VIRTUAL New Schools of Thought

Abstract

In a hybrid history-theory course sequence, students balance knowledge acquisition through texts, images, lectures, and websites with in-person exploration of buildings in everyday environments. They take on this work guided by undergraduate and graduate teaching assistants, the instructor, and a cadre of librarians who bring wide-ranging sources and approaches to bear. Throughout the course sequence, students interrogate sources and resources for designers by focusing on their authenticity and fidelity, as well as the challenges they bring to the interpretation of the built environment across scale from material to object to space to building to place. What does it mean for students to have agency in their learning? They experience and react first-hand to environments on campus where they learn. They work with visual, written, and oral sources, learning about opportunities and challenges inherent in these sources and weaving them together in a tapestry of understanding about design in the world and their own place within the design world to which they aspire. They become makers and authors and interviewers in their own right, generating knowledge for future designers who enroll in the course sequence. They provide wide-ranging deliverables, curated from a handful of possibilities for each assignment. Ultimately, they learn the lesson that design is not and cannot be viewed from one fixed vantage point. The field represents both the confluence and dispersion of ideas that encapsulate humanity’s greatest hopes and fears. As such, I focus on methods in which students shape the course and their own views of design.