IN-PERSON MADRID FOCUS ON PEDAGOGY. SECTION A

Abstract

This paper reflects on an experimental graduate seminar in architectural theory taught at a large American R1 university, foregrounding pedagogy as an emancipatory practice. Structured around cases and theories of contemporary housing from late twentieth-century social projects to recent collective housing initiatives, the course combined a defined historical framework with an intentionally open and participatory method. In contrast to conventional history surveys, typically organized as linear, instructor-driven narratives that privilege chronology and position students as recipients of expert knowledge, the seminar redistributed agency by inviting students to actively construct the course’s intellectual trajectory.
Drawing on Rancière’s concept of intellectual equality, as articulated in The Ignorant Schoolmaster, the seminar destabilized entrenched hierarchies of knowledge transmission. Rejecting the primacy of explication, it assumed equality between instructor and students as a point of departure, repositioning learning as a process of verification enacted through attention, comparison, and interpretation. Rather than positioning the instructor as the source of authority, students actively shaped the syllabus by introducing case studies, sources, and interpretive frameworks. Open assignments reinforced this structure, privileging self-directed inquiry and alternative forms of knowledge production. The seminar thus functioned as a pedagogical experiment in enacting equality, redistributing authorship and agency within the classroom. By documenting this process, the paper argues for architectural humanities pedagogy as an open-ended, participatory practice, capable not only of analyzing emancipation in architecture but of performing it within the structures of learning itself. This approach is aligned to engage complex architectural questions, where plurality of knowledge demands pedagogical models that embrace dissensus, multiplicity, and active student agency.