Friday’s session made the wide variety of types of teaching at UAL explicit to me. In my group, I was one of the few lecturers whose teaching is studio-based and I was certainly the only one teaching a design studio. I met my peers who are language tutors, librarians, technicians, tutors whose role is to support other tutors (so I’m, in fact, their potential student) and other variations of roles, which I can’t say I even fully comprehended. It is something I hadn’t appreciated when joining the course and which I’m now excited about, as the multitude of perspectives, I’m guessing, will be useful for abstractions and generalisations as well as for developing more empathy in my teaching. I also have some worries. I’m wondering about the applicability of what I will be learning on the course and I’m a bit concerned about over-theorising activities that have come naturally and I deem to be effective as a teacher. Will this course I have committed to benefit myself and my students directly?

I re-read some of Against and for Method: Revisiting Architectural Design as Research (ed. Jan Silberberger, 2021, gta Verlag) in preparation for Friday’s session. I first read the book in the end of 2021 and although I found it dull and over-explaining at times, with some texts feeling un-edited, I can say in hindsight it was one of my early steps into thinking about ways of educating systematically rather than intuitively. 

Amongst my main take-aways from the book, I included three for my introductory presentation at the PGCert course:

1. We are building something. And by that ‘something’ I mean a better systematised architecture research culture, especially meaning design-based research. By ‘we’ I mean all of us architecture tutors, largely unknown to each other, who care for architecture education to be more than profession-based or -oriented.
2. The way we educate is of its time. Claudia Mareis’ historic account on science-oriented design education after WWII made me realise how the way I was taught and how I now teach is something I can’t take for granted. Change is possible as we always teach in the context of our times and we need to question, adjust and critically analyse our ways within our contemporary context. On a side note, many of the essays in this book also made it clear to me how much the governance of education and the politics around it have an effect on how universities operate. To me, it was most explicit in the sudden surge of art universities turning to research as research success became the criteria for governments to hand out moneys.
3. What is most important to learn today? Or more importantly, what is most important to know tomorrow? Albena Yaneva’s quote shows a method that teaches students not what design is but what it does. This has been the focus in my own teaching too but as I see it spelled out in this way, I can’t help but turn into a devil’s advocate and think, have I done this too much? 

References:

Silberberger, J. (ed.) (2021). Against and for Method: Revisiting Architectural Design as Research. Zürich: gta Verlag.