Pedagogy 2025

Abstract

Contemporary architectural education is increasingly shaped by pressures to professionalize, produce outcomes, and demonstrate mastery. These pressures mirror broader academic trends toward metrics-driven teaching and technocratic learning design. The Boids and the Bees, a graduate elective in architectural representation, was conceived as a refusal of these logics. It positioned play not as a relief from rigor, but as a generative alternative to it. Within this elective, students defined their own representational problems—ranging from disciplinary conventions to social and political questions—and co-authored the criteria by which their work was assessed. Using video game engines as unfamiliar and unstable platforms, students and instructor engaged in mutual learning, where traditional hierarchies of expertise gave way to collective experimentation. The course embraced ambiguity, failure, and glitch not as setbacks, but as conditions for meaningful work. Rather than assessing polish or resolution, student projects were evaluated in relation to self-determined goals based on what each student hoped to explore and how they learned most effectively. This led to formative, collaborative assessments grounded in reflection, iteration, and responsiveness. In place of critique culture or fixed rubrics, students practiced staying with the unexpected, allowing emergent outcomes to reshape their process. This presentation does not offer a formula, but a provocation: that play, ambiguity, and unanticipated outcomes can serve as serious tools in rethinking architectural education. By reframing learning as a shared, indeterminate pursuit rather than a march toward mastery, it contributes to broader conversations on critical pedagogy, representation, and the futures of post-digital design learning.