Author Archives: Laura Linsi

Towards a learning community

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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.
A page from Tessa Breen’s reflective journal, Studio 5, BA Architecture, CSM.
A page from Tessa Breen’s reflective journal, Studio 5, BA Architecture, CSM.

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.

How to teach togetherness?

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In the interview with Gielen and van Heusden, Richard Sennet calls for avoiding “the Romantic notion of the little genius who pushes through his innovation” in education. He claims that innovation is collective activity. [1]

The artist-architect-designer Pieterjan Ginckels is probably the first teacher who inspired me to re-imagine architecture design studio teaching as collective practice. He teaches at the Department of Architecture at KU Leuven in Brussels where he is the Professor of Visual Literacies and Provocative Practices. In his design studios, he sets up polemical briefs with the aim to fundamentally question the role of the contemporary designer, to enable critical thinking (towards critical thinking) and to critically engage with shared lived experiences in a speedy compartmentalised world. Having followed his practice for some years, I can identify two main methods in his teaching:

  1. Continuous use of oversaturation. For example, his teaching is deliberately overloaded with popular culture notions and terms that are likely to link directly with the students, such as Snowflake, speed trip, anthropocene (misanthropozine), car tuning, avocado culture etc. In contrast to the dominant way of using these terms carelessly and often with an aim to insult, Ginckels’ teaching encourages a critical approach and opens them up as possibilities. [2][3]
  2. Explicit collectivism. For example, Paradigm Weekly, a Master studio Ginckels teaches, focuses on what he calls ‘collective experiments’ with visual architecture culture [3]. I have witnessed him going on so-called speed trips with his students, which involve yoga sessions in public realm, gaming in internet cafes, setting up a lifestyle shop and handing out self-branded energy drinks [4]. These unconventional activities are thought up together with the student group and involve a shared project production experience, dressing up in a group uniform and performing together. Speaking from my experience of having participated in one of such events, it was the intensity of the experience that resulted in a loss of a sense of self and in inventing a new persona who is completely and explicitly intertwined with the rest of the collective.   

Ginckels’ approach is certainly experimental, if not radical within European architecture schools. During the course, the students along with Ginckels create a collective experience that challenges the usual master-apprentice hierarchies of a design studio, they might feel encouraged to test out an alternative persona during the performative speed trips and ultimately to re-assess their designer-selves. What I admire most about these methods are playfulness, plea for togetherness and a meaningful step away from glorifying the individualistic creative practice.

Pieterjan Ginckels on a ‘speed-trip’ with Estonian Academy of Art students in 2020.

I enjoyed finding a direct link between Sennet’s take on learning outcomes as expressed in the interview and Ginckel’s setting out of his design studio ethos. Sennet says, “Often you’ve done your best job with an art student just as with a scientist when he or she comes out asking questions, rather than saying ‘I know how to do this’.” [1] This is not dissimilar from Studio Snowflake’s ethos: “STUDIO SNOWFLAKE believes we are critical agents, and produce questions rather than answers.” [2]

A common thread in Sennet’s, Ginckels’ as well as bell hooks’ works is that of building strong relationships between teachers and students. Such strong relationships form the basis for a ‘learning community’ as hooks calls it, and can help students become more motivated and engaged to learn. [5] This point resonates with my own teaching experience and I have clear ideas of methods I can implement to develop this aspect of my teaching. What I struggle with is finding the balance between pushing a more radically communalist agenda which I do believe to be beneficial, whilst making sure students manage the individual obligatory department-wide deliverables. 

References:

[1] Gielen, P. J. D., & van Heusden, B. P. (2012). “A Plea for Communalist Teaching. An Interview with Richard Sennett”. In P. Gielen, & P. De Bruyne (Eds.), Teaching Art in the Neoliberal Realm. Realism versus Cynicism (pp. 33-47). Valiz.

[2] Ginckels, P. (2022) Studio Snowflake. KU Leuven Faculty of Architecture. Available at: https://www.blog-archkuleuven.be/studio-snowflake-22-23/?filter_department=28 [Accessed 21 March 2023]

[3] Ginckels, P. (2022) Paradigm Weekly. KU Leuven Faculty of Architecture. Available at: https://paradigmweekly.com/ [Accessed 21 March 2023]

[4] Ginckels, P. NoBullFaster. Pieterjan Ginckels website. Available at: https://www.pieterjanginckels.be/index.html [Accessed 21 March 2023]

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

Microteaching: Thresholds in Spatial Design

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I focused my microteaching session on an aspect of spatial design – thresholds. In architecture, thresholds might literally mean a doorway, but more often the term is used as part of architectural jargon to mark any transition from one spatial experience to another, like stepping inside from the outside or from a communal space to a private space. The term is also used for spaces between public and private spheres – a front garden is a threshold between the street and the home.

My main aims for choosing the topic:

1.     To share with the participants ways to consider their surrounding built environment and to draw attention to designed and thus challengeable aspects of it.

  1. To challenge myself to teach an architectural notion simply, avoiding jargon and to learn from others’ perception of spatial design.

After starting with a brief explanation of thresholds and the aims of the session, I told the group that we will be using three doorways near the classroom as objects. Considering spatial design elements that affect their experience of transitioning from one space to another, I asked them to take 5 minutes to mark up everything they notice about these doorways. I explained that most of them might seem conventional but are nevertheless important to take account of. 

Object Doorway 01: Asuf and Sebastian discussing
Asuf and Sebastian’s worksheet
Object Doorway 02: Carole taking notes
Carole’s worksheet
Object Doorway 03: Smriti taking notes
Smriti’s worksheet

There were only a few of us left for my session and so two participants ended up working alone. This was fine, but looking back, doing the exercise in pairs or groups would’ve definitely evoked more noticing, discussion and learning for both myself (at this point I struggled with talking about these spaces in abstract terms and just saw “answers” clearly drawn out in front of me) as well as the participants.

We then took 5 minutes to go around all three doorways with the group to hear about everyone’s observations. The session ended with us back around the table looking at previously selected images of special, very deliberately designed thresholds. I asked everyone to identify devices that had been used to evoke certain perceptions in these cases and to find similarities between the spaces on the images and the very ordinary thresholds we observed.

Example 01 of a special threshold
Example 02 of a special threshold

My aim was that in having to take a close look at these doorways, the participants would start to notice the amount of designed elements and design decisions that make up spaces and surround them everywhere. During the group discussion most of the participants said the session led them to reflect on a number of their everyday thresholds, e.g. stepping onto the bus. I appreciated the participants noticed how this type of pro-active analysis encourages agency over designed spaces. I got feedback that participants became more mindful about their surroundings and that they appreciated the embodied dimension of the session.

Feedback notes 01
Feedback notes 02
Feedback notes 03

To add some of my own:

  • A more interestingly designed environment (e.g. CSM building) would benefit the observations and inspire further engagement with the theme.
  • I didn’t quite manage to avoid jargon such as ‘design elements’ and ‘design devices’ and took it for granted that these terms are understood.
  • I managed to hold myself back from speaking an awful lot myself and prompting too much, which is my usual way of handling nervousness or others’ silence.

The microteaching day made some of the benefits of object-based learning explicit to me, especially relating to the “power of wow” (as experienced in Joanne’s “Stop that!” plant session. My teaching of architecture already includes object-based aspects such as making of and engaging with models, asking students to bring material samples and found elements from project sites to studio. However, I never knew to set these into an object-based teaching framework and I was doubtful whether such activities made sense in the students’ tight learning and delivery schedules. I gained a lot of confidence in object-based methods from the workshop and I am already planning future sessions accordingly. I’m most excited about developing my teaching with bringing students in contact with real construction materials to encourage discussions of supply chains, labour, ecology and much else implicit in architecture.

Here are some immediate reflections I put down on the day:

  • The day reminded me how tiring studying is and was, i.e. keeping alert and learning so much new takes a lot of energy. Even if fully enjoying it, I was exhausted by the end.
  • Joanne’s computed plant really drove the “power of wow” idea home.
  • I become antsy when a teacher talks about an object but hasn’t yet provided the rest of us with access to it, i.e. when there are objects of interest around that I am not yet allowed to touch or properly engage with. 
  • I also get antsy during lengthy reflections which wander too far off from the actual activity or its central theme and might get too generic. I’ve found it suits me better to stick to a previously agreed programme and not diverge.
  • Speaking plants are absolutely hilarious. The banana that says, “Hello” in a deep male voice still gives me nightmares to this day.
  • Sarah Leontovitsch’s intense (many layers of activities within the short given period) and very well prepared session was best suitable for me. I liked going through precise activities quickly and being guided to an understanding of the main theme – alternative text. This type of very structured activity might not always be appropriate in my design studio teaching but it can certainly be implemented occasionally to cover some more precise topics and to bring in a change in tempo in the otherwise elongated individual design project development.
  • I generally enjoyed more specific subjects/topics more within the microteaching format.
Joanne’s “power of wow” speaking succulent and banana
The cover of the zine I made in Michelle’s session

References:

Hardie, K. (2015) Innovative Pedagogies Series: Wow: The power of objects in object-based learning and teaching [online]. York: Higher Education Academy. Available from: https://s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/assets.creode.advancehe-document-manager/documents/hea/private/kirsten_hardie_final_1568037367.pdf [Accessed 20th March 2023].

Professional Frameworks: an attempt to define

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Network of Norms

At Friday’s Values and Ethics in Teaching seminar, we discussed Professional Frameworks, affiliated actors and stakeholders and attempted to define associated key terms (policy, framework, strategy, code, principle, guide). Writing concise definitions is never easy and even if we managed to find UAL examples for all of them, the list remained, to a degree, impenetrable. Clearly, these terms overlap, cross-pollinate, occasionally double up, interrelate. The number of separate documents they encompass is so overwhelming that the whole topic seemed to evoke quite a bit of reluctance.

I was inspired by Lindsey’s use of a photo of a timber frame building to visualise the term framework as well as my groupmate Simon’s attempt to visualise his understanding of how the rest of the norms would fit into this metaphor (“So which of these norms would be a door?”). Based on a quick sketch I did in the class, I went home and developed my own visual version of the norms. I went full into my architect-mode, imagined a construction site and drew up the understanding I developed on the role of all the different types of norms after our group discussions in the seminar. Drawing it, I also relied on the Padlet that one of the groups set up, which worked well to spell out a definition for each norm.

I liked to imagine how all the norms feed into each other with policy enabling everything to happen. The framework is firmly rooted within it – its exact location, foundation, maximum size are all defined by policy. Most action and most creativity, however, is happening around the two and is feeding into them. The relationship is always reciprocal. The actors might even forget that they are in fact constructing something within policy (which is more like an abstract rather than a real physical boundary). The framework is a shared goal but it is also something that has been designed and can only stand up following the shared principles and ideas of everyone involved.

References:

UAL PgCert Values and Ethics in Teaching Seminar Padlet [2023]. Available from: https://artslondon.padlet.org/sleontovitsch/remake-of-define-terms-for-class-dw1w70vjsteg68xy [Accessed 20 March 2023].

Taking away from Seminar 01: Designing and Planning for Learning

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I’ll allow myself to start out by indulging in my exhaustion but a very happy mood and a high level of motivation after today’s seminar in LCC. Ohhhh, how I prefer in-person learning and teaching. Don’t try and tell me it is regressive, I have reasons. Here’s some of why, all experienced today:

* The natural buzz in the room when several smaller groups / pairs discuss simultaneously. Catching a word, sound, phrase in the background can spark a new idea and feed into a different conversation.

* Not having to go in turns with awkward looking-into-nothingness just-slightly-too-long silences in-between. Not always having to stare at each other’s faces when discussing in a small group but also looking at the sketching the other is doing and getting important layers of information from body language. Simultaneity of different types of interaction must be a thing. Is the lack of it why I get so bored at online sessions and start to fiddle around with other things, checking social media etc?

* Not feeling like there is so much weight on saying or asking something.

* Casual conversations, incl. during breaks.

* Moving my body in response to people speaking from various directions, looking at different backgrounds. It keeps me alert.

* Gauging others’ engagement, reactions. That keeps me alert too.

I’m learning infinitely more when in-person. I feel like I’m a part of something that matters beyond myself and the immediate space around me. It just is so. much. better. So much more motivating.

A bleak view from the 14th floor didn’t interrupt my good mood!

Now that’s done, I will focus on three take-aways from today’s Designing and Planning for Learning Seminar.

1) Teaching Formats and Strategies Paperchase. On top of the very insightful reflections within our group on the different teaching formats, their benefits and challenges, everyone’s recommendations for methods and strategies on how to overcome some of the challenges or enhance the benefits, the paperchase method itself proved to be something I’m sure to try out in my own teaching. As Lindsay highlighted at the end of the session, her and John had “taught us nothing” during the exercise. The learning was all done within the groups themselves without the teachers giving any prompts or information in between. Strictly keeping to the time and facilitating smooth transitions between groups and the physical space are itself important contributions to enable the learning. 

2) The revealing moment (for me) when Sakiko highlighted how she felt the AM chat about the blog and how we are supposed to take it easy and just use it for our natural reflections on the seminars and lectures, almost like a sketchbook, was totally undermined once we got to discussing the blog as contributing to the course’s Learning Outcomes and forming a part of our assessed portfolio. Even though I didn’t experience worry at the time, I too did sense a discrepancy between these two ways of discussing the blog and my immediate reaction was to “blame” the discrepancy on the structure of the course. However, once Lindsay, again, grounded us in our own teaching by saying something along the lines of, “Isn’t that exactly what you’d be asking from your own students too? Feel free, experiment, do what you like, don’t worry! And then before the submissions they are faced with the expected Learning Outcomes and Assessment Criteria…”. That incident absolutely helped me gain some empathy within this complex situation of outcome-based learning with clearly spelled out criteria versus the process-based and open-ended learning we are encouraging our students to do and that we find so crucial to any art and design practice. Next step: figure out how to close that gap (or at least make it narrower) to support our students better.

Mat’s inspirational poster-boardgame

3) Mat’s (D. ? Sorry Mat… It was Mat from John’s Cohort) poster from Learning Design Workshop Part 2. Mat drew his poster as a quick board game. I’m thinking it could be developed into a pretty exciting and insightful Snakes and Ladders version too to loose the linearity. But also it gave me the idea of attempting to visualise the complex bundle of requirements and hopeful outcomes of architecture design studio as a cloud diagram. With my own poster, I only got as far as to construct a baseline for what seems like a bit of a problem on our hands currently – in the case of the design studio, the students are having to engage with three separate briefing documents, all text based, to get information on one single unit. The official status of these documents vary, but surely that makes little difference to the students. The documents are also full of overlaps and repetition, however to get a full set of information, all of them need to be engaged with. So here I am giving myself some homework and setting an outline for a future blogpost: draw a second version of the poster imagining it as something like a board game – cloud diagram – network of parameters. Visualising the teaching-learning experience makes sense especially because that’s again something we would always ask of our students too – we would probably just send them back “to the drawing board” if they came to present their work as just text. “Visualise it”, I would say.

Against and for Method

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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.

Me, my teaching context and PgCert

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A site visit to Meridian Water in October 2022.

My name is Laura Linsi. I am an Associate Lecturer at Central Saint Martins, UAL. Together with Roland Reemaa, I teach a design studio at the BA Architecture (Hons.) Course. It is my third academic year doing that.

I also teach at the Estonian Academy of Arts since 2018, where most recently, I have become an Architecture MA thesis supervisor. And I am a part of an international team who is setting up an MA Architecture Programme at the Latvian Academy of Arts in Riga. I also work as an architectural designer and I’m starting a new job as a magazine editor in the coming months.

A lot of my teaching has been intuitive up until now and although I recognise getting better (more inclusive, empathic, effective) at it, I would like to find structure and confidence in my methods, to consolidate the ones I observe working well as well as to learn about contemporary and well-working methods rather than spend a ridiculous amount of time re-inventing the wheel. These are my main objectives for the PGCert course.