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.

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

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.

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.

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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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.

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.