I will ground my intervention in the architecture design studio context, more particularly in the vertical studio (2nd and 3rd year undergraduate students) that I teach together with my colleague Roland Reemaa. That means I will be working with a diverse group of approx. 20 students – a cohort I get to know well, as I meet them for an entire day almost every week across the academic year.

As a crude summary, the architecture design studio (design unit) at CSM Spatial Practices consists of:

• Tutors provide a theme the studio is focussing on for the entire academic year (e.g. Circular Economy in the built environment);
• Tutors assign a site where students propose an architecture project (e.g. Meridian Water in LB Enfield);
• Students are working on the same site, but each proposes an independent project. There is no requirement for an independent project to align with their peers’ work;
• The studio consists of 2nd and 3rd year students, whose briefs are somewhat different. However, in the end of the academic year, everyone hands in a portfolio of work consisting of their interpretation of the site and the theme, and most importantly, a proposal for an architecture project.

I have two main issues with the workings of the design studio that I would like my intervention to tackle:

1. The individualistic practices (Garrett 2024) of architecture education. These enforce the idea of meritocracy (Wong et al. 2021), create blindness to personal circumstances, and remove opportunities to learn from the rich diversity of others’ life experiences and knowledge, i.e. hinder empathy (Rekis 2023, hooks 1994). 
2. UAL admission policies have successfully increased diversity in the student cohort, but tutors are not provided with resource (most of all time) to go beyond it (re-think teaching, give extra attention to inter-personal relationships amongst students), which means diversification might become a mere tick box exercise (Tate 2018, Sadiq 2023). 

With my teaching practice, I am striving to work against the isolating nature of the independent architecture project across the academic year, engage in critical pedagogy (Freire 1970) and to establish a learning community (hooks 1994). However, it is not within my power to change the overall brief the students receive, indeed, it is not even in the power of the heads of the department, as architecture education is governed by a national umbrella organisation – Architects Registration Board – because ‘architect’ is a protected title. However, across the academic year, we (both in my studio and more widely in the department) are trying to create various points of communal learning. One point for intervening that Roland Reemaa and myself have identified in our design studio is in the first month of the unit when we do a series of group visits to the site we have assigned for the students. At this point in the year, the students haven’t yet started working on their personal projects, and have a clear common ground. We propose to bring their individual experiences of this common ground (i.e. the site) together by creating a shared mapping. 

My proposed intervention consists of the following parts:

1. Group visit to the site we assigned to the students;
2. Gathering back at our studio space at CSM to set up stations for the mapping exercise;
3. Communal mapping (in 4–5 groups);
4. Group pin-up and discussion.

The aim is to go beyond individual learning by listening to others’ perspectives and by collaborating with them on a shared drawing, i.e. communally created artefact. The intervention engages with humanising the students – seeing them as thinking, ‘feeling and doing beings’, and so with critical pedagogy (Hill & Singh 2018). We rely on a drawing method called ‘Hairy Drawing’ developed by the London architecture office East (East 2009).

Key references:

East (2009) Expressing Interest. London: East, pp 147–150.

Freire, P. (1970) Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Bloomsbury Academic.

Hill, V. & Singh, G. (2018) Critical Pedagogy #4 ‘What does it look like in practice?’ [Online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6ghTlyBDNk [Accessed 20 Jan. 2025].

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

Garrett, R. (2024). Racism shapes careers: career trajectories and imagined futures of racialised minority PhDs in UK higher education. Globalisation, Societies and Education, pp.1–15.

Rekis, J. (2023) Religious Identity and Epistemic Injustice: An Intersectional Account. Hypatia 38, pp 779–800.

Sadiq, A. (2023) Diversity, Equity & Inclusion. Learning how to get it right. TEDx [Online]. Youtube. 2 March.

Tate, S.A. (2018) Tackling the ‘BPOC’ Attainment Gap in UK Universities [Online]. Youtube. TEDx/Re:Act, Royal School of Speech & Drama. October.

Wong, B., Elmorally, R., Copsey-Blake, M., Highwood, E. & Singarayer, J. (2021) Is race still relevant? Student perceptions and experiences of racism in higher education. Cambridge Journal of Education, 51(3), pp 359-375.