VIRTUAL New Schools of Thought

Abstract

This study aims to explain the impact of first-year design students’ reflective journals about their studio experiences and peer interactions on their design learning. To this end, a 13-week case study was conducted in a pre-disciplinary first-year design studio with the participation of students, instructors and research assistants from the Departments of Architecture, Interior Architecture and Industrial Design. The author gave a notebook he designed, which requires daily and weekly entries to volunteer students every Monday and received the previous week’s one. The first section of the notebook is dedicated to summarising their learning experiences through reflective diary entries for each day of the week. The weekly section, completed on Sunday, is structured around specific topics based on the four stages of Kolb’s (2015) learning cycle. The inclusion of metacognitive acts, which allow students to record and document their experiences at the most immediate moments without any external pressure and to reflect on their learning experiences, is a critical element of the data generation process. Furthermore, in the last week of the one-semester reflective process, the students were expected to answer the question, “Explain the effect of your daily and weekly writing and drawing activities on your learning experience for one semester?” in written and visual form to understand their diary and weekly journaling experiences. In line with this purpose and scope, what kind of awareness the reflective journals provide about design learning was revealed.
Keywords: Reflective practice, experiential learning, first-year design studio, diary, journal