VIRTUAL: Applying Education

Abstract

This study aims to reveal how the dialogic interactions between educators and learners, who act as the co-constructors of knowledge and meaning in foundation design studio, affect the learning act. Within the scope of this study, design studio experiences of the first-year students of Architecture, Interior Architecture, and Industrial Design departments at the Faculty of Architecture, Istanbul Technical University (ITU), were investigated with dialogic pedagogy in mind. The Foundation Studio includes Project I, Project II, Visual Communication I: Visualization & Technical Drawing, Visual Communication II: Visualization & Perspective, and Basic Design & Visual Arts courses. The visual and written diary that was systematically filled out based on the field notes taken by one of the authors, who worked as a research assistant, throughout two semesters’ studio hours was used as the central resource for the study. Diary entries, an ethnomethodological approach, have been made to obtain “thick descriptions” of collaborative verbal interactions such as dialogue, discussion, and crit through peer-to-peer and/or learner-to-educator interactions. All of these are indispensable and key elements of the studio environment due to the social aspect of learning processes which complete the ways of visual, creative, critical thinking and production in the design studio. In this vein, according to diary entries, dialogic interactions are evaluated and the findings were elaborated under two main headings for the phenomenological determination of the dialogic experiences and the development of critical and autonomous thinking mechanisms of first-year students.
Keywords: Dialogic pedagogy, first-year design education, foundation design studio, participant-observation, diary.