitetre tent

Flipping the Script: Foregrounding the

architecture studentJames Thompson

Univeristy of Melbourne

1 |Charrette 6(1) Spring 2020

Charrette

Charrette 6(1) Spring 2020|2

Traversing an architectural education is undeniably a life-altering experience. What students ascertain soon after embarking is that the acquisition of skills and knowledge only partially accounts for this sense of personal transformation. They discover that engaging deeply in disciplinary practices, learning to ‘think like an architect’,1 fundamentally alters their pre-existing relationship with their built and cultural environment, instilling a potent sense of agency. Just as important, the bonds they ultimately form with their fellow students are akin to those formed between strangers trapped overnight in an elevator. When you ask graduates to reflect on their architectural education, these transformative dimensions that shape their personal and professional identities are absolutely central to their narratives.2 And yet, these aspects are too often disregarded by academics when we focus our attention on what we believe are more consequential academic concerns, like course content and design deliverables. At the same time, there has been a noticeable shift across higher education whereby student life is now considered inseparable from one’s academic experience, sparking questions surrounding how academics might contribute to making universities more supportive and inclusive environments. Lecturers are increasingly conscious of how their performance as teachers impacts not only learning but student wellbeing, including motivation and sense of belonging.3 The implications are significant in our discipline given how its pedagogical tradition is manifested through nuanced gestures, speech and representation,4 not to mention architecture’s reputation for mismanaging stress, burnout and mental health more generally.5 Whilst some academics may question the attention placed on student satisfaction surveys, few are likely to counter the claim that our field has considerable room for growth when it comes to better understanding and better serving students along their personal journeys of self-transformation.

For this special issue of Charrette, we invited essays that foreground the architecture student experience as a way of exploring themes of student agency, belonging and identity transformation. The notion of ’flipping the script’ became a way of shedding light on various under-acknowledged dimensions of architectural education, from the holistic to the fleeting. So much of architectural education remains a tacit, unspoken enterprise, supporting the prevalent sense that ‘you had to be there’ to appreciate its intricacies. It is no surprise then, that what little gets published on the experience of becoming an architect often sparks considerable and critical reflection across the community.

Nearly thirty years have now passed since a wave of scholarship waged a sharp critique against architectural education.6 One of the key claims cutting across this work was that professional degree programmes are structurally bound to enculturate each generation of architects in ways that safeguard the privileges, ideologies and power structures of the profession. It appeared as though Schön’s idea of design pedagogy as inherently tacit,7 was excusing academics from openly stating, to students and each other, what was obvious to attentive and critical observers: that the curricula printed on


editorial

paper masked architecture’s ‘hidden curriculum’ of cultural reproduction. The conventional format of a design review, for instance, cannot be justified purely from the standpoint of intended learning outcomes. Rather, each of the learning structures most central to the discipline’s pedagogical identity were so cherished precisely because they contributed to shaping particular professional identities. These seminal publications went on to inform a generation of further scholarship intended to better understand and support architecture students—including Boyer and Mitgang’s call for architecture schools to be ‘communicative, just, caring and celebrative’ communities8 and the series of summits convened, and surveys commissioned, by the American Institute of Architecture Students’ (AIAS) Studio Culture Task Forces.9

Emerging over roughly this same thirty year period has been an influential stream of educational philosophy led by Ronald Barnett. This perspective reframes higher education practice and inquiry with prompting questions like:

- What is it to be a student?- What kind of changes might students undergo in their educational journey?- What kinds of pedagogies might help sustain students on their educational journey?10

If such questions sound rudimentary, this is precisely where their power lies.

Figure 1: Architecture students from

the Pratt Institute sketching in Chinatown, Manhattan.

(Courtesy of the Pratt Institute Archives).


The notion that education ought to be considered a narrative of personal and social transformation poses a direct challenge to the dominant discourse of education as a transactional enterprise between corporation and customer. So whilst vague concepts of ‘student-centred practices’ easily get co-opted under neoliberal commodification of universities, one tactic to resist this current is to expand our scope of education to capture ‘a fuzzy set of processes’ that includes ‘the identities of teachers and learners, the subject matter learned, and the social structures produced and reproduced’.11 This opens up space for acknowledging, and expressing in more authentic ways, the agency that students possess with regards to shaping their own learning processes and university experience. Furthermore, adopting a holistic perspective towards education calls for novel methodological approaches:

We cannot reduce identities to numerical data, nor can we understand the human self through the use of metrics. To understand the change that students undergo, we need to solicit stories from them, and for that, we will likely need ethnographers and a commitment to understanding the processes and rites of education and not simply their quantifiable outcomes.12

Parallels can certainly be drawn between this theoretical perspective and discourses within our discipline. Unfortunately, in the clear majority of research on architectural education, students are still portrayed as clients tend to be in accounts of design projects: as recipients more than contributors, as objects more than subjects. Yet, if you squint your eyes towards the horizon, there is reason to be hopeful. As is evident from many of the pieces published in this issue, the phrasing of research questions and the methodological approaches employed have begun to account for student agency. Whilst we tend to avoid adopting educational jargon to the extent of other fields, this reorientation can be read as signifying a progression from an interest in student engagement to student empowerment.

In seeking contributions for this issue from academics, administrators, mentors and students past and present, we encouraged above all else the foregrounding of the architecture student experience. Having received expressions of interest from five continents, the contributions ultimately selected for publication represent diverse but related frames of reference. Perhaps their greatest value is as a collective, a quilt of various scales and contexts that reflects the multifaceted nature of architectural education. They also span writing genres, from more conventional academic articles that examine particular facets of teaching and learning to more reflective narrative accounts that capture moments in time.

From the latter group, Jane Tankard’s essay draws together voices of London-based students and tutors who, at the end of the Cold War period, participated in pedagogical experimentation and political activism as a way of resisting rising neoliberal forces. Her work is an explicitly utopian project, an ‘attempt to address the values in architectural education that appear to


editorialhave been all but lost but could be reclaimed’.13 Another narrative-based contribution picks up on a similar spirit to describe the founding of a new architecture school. Transporting us to Los Angeles, Tessa Forde colourfully recounts her experience attending The Free School of Architecture’s inaugural year, 2016, and the events that led to her co-leading a ‘benevolent mutiny’ of the school with fellow students. The resultant radical model of education calls for ‘dismantling the teacher/student relationship’ and the belief ‘that anyone who participates can teach’.14

On the more conventional side of academic writing, this issue includes contributions that focus on particular pedagogical structures of architectural education and how these shape the student experience. Karel Deckers’ polemical essay explores how the Freudian notion of the uncanny might inform a pedagogical approach that encourages resilience in future practitioners. Deckers offers this affective strategy as a counterpoint to a profession built on a vain pursuit of ‘designing novel and beautiful objects that often serve to glorify the designer’s ego’.15 In response to calls for student empowerment, members of the Atelier de la Conception de l’Espace (ALICE) at the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland, experimented with a set of pedagogical/curricular strategies and learning aids based on the concept of ‘protostructure’.16 The authors, each of whom teach in this program, reflect on the impact of these implementations and how they have impacted the identities of students and teachers alike. Charlie Smith presents the outcomes of a study investigating peer review as an alternative, or rather a valuable supplement, to the traditional design review.17 Meanwhile, Philip Crowther’s work likewise explores an alternative approach to feedback known as intrinsic feedback, ‘in which the learning activity itself provides feedback directly to the student‘.18 Lastly, driven by their interest in encouraging ‘deep learning’, Andrew Roberts and Ashok Ganapathy Iyer present their findings from a multi-national phenomenographic study that maps how curricula from four institutions ‘might influence levels of engagement in individual student’s learning’.19

This special issue of Charrette contributes to the ongoing and critical conversation of how students experience architectural education. As evidenced over the past thirty years, this is a conversation that heavily depends on momentum and advocacy from within our scholarly subcommunity. In exhibiting this work, the hope is to encourage further reflection and action, including scholarship that considers, and even incorporates, student perspectives.

In addition to the authors and reviewers, who endured substantial unforeseen delays in the process, I would like to thank the tireless Charrette editorial staff. This issue emerged at a period of transition for the team, as James Benedict-Brown left it in the capable hands of his successors, Mina Tahsiri and Sophia Banou. My very best wishes to the journal going forward, as it remains one of the few precious venues in our field truly dedicated to educational concerns.


Postscript

The publication of this issue aligns with a particularly challenging moment in history for humankind: a global pandemic that has yet to be curtailed, overloaded healthcare systems and large swaths of the population under physical isolation. Caught within the confronting demands on our personal lives, education globally has been thrown into a momentary state of chaos. Face-to-face learning has largely been cancelled until further notice, compelling educators and students to adjust to unfamiliar interactive platforms whilst seeking to maintain some semblance of normalcy.

Undoubtedly, this experience will leave its mark on every sector of our societies and individual life stories. In many ways, there may not be a ‘return to the way things were’. How will architectural education cope with this historic upheaval? After lurching forward into something that resembles our collective imagined future of education, will its post-pandemic form be some sort of hybrid between this and the past? Perhaps the experience will provide us all with a lasting example of, on the one hand, the power and limitations of engaging in learning remotely, and on the other, the palpable benefits of sharing physical spaces with one another. Within just the first few days of adjustments, witnessing the creativity and flexibility within our educational communities has been inspiring. One can only hope that, once we’ve had an opportunity to reflect on this period, the deeper lessons we might gain about empathy, empowerment and togetherness will inform our post-pandemic realities. Stay safe, everyone.


editorialREFERENCES1 Donald A. Schön, The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action (New York: Basic Books, 1983).

2 James Thompson, Narratives of Architectural Education: From Student to Architect (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2019).

3 Thomas A. Laws and Brenton A. Fielder, ‘Universities’ expectations of pastoral care: Trends, stressors, resource gaps and support needs for teaching staff’, Nurse Education Today, 32 (2012), 796-802.

4 Inger B. Mewburn, ‘Constructing Bodies: Gesture, Speech and Representation at Work in Architectural Design Studios’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Melbourne, 2009).

5 Larisa Karklins and John Mendoza, Literature Review: Architects and mental health: A report prepared for the New South Wales Architects Registration Board (ConNetica, Caloundra, Queensland, Australia, 2016) <https://www.architects.nsw.gov.au/download/Architects%20and%20Mental%20health%20FINAL.pdf> [accessed 21 January 2020]

6 Kathryn H. Anthony, Design Juries on Trial: The Renaissance of the Design Studio (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1991); Dana Cuff, Architecture: The Story of Practice (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991); Thomas A. Dutton, Voices in Architectural Education: Cultural Politics and Pedagogy (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1991).

7 Donald A. Schön, Educating the Reflective Practitioner: Toward a New Design for Teaching and Learning in the Professions (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1987).

8 Ernest L. Boyer and Lee D. Mitgang, Building Community: A New Future for Architecture Education and Practice (Princeton, NJ: The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 1996).

9 Aaron Koch, Katherine Schwennsen, Thomas A. Dutton, and Deanna Smith, The Redesign of Studio Culture: A Report of the AIAS Studio Culture Task Force (American Institute of Architecture Students, 2002); American Institute of Architecture Students, Toward an Evolution of Studio Culture: A Report on the Second AIAS Task Force on Studio Culture (American Institute of Architecture Students, 2008).

10 Ronald Barnett, A Will to Learn: Being a Student in an Age of Uncertainty (New York: McGraw Hill, 2007), p. 2.

11 Stanton Wortham and Kara Jackson, ‘Educational Constructionisms’, in J.A. Holstein & J.F. Gubrium (eds.) Handbook of Constructionist Research (New York: The Guilford Press, 2008), p. 107.


12 Chad Hanson, ‘Changing How We Think About the Goals of Higher Education’, New Directions for Higher Education, 166 (2013), 7-13.

13 Jane Tankard, ‘... a Few People, a Brief Moment in Time: Architectural education experiments 1987-9’, Charrette, 6.1 (2020), 93-120 (p. 94).

14 Tessa Forde, ‘Starting a Free School of Architecture’, Charrette, 6.1 (2020), 121-143 (p. 133).

15 Karel Deckers, ‘Foregrounding the Student’s Lived Experience in Architectural Education’, Charrette, 6.1(2020), 145-159 (p. 157).

16 Darío Negueruela del Castillo, Dieter Dietz, Julien Lafontaine Carboni & Aurélie Dupuis, ‘Imagining With and In Space: Structural support as a cognitive device inarchitectural education’, Charrette, 6.1 (2020), 9-28.

17 Charlie Smith, ‘When Students Become Critics: reviewing peer reviews in theory and practice’, Charrette, 6.1 (2020), 71-92.

18 Philip Crowther, ‘Centring the Student through Intrinsic Feedback’, Charrette, 6.1 (2020), 53-70 (p. 53).

19 Andrew Roberts and Ashok Ganapathy Iyer, ‘Engaging with the Deep: Developing an understanding of deep and surface learning in design studio education’, Charrette, 6.1 (2020), 29-52 (p. 30).

Minerva Access is the Institutional Repository of The University of Melbourne

Author/s:

Thompson, J

Title:

Flipping the Script: Foregrounding the architecture student

Date:

2020

Citation:

Thompson, J. (2020). Flipping the Script: Foregrounding the architecture student. Charrette,

Journal of the Association of Architectural Educators, 6 (1), pp.1-8

Persistent Link:

http://hdl.handle.net/11343/281026

File Description:

Published version

Documents

ipping the Sript regrning the arhitetre tent