It was The Architectural Review’s Education issue [1] that made me pick up bell hooks’ Teaching to Transgress [2]. In The AR’s editorial, which sets out the issue’s focus on un-institutionalised spaces of learning, Manon Mollard, Eleanor Beaumont, Ellen Peirson and Kristina Rapacki write, “Such alternative spaces for learning resonate with hooks’ liberatory politics. Formal higher education, however, is increasingly policed, shrunk and squeezed. Today’s universities are deeply marketised, having been laid bare to the forces of neoliberalism. What ought to be a lifelong project is reduced to the preparation of productive members of capitalist economies.”

Robert Mull, who was leading the Free Unit teaching initiative at the Cass Faculty of Art, Architecture and Design in London suggests similar tendencies in his essay “The Free World” in Architects After Architecture. The Free Unit supported architecture students to structure and deliver projects in difficult contexts of deprivation, displacement and political uncertainty. In contrast to the values shared in the Free Unit, he writes about self-interest, competition and mistrust that dominate the contemporary architectural practice and also permeate architectural education. Since 2015, Mull has been involved in education, research and practice in the refugee crises. He writes, “In all the places I worked the generosity, common purpose, collective action and mutual support I witnessed represented exactly the opposite values to those that worried me about architectural practice and education.” Amongst the most important benefits of de-institutionalising the Free Unit and turning it into The Global Free Unit, he highlights the benefits to students’ wellbeing and sense of purpose, “Education is no longer a rehearsal for future practice or a space apart from their everyday lives but a part of it.”[3] 

Even though I too see and have personal experience of alternative spaces for learning having huge potential for liberatory practices, and I agree with the observations of marketised universities, it seems to me that teaching a relatively small group of students within a design studio context still entails underexplored opportunities for progressive pedagogies. Doesn’t the art, design and architecture school still hold hints of communitarian learning that might have been more easily lost from other HE departments because of a difference in dominant teaching methods? 

Mull’s observations on The Global Free Unit’s benefits to students reflect bell hooks’ writing in Teaching to Transgress, where hooks emphasises the importance to bridge teaching with students’ everyday. It reminds me that in the classroom there should be space for valuing students’ as well as teachers’ experience outside of academia, like their commitment to different kinds of activism. It should be our aim to engage students so that they have the opportunity to contribute to the classroom with their experiences. Contributions are resources. Bell hooks, “…we all bring to the classroom experiential knowledge, /…/ this knowledge can indeed enhance our learning experience.” In her essay “Theory as Liberatory Practice”, hooks discusses her stance on the theorising-practicing split. Her thoughts on the importance of intellectual work for collective resistance and the production of theory as a potentially liberatory social practice evoke possibilities that lay in the formal studio space or classroom. Learning in this context can still inspire ways to change our current reality. It inspires me that hooks insists, “The classroom remains the most radical space of possibility in the academy.”[2] 

I will finish off with a few quick but concrete ideas for undertakings that could help with building a learning community:

• Taking time and space for shared experiences, such as visits to inspiring projects and meeting with activist groups, and reflecting on them.
• Creating space for sharing experiences outside of academia, as well as how what the students have learnt impacted what they experienced.
• Making use of London as our shared site for teaching and learning. Architecture is ubiquitous here and it is a waste to disregard that. Going for site and project visits together, reflecting on our day to day experiences in the city might help to build a common ground.
• I could bring the reflective journal more deliberately into my teaching methods. Currently journals are mostly token. Again inspired by bell hooks, reading and showing journals to each other in each class might solidify that everyone’s contribution matters.

References:

[1] The Architectural Review: Education, September 2022.

[2] hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to Transgress. Educations as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge.

[3] Mull, R. (2021). “The Free World”. In: Harriss, H., Hyde, R., Marcaccio, R. (eds.) Architects After Architecture: Alternative Pathways of Practice. Eds. New York: Routledge, pp. 302-311.