IN-PERSON Prague Research & Teaching Conference

Abstract

Most Canadians live in metropolitan areas, and most Canadians speak English. This is great news for Canada’s twelve accredited post-secondary schools of architecture, as all are based in major metropolitan areas and nine schools exclusively offer education in English. From another perspective, however, this leaves large swaths of the population with limited exposure to the possibilities of architectural education. Secondary students such as those in remote and rural areas, or students attending the approximately 220 Francophone high schools operating outside of Quebec in linguistic minority situations, are faced with substantial barriers to pursuing design education – if they even know such opportunities exist, or what they would entail. As faculty at Canada’s only bilingual architecture school, the McEwen School of Architecture in Sudbury, we have developed a simple and impactful toolkit for architectural outreach from the simultaneous assumptions that, first, these students are equally deserving of access to design education and, second, that direct outreach at the secondary school level is the most effective means to introduce students to the possibility and opportunity of architectural education. Our approach is straightforward and low-tech: we send bilingual representatives to Northern Ontario high schools in rural, remote, and linguistic minority communities to lead in-person workshops with twenty drafting boards and pencils. The focus on in-person, hands-on workshops is apparently unprecedented and has received praise from schools, attention from professional regulatory bodies, and an overwhelming amount of interest from other regions in Canada.