Radical Pedagogies in Architectural Education
"Pedagogical experiments played a crucial role in shaping architectural discourse and practice in the second half of the 20th century. In fact, the key hypothesis of our Radical Pedagogy[1] research project is that these experiments can be understood as radical architectural practices in their own right. Radical in the literal meaning from the Latin radice, as something belonging or relating to the root, to its foundations. Radical pedagogies shake foundations, disturbing assumptions rather than reinforcing and disseminating them. This challenge to normative thinking was a major force in the postwar field of architecture, and has surprisingly been neglected in recent years. ...
Architectural pedagogy has become stale. Schools spin old wheels as if something is happening but so little is going on. Students wait for a sense of activist engagement with a rapidly evolving world but graduate before it happens. The fact that they wait for instruction is already the problem. Teachers likewise worry too much about their place in the institutional hierarchies. Curricular structures have hardly changed in recent decades, despite the major transformations that have taken place with the growth of globalisation, new technologies, and information culture. As schools appear to increasingly favour professionalisation, they seem to drown in self-imposed bureaucratic oversight, suffocating any possibility for the emergence of experimental practices and failures. There are a few attempts to wake things up here and there but it's all so timid in the end. There is no real innovation.
In response to the timidity of schools today, the Radical Pedagogy project returns to the educational experiments of the 1960s and '70s to remind us what can happen when pedagogy takes on risks. It's a provocation and a call to arms."
(Beatriz Colomina with Esther Choi, Ignacio Gonzalez Galan and Anna-Maria Meister, 28 September 2012, The Architectural Review)
1). Radical Pedagogy is an ongoing multi-year collaborative research project by a team of PhD candidates in the School of Architecture at Princeton University, led by Beatriz Colomina and involving seminars, interviews and guest lectures by protagonists and scholars. The project explores a remarkable set of pedagogical experiments of the 1960s and '70s that revolutionised thinking in the discipline. Each student is working on one of these experiments and collectively mapping the interconnections and effects of these experiments towards a major publication and exhibition.
Fig.1 Tournaments in the Course ‘Culture of the Body', at the Valparaíso School, 1975. Courtesy of Archivo Histórico Jose Vial, Escuela Arquitectura y Diseño, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
The creative use of mobile technologies to enhance learning and teaching in the performing and visual arts
Date: 26 Apr 2013, Location/venue: The Old Fire Station, University of Salford, England
The workshop"offers an opportunity for those involved in teaching, or directly managing degree programmes in the Arts, to find out more about the role mobile learning can play in enhancing the student and tutor experience. Through a series of presentations, activities and discussions, led by academics from the Arts discipline area, participants will be introduced to mobile technologies approaches and see discipline-focused exemplars of mobile learning applied in teaching practice."
(Higher Education Academy)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
The arts and sciences are drawn more closely together by technology
"A passion for bringing together expertise in the arts, computing and technology is inspiring the University of Greenwich's new Professor of Digital Creativity.
Gregory Sporton, who joins in January [2013] from Birmingham City University, has spent much of his academic career researching the impact of new technology on the visual and performing arts. He is a former professional dancer and has also researched the history of ballet in Soviet times.
He is excited about introducing a new and original focus on the arts to Greenwich. 'I aim to gather together the expertise we have in so many disciplines, such as creative arts, computing, visualisation and all the rest, and make something new and interesting,' Professor Sporton says.
'The arts and sciences are drawn more closely together by technology: there is less differentiation than people think, and at Greenwich I want to build a research environment to explore that."
(University of Greenwich News, 17 December 2012)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
Ericsson: the future of learning in a networked society
"We are on the brink of an extraordinary revolution that will change our world forever. In this new world everyone, everything and everywhere will be connected in real time. We call this the Networked Society, and it will fundamentally change the way we innovate, collaborate, produce, govern and sustain. When one person connects their life changes. With everything connected our world changes."
(Ericsson Limited, 2012)
Fig.1 Published on YouTube 19 October 2012 by Ericsson
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David ReidSHARE
University students face a constant stream of questionnaires designed to assess the standard of their courses
"I'm more bothered by the underlying assumptions about what makes good university teaching that lie behind many of these surveys. You can see them particularly clearly in the National Student Survey, and the reams of student feedback it publishes online - explicitly, so it says, to help prospective students choose a good course, and to help universities 'enhance the student learning experience'. ...
OK, I can see how at first sight that might seem obvious. Who, after all, wants to see their kids go off to university, at great expense, for a diet of dis-satisfaction? But, from where I sit, dissatisfaction and discomfort have their own, important, role to play in a good university education. We're aiming to push our students to think differently, to move out of their intellectual comfort zone, to read and discuss texts that are almost too hard for them to manage. It is, and it's meant to be, destabilizing.
At the same time, we're urging them never to be satisfied with the arguments they are presented with, never to take things on trust, always to challenge, always to see the weak points, or to want to push the argument further. Then along comes the National Survey, treats them as consumers, and asks them if they're satisfied."
(Mary Beard, BBC News, 2 December 2012)
CONTRIBUTOR
Phil NoddingSHARE
