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Learning Design Teaching Jiun-De Chen, Ann Heylighen Department of Architecture, Urbanism & Planning Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium
Abstract This paper aims to explore, examine and evaluate the process of building teaching capacity, particularly for those entry-level design studio tutors who did not teach before. The initial hypothesis is that to teach freshman designing requires unique skills, and these skills are unlike those needed for guiding upperlevel design studios. For a novice tutor to learn these skills reveals a special process that is composed of learning and teaching simultaneously. By reviewing relevant literature and reflecting on personal experience, the authors adopt a holistic approach rather than linear analytic deduction. Through this strategy, the paper represents a first step towards a more articulate understanding of what characterizes the process of learning design teaching. Keywords: design pedagogy, architectural education, design studio
“If you don’t learn while teaching, don’t teach”—Proverb supposedly Egyptian. “Teaching and learning enhance each other”—Chinese saying.
1
How tutors become tutors
To our knowledge, there is no school or program that provides certified teacher education for the tutors of architectural design studios. The basic qualifications required to become a studio tutor come down to possessing either at least a master degree in architecture (or relevant design field) or substantial experience in architectural design practice. The assumption seems to be that the ability of design tutoring is by nature embedded within those qualifications.
Consulting the criteria for teaching in most of the disciplines at undergraduate level, we may find that the credit of teaching training seems irrelevant to their qualification. Obviously the educational institutions have already accepted that scholars who have acquired knowledge with certified status shall be suitable for the teaching jobs in higher education. The main purpose of undergraduate education is yet to impart domain knowledge onto the students who are able to assimilate it based on their preliminary schooling. Therefore, if the classroom setting or the way of teaching is similar to what students have been used to, the instructors usually have no trouble in re-using their own learning experiences as students before to construct their didactics now. For sure they have to prepare course materials and reorganize their thought in order to suit the way of instruction. Since the body of knowledge has been set as a discipline, and usually several textbooks written by experts are available, teacher training seems unnecessary for these knowledge holders to perform their role as tutors. In professional education the type of teaching for practice courses does not run in the same way. The professional knowledge in practicing may only be transferred effectively and efficiently through “learning by doing”, so the pattern of teaching is quite different from that in a lecture class. But the criteria for the teacher are not different―no teacher education needed. The eligibility of instructors for this type of courses (performance, diagnosis, legal defense, design, et al.) depends more on personal experience in the specific profession as a whole, than on the academic degree, not to mention the credit of teacher training. It seems then that all knowledge holders are qualified to teach undergraduate students. However, as we can see from administrative evaluation processes and students’ responses, not every tutor presents successful studio guiding in order to furnish future practitioners with effective design education. In fact, tutors still have to build up their teaching capacity by going through the real instructing process in the classroom with or without special training beforehand. Teaching, as a profession itself, needs practice as well. Therefore it is not unusual for teachers to make mistakes and learn their lessons in the process. The institutions also have a certain tolerance to allow beginning teachers for this type of “trial and error” in a period of probation. Fortunately this learning to teach does not truly start from scratch, nor is it confined to isolated individual exploration. Beginners may retrieve their experiences as former student. Here the requirement that tutors hold a relevant academic degree ensures this type of resource to be available to them. Secondly, the colleagues of beginning teachers play an important role—not only in supporting them as consultants, but also in providing examples, as role models, for them to learn from. This resource is more evident when new teachers collaborate with other senior colleagues. Another useful asset is the course material that has been gathered through semesters, like syllabi, bibliography, assignments, students’ work, etc. Usually novice teachers are not assigned to teach brand new courses, so it is easy to acquire these documents from the
schools. The reference to these archives becomes a shortcut to trace their own way of teaching. Basically, for intelligent people like knowledge holders it is not difficult to find out the methods mentioned above to equip themselves for the new job. But later on they will realize that most of the predicaments they encounter in the studio are more complicated to unravel with these tools. Design tutoring is an act that relies heavily on interaction (Heylighen et al., 1999). It is like a type of performing art. The interactions between teacher, student, the taught subject and the classroom setting form a phenomenon of non-scripted drama. To perform adequately in the act, there is no one-way, clear-cut, step-by-step routine procedure. The holding of domain knowledge is the premise, but not the promise, of competence to teach it. As many researchers have pointed out, there is a tendency to classify knowledge into two poles: explicit and tacit ones (Polanyi, 1967). Tacit knowledge represents knowledge based on the experience of individuals. It expresses itself in human actions in the form of evaluations, attitudes, points of view, commitments, and motivation. Usually tacit knowledge is difficult to express directly in words, and often the only ways of presenting it are through metaphors, drawings or other methods of expression not requiring a formal use of language. On the practical level many experts are often unable to articulate all they know and are able to, and how they make their decisions and come to conclusions. Polanyi (1967, p. 26) captures the essence of tacit knowledge in the phrase ''We know more than we can tell'', and further clarifies the concept in commonplace examples like the ability to recognise faces, ride a bicycle or swim without even the slightest idea of how these things are done. Most of the knowledge taught in school is deemed theoretical, academic, universal, and therefore explicit. Some special types of training like the practicum (Schön, 1985) help students gain tacit experiences that may only be kept inside as personal knowledge. When there is no teacher training to impart explicit teaching knowledge onto novice teachers, they can only rely on previous experiences (theirs and others) to build their ways to new knowing. So in order to present explicit knowledge to students, instructors have to construct their own tacit knowledge in teaching. What if the knowledge they are presenting is tacit and personal as well, is it easier for them to grasp another type of tacit knowledge like teaching? Or is it just opposite? As the following sections will demonstrate, design studio tutoring in architecture schools represents a unique example of this situation. First, a general description of studio teaching is given to point out some prominent phenomena in architectural design education (Section 2). Subsequently, the paper zooms in on the specific nature of didactics in the entry-level design studio (Section 3), which provides a unique perspective to investigate the interaction between generating and transferring design knowledge in teaching and learning (Section 4).
2
Studio teaching scenario
Basically the pedagogical idea and didactical method of the design studio is project-oriented. It was derived from the former atelier style of working where apprentices followed the master in observing, exercising, and dealing with real design projects. In this way the apprentices were able to get familiar with diverse types of projects in terms of functional variety and the program’s complexity advanced along with their progression. In this process the ability to design architecture was being passed on to them as well. Today most of the undergraduate programs in architecture schools still adopt this age-old masterapprentice pattern. The design studio offers students an ‘espace transitoire’ (Winnicot, 1971) on their way to real practice, allowing them to ‘act out’ the role of designers without having to take the consequences if their design fails. Because the nature of design learning is quite different from acquiring theoretical knowledge, a holistic approach like tackling a real project may be the best tactics for guiding young architects indeed. In an architectural firm apprentices may experience the authentic social, political, and financial aspects of design affairs. In school, however, a design studio project has to represent these affairs in a hypothesized way, due to the limitations of an educational environment. It is more like a virtual reality version of an architectural project. From time to time the tutors or the critics in the jury argue that students frequently fail to reflect these issues in their design work. Yet they have to be aware that they are dealing with youngsters who have scarce opportunities to deal with these issues in their real life, not to mention the capacity to reflect them appropriately in a design project. The major resources of knowledge on these practical issues are the other (theoretical) courses provided in the educational program. However, the ever more fragmentary and aspect-oriented way in which the curriculum is structured—partly due to the intrinsically complex nature of architecture—hinders students in recognizing the coherence between these courses and the studio. Moreover, the academic knowledge taught in these courses tends to abstract, systemize, and theorize these practical issues. Not only the students have difficulties in making adequate use of them in design, also the tutors have a hard time guiding students in actualizing these issues. Since the assignments given in design studios convey less authenticity than real design projects, many assumptions have to be made in order to undertake the exercise. Familiarisation with the project type is gradually giving way to the adaptation of the design process, in other words, to acquiring one’s own design capacity. From the Design Methods Movement on to the design research lately, the design process has been identified as problem-oriented (based on the problem-solving theory) or solution-oriented (according to the design thinking and cognition theory). These two definitions may sound paradoxical at first glance, though they just reflect the diversity that is inherent to the design activity. And they may substantiate quite well that studio guiding has to introduce many different types of didactics to build up students’ design capacity.
As illustrated by the well-known story in Schön’s famous book The design studio (1985), the desk crit represents the core technique of guiding in architectural design education. Through this “refection-in-action” the “designerly” (Cross, 1982) ways of thinking and acting can be “known” by the students. In addition, very often the tutors give lectures to address specific design knowledge that is better presented in this way. At these moments tutors have to bring systematic reasoning or logical thinking into the studio. Group discussions like pin-up and reviews can take place at certain stages in order to foster multiple reflections between several actors in studio settings. The tutor’s main task is to build up and strengthen students’ design skill and design thinking, yet the method to do so is hybrid. For tutors learning how to teach in upper-lever design studios is relatively easy. The senior students have become familiar with the style of studio phenomena, and their capacity in the designerly ways of thinking has been developed considerably. The instructor can make use of her/his expertise in every facet of architectural design and “reflect” together with the pupils during the desk crit. At the starting point of their teaching career, novice tutors may feel awkward to verbalize the moves in helping a student’s design. A transitional mechanism between tacit operation and explicit explanation of design has to be introduced into their mind. Yet initiating this mechanism should not be that hard, since their architectural jargon is not alien to the students, and they have been trained to present their design projects for a long time. When studio tutors manage the tricks of teaching by their own heuristics, the various activities related to studio guiding become their means to organize the expected process for students to go through. Certain routine events, such as assignment-giving lectures, site visits, pin-up, desk crits, and mid-term/final reviews, may shape the ordinary studio procedure. However, the instructors still have abundant flexibility in conducting their groups to jump between different styles of learning according to their pedagogical concerns. Diverging or converging, explicit or tacit, systematic or improvising, so many paradoxical ways of training coexist in the design studio. It just proves that teaching design is similar to designing itself. Design studio teaching is like dealing with a design problem: it is wicked (Rittel & Weber, 1973), but manageable through designerly ways of acting. Studio tutors as experts in design thinking may easily relate this expertise to their guiding strategy and find their way out in this way. Cross (1981) pointed out that “the design process is often likened to a learning process.” His original intention was to relate the contribution of learning theory to design theory. Within the context of this paper, the argument may as well be reversed: if experts like studio tutors have mastered the design process, their approach to learning “teaching” may be likened to it. Combined with their professional knowledge in the domain, this likening should enable architect-teachers to guide a design studio conveniently.
3
Teaching the beginners
Having sketched the teaching scenario in the design studio, it seems obvious that adapting novice students to this style of learning takes considerable time and effort. Thus the entry-lever design studio plays the role of transition. Usually attention is paid to what content shall be given in this one year period to equip student with sufficient knowledge and skills for their advanced studies in the future. Little has been noticed about how the transition takes place and its effect on the quality of students’ learning, not to mention the studio tutor’s awareness of these issues. Beginners are not confronted with designing architecture right away. There are basic exercises like shape composition, form generation, color and texture exploration that may introduce them into the realm of spatial construction. For some schools the pedagogy of entry-level design education is to equip students with one set of design approaches according to a certain style, philosophy, or paradigm. The strategy can be derived from the Bauhaus School, the phenomenological ways of inquiry, or morphogenesis in computer applications (Cappleman & Jordan, 1993). The underlying idea is to bring pupils into the design territory through these approaches, but not to emphasize the legitimacy of these approaches as the only way to guide the design studio. Students may evaluate, criticize, and even discard them afterward at any point in their career. The risk, however, is that exposing them to a too rigid approach at the early stage of design education may limit their future development. Furthermore, are all students equally capable of picking up this set of design approaches? (Bar-Eli, 2005) Confusion and frustration are inevitable at this level because the students have never dealt with these contents before, nor approached them in this way. Not to mention the rapid evolution and shifting trends in these days where many new issues and methodologies for improving design education have brought in extra techniques and ways of tackling environmental concerns. Though the project scales and requirements have been adjusted for entry-level assignments, all of these unconventional topics push novice students into extreme poles of learning territories. It is the new knowledge “for” designing, as well as the new way of “knowing design”, that challenge beginners’ former cognitive pattern in education. Though experienced designers seem to be able to guide the entry-level studio easily, there is still a legend circulating around architecture schools that few architects like to guide first-year design classes. The reason could be that practicing architects, who already have been equipped with design skills implicitly through their careers, have difficulties to explain designing explicitly to novices. It is not only because freshmen know nothing about designing at all, but also because designing itself possesses the nature of a “black box” that is hardly to be revealed literally.
Moreover, most experts in the field of architecture are reluctant to serve as critics of first-year design studio reviews. They barely find professional issues, which relate to diverse aspects of architectural knowledge (technical, social, political or cultural factors) and are seemingly superior to the basic training in space composition or form generation, to stand upon as arguable points to criticize students’ works. This phenomenon reflects certain problems in architectural design education. The entry-level design training is deemed as too basic to be evaluated from the perspective of the architectural profession. Clearly, for guiding beginners in the design studio the tutor as an architect cannot simply depend on his/her professional knowledge and inherent design capacity. The taught subject is not the course of the architectural profession yet, but only the basic elements and skills needed to be acquired first. The tutor has to subtract and abstract the complex professional knowledge according to this level to suit the student’s learning capability. This does not mean that the design knowledge has to be simplified or reduced. On the contrary, the tutor has to identify and amplify the prominent essence, and find a proper method to present this in the teaching process. The trade jargons do not work at all; the prompt moves towards a design solution will confuse students considerably. More considerations and sophisticated moves outside the professional knowledge have to be developed for teaching at this level. Fortunately the mode of “reflection-in-action” is still applicable to learn these tricks, based on personal experiences from the past, observing colleagues’ teaching, absorbing information from dossiers, and mainly through teaching itself. When the tutors have experience in teaching upper-level studio, they are already familiar with the reflection skills in guiding students’ designing. What they need to teach beginners is to realize that the old tricks may not work anymore, and extra knowledge about designing has to be acquired. This extra knowledge is not new. It exists implicitly in the professional knowledge. To acquire it means to externalize it, to be aware of what is already there and find the right way to bring it up. Ultimately, the most important concern is to transfer it patiently to students. For novice tutors to teach beginners is more complicated. Their studio experiences remain at the student side of the interaction. The easy way out is to start imitating their former tutors and make changes later as they reflect on the act of teaching. At the same time they also have to develop extra knowledge for their inner understanding of the prime basis of the profession. They may master designing already, but it is unnecessary, and impossible for some parts, to dig out its root and make it explicable. But for the sake of the student, they are forced to articulate it to a certain extent in order to be used while teaching. Perhaps it should not surprise that the demand to make this kind of effort does not please every architect-teacher. It takes extra time to ponder the essence of architectural design while reflecting on teaching designing. McGinty (1993) emphasizes that teaching beginners teaches teachers: “Teaching beginners continually tests one’s mastery of what really is
fundamental in architecture. The clarity of your thinking is tested. If your thinking is fuzzy, what you say will not make sense to them.” Then if teaching beginners becomes a regular position, McGinty continues, the wisdom and truth of one’s thought, the ethics, the vocabulary, and the powers of communication are all tested: “The tutors will ask themselves: ‘Are we learning as well as teaching?’”
4
Teaching/learning
Most teachers experienced that preparing a new course or giving a lecture with new topics makes them learn more about the subject than they knew before. Sometimes they feel that they themselves are the beneficiaries rather than their audiences. From the ancient wisdom quoted at the beginning of this article, we may sense that teaching and learning are essentially reciprocal, two sides of one coin, and not equivalent to giving and taking. But there is another layer of interaction happening simultaneously between the subject and the object of teaching and learning in design studio. Teachers who are learning how to teach designing may present this layer best. When Schön described the coaching artistry in the architectural design studio, he pointed out that there are several levels of learning in the process of reciprocal reflection-in-action. “The student learns both about designing and about learning to design…Further, the student learns about design in the same process by which she learns about designing” (Schön, 1985, p. 64). In other words, the subject (design) and the ways to grasp the subject (designing/learning) are both gained together by the student. Then can the tutor learn both about teaching and about learning to teach? Although different actors (teacher/student) are involved in the same process (studio guiding), the reciprocal reflection-in-action focuses on design as their mutual goal. So the interaction between student and master in the design studio may enhance the student’s learning and the master’s teaching on design. The question posed above is just a language game, because the two subjects (teaching/learning to teach) to be grasped by the teacher are identical. However, a more intriguing question shall be: does the tutor learn both about teaching design and about design itself? Here, design as a body of knowledge, designing as a skill or know-how, and learning to design as a new situation to deal with are all interwoven for the student to learn. For the learning tutor, an extra level of learning can be identified. Teaching as the new task to learn, designing as a subject to teach instead of a skill to perform, and design as a value system to be imposed by teaching are all intertwined in the teaching process. Furthermore, when the learning tutor encounters the novice student, design as a body of knowledge to be reinvestigated by the teacher with an eye to clearer presentation, adds one more layer to the complex reciprocal reflection-in-action. “Just as the restructuring of the cognitive schemes our students bring to designing enables them to become better designers, so the restructuring of the cognitive schemes
we bring to studio teaching should enable us to become better designers of our students’ learning experiences” (Ledewitz, 1985, p. 7). The cognitive schemes derived from a reinterpreted understanding of design do not only affect the student’s learning experience, but also enhance the learning teacher’s comprehension of design. Apart from these cognitive shifts in the design learning/teaching procedure, there are also other factors that determine the teacher’s performance in studio education. Similar to other lecture classes, the course guiding structure of design studios in architectural departments relies on two major aspects: didactical conditions and instructional traits. The former relate to the institutional requirements and resources such as educational goal, expected outcome, instruction hours and schedule, types of assignment, student number per tutor, available classroom spaces, etc. All of these are conditions that are imposed externally onto the design studio teacher. The latter relate to the personal characteristics and capacities that could be style preference, professional knowledge, communication skills, value system, favorite design approach, teaching experience and so on. These are the studio tutors’ inner attributes that may influence the quality of students’ learning. Albeit didactical conditions and instructional traits affect other course guiding structures as well, they seem to play a much stronger role in the quality of design studio teaching. Usually the criticism and research on studio education tends to shed light on the quality of the final products and learning process, but little attention has been paid to these two characters. Too few opportunities for interaction provided by the didactical conditions may restrict the frequency of cognitive shifts for the tutor to develop a better insight in her/his teaching task. Too egocentric attitudes at the side of the tutor may shut down the possibility to adopt a new vision of design for improving the student’s learning experience. Sometimes the moves tutors make in studio guiding might look irrational and irresponsible. In the extreme case the authority that teachers possess can be stressed to stop students’ questioning and force them to move into next design stage. It could be the intention to try and break down students’ narrow mind and expand their horizon; it could be, however, just the camouflage of incompetence in guiding design. So the appropriateness and legitimacy of employing whatever useful technique in whatever stage of design guiding should be considered seriously without losing students’ confidence and trust. “In an extreme learning bind, the teacher, failing to communicate, gives up on the student and/or the student, unable to be understood, gives up on the teacher. In order to avoid the dilemma of mutually-reinforced misunderstandings, Schön argues that we should try to build a series of agreements with our students on the nature of architecture and design. This requires that we try to make more explicit the objectives, standards, and assumptions that underlie our teaching, which, in turn, demands that we develop a greater awareness of the implicit messages we convey to students” (Ledewitz, 1985, p-2). Obviously this is the kind of personal knowledge that can be obtained only through experience and knowing-in-action.
5
Taken for granted
Is it easier for teachers to acquire the tacit knowledge of teaching if the knowledge to be taught is tacit and personal as well? In an attempt to address this question, we have taken a glance at the complexity of learning/teaching phenomena in the design studio. At first sight, it seems right to say that the answer is positive, yet for learning teachers there are considerable discrepancies between guiding upper-level students and beginners. According to the Constructionist theory, real learning does not take place by receiving information passively from others, but by actively building the structures of knowledge through an interactive process between the learner and the context, especially when the knowledge constructions become external and shared (Papert 1991). Although the theory concerns the learning process in general, its relation to the development of student-architects’ designerly ways of thinking has been identified (Oxman 2001). Our exploration throughout this paper has been following a similar thread, and furthermore has tried to apply the theory to investigate the nature of learning design teaching. For novice tutors to build their guiding capacity with beginner-students reveals the extreme case of constructing knowledge at multiple layers simultaneously. Besides the reciprocal reflection-in-action that has been pointed out long ago, the need to reconstruct the understanding of design, didactical conditions and instructional traits are all crucial to be aware of and cannot be overemphasized in the knowledge structuring of design studio guiding for tutors as beginners. Research in relevant disciplines has made us realize that design studio teaching, which is taken for granted in architectural education, presents a unique mode of knowledge construction and reconstruction that is quite different from academic education in general. Combined with the settings of the university system, this core curriculum for the professional training develops its own culture (Koch & et al., 2002) that challenges both the student’s learning quality and the tutor’s teaching capacity. In this sense the novice tutor has to learn actively to teach, instead of just teach, and not through teaching only, but also through reflecting on teaching. If the novice tutor has the luck to teach beginners, the gain will not be limited to teaching, but will also include learning the substance of design. For a long time, we have been teaching design studio with a focus on students’ design but unaware of their learning; or with a focus on their learning but unaware of our teaching; or even with a focus on our teaching but unaware of our learning to teach. Then how about focusing on our learning to teach but unaware of our learning in design itself? In facing the shifting trends of architectural design education, these fundamental questions should be highlighted to remind the educators of our profession that never overlook the values and advantages of this unique mode of learning while teaching design for beginners. Hopefully, this awareness may help to initiate further restructuring of tutors’ design knowledge, and to benefit the quality of students’ learning when they just step into this challenging profession.
Acknowledgements Jiun-De Chen is currently a PhD student supervised by Prof. Herman Neuckermans at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium. His PhD research is funded by the scholarship program of the Ministry of Education in Taiwan.
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