Pedagogy 2025

Abstract

It is challenging to teach a humanities course to students who are not humanities majors. My experience is teaching architectural history to students in a professional degree program, trying to make the material relevant or make it entertaining enough that students will consider it a valuable contribution to their educational and professional careers. Architectural history may be relevant in developing a repertoire of precedents and learning new design strategies, but these reasons are rather vague and vapid, and it is not clear to students that lessons from the past are relevant to contemporary design. I will suggest that the value of these courses is not the retention of the material or its utility, but more generally to encourage and develop enthusiasm for the field. My experience is that retention of material from a survey course is poor, and memorization of facts is not effective in the age of AI. Though the professional licensing organization and the schools agree that history is important for future designers, there is no agreement on what teaching strategies work or what metric we might use to develop the data for evidence-based strategies. This presentation will explore my observations from teaching humanities surveys in a professional practice-centered program, suggest ways that this material can be made relevant to students’ educational and professional development, and suggest future research and metrics like post-course and subsequent surveys to measure the efficacy of the course experience.