The EAAE Education Academy organized three workshops in spring 2021, focusing on architectural design remote teaching issues.
Find their descriptions and schedules below. The papers resulting from these workshops can be found in the Best Practices Repository.
The Workshop Series
WS 1. 05.02.21 Remote entry: First year experience (Moderator Michela Barosio)
To meet architectural design for the first time through a screen might be scary and fascinating at the same time. Teaching relationship to space and perception while not sharing the same room seems paradoxical, but many teaching experiences set up in an emergency situation have been successful. Among those experiences, teaching first year students presents some extra difficulties as they have never physically experienced the design process, the human relationship between students and teachers has not been set yet, the representation techniques are not already acquired and the team working netwoks are not yet established. Furthermore, any field work or site survey have to be avoided and therefore the physical experience of a project or site is impossible. How can teachers overcome these obstacles and even transform them into opportunities? Which pedagogical approach, teaching techniques and digital skills can make teaching architectural design remotely more than a diminished version of presence teaching, but an augmented teaching experience?
WS 2. 05.03.21 Working alone, together: Organizing Group work (Moderator Mia Roth-Čerina)
The design studio is the backbone of architectural education, the defining origin of its identity and culture. The trajectories of relations, hierarchies, tools and places define the specific studio culture of a school, reflecting the values it cultivates. While many of the topics dealt with in the studio have remained the same, the processes and energies comprising what we know as studio culture have dramatically changed.
With the removal of the participants from the common spatial setting, a new way of coming and working together has emerged. Between these different translations into the virtual, and the deconstruction of the interrelated aspects making up studio culture, we can look at them separately. How has the energy of studio community survived? Have the binding fibres also extended to interpersonal support in challenging times? How has this affected the teacher-student relationship? Have present hierarchies been challenged or have they deepened? Is the virtual studio an inclusive environment contemporary education aims to provide, or has it uncovered new layers of inequality? Is the free-thinking, ‘unregulated context’ of the studio – where exchange can be as much a result of a common task as it can be a result of spontaneous, serendipitous or haphazard encounters and observations – possible online, and if so, what modes of operation enable it? Finally, what shifts in content have emerged at its core? Remote teaching has been a transformative experience. We look different at teaching now, and we look different at studio teaching as a commonly shared practice. How then, when we come back after this transformative experience of remote teaching, will we look at the spaces of the school building? How will we look different at working ‘together together’ after having worked ‘alone together’?
WS 3. 02.04.21 Judging from a distance: Final Jury and assessment (Moderator Patrick Flynn)
The review and feedback process for students aims to foster a culture of learning and reflective practice. In real life settings this is frequently delivered through the ‘crit’, short for ‘criticism’, where the students’ work is used as a learning tool for all the class. In this scenario the ‘crit’ is bound by a specific time and place with associated rituals and roles well established and defined.
The online learning space allows for a rethinking of how feedback, judging and reviews can be re-imagined. In the new setting can the new feedback process change of locus of control from tutor centred to increasing student engagement and self-critical reflection? Does this new online world allow a wider range of voices from different disciplines and international backgrounds inform the teaching process? Can the new method of delivering feedback and critique lead to the design of new inclusive, collaborative assessment and feedback processes or does it hinder this aim? Is it possible to use this method to increase student engagement and their development of critical reflection skills across an architecture programme? Will this type of delivery of feedback remain in the long term or will feedback and critique return to its former shape?
Invitation for participation
Unlike many other academic conferences and seminars, the EAAE EA workshops do not consist of paper presentations only. The workshops operate through working sessions based upon intensive debate among all participants in smaller groups. Therefore, we need more voices and thoughts than paper presentations. The Education Academy aims to be a platform and think-tank where concerns and best-practices all across Europe can be shared. We thus invite each architectural educator within the community of the EAAE to join our workshops and participate in the debate, also without submitting an abstract.
Organizing and scientific team
Johan De Walsche (EA main coordinator – University of Antwerp)
Michela Barosio (Politecnico di Torino)
Patrick Flynn (TU Dublin)
Mia Roth-Čerina (University of Zagreb)
