VIRTUAL: Applying Education
Abstract
Most research on architectural education focuses on formal teaching events. Mainly, it analyses meetings of students and teachers in tutorial sessions, design reviews and formal presentations. In architecture education, however, informal attributes of learning are incredibly dominant. Students develop their design knowledge mainly between formal teaching sessions by engaging with complex and open-ended design problems, cycling between making tangible and virtual objects and reflecting in and on their actions. These learning processes are difficult to trace as they usually occur in different venues and within complex ecologies of human and non-human agents. The primary aim of this study is to contribute an empirical account of informal modes of learning, especially but not solely, of design and architectural education. It follows a unique architectural design master’s program where students live and learn on campus. The campus provides them with all their living and learning needs. These include dormitories, a kitchen, a dining room, a wood workshop, a FabLab, and a Library, all in one building. This learning setting allows a unique opportunity to follow the students’ informal learning interactions. Our data sets comprise more than 100 hours of ethnographic documentation written over four months. We use a Sociomaterial theoretical approach and ANT methodology to analyse our data and interpret our findings. Our study offers three kinds of contributions: Theoretically, we view the process of architecture education as enacted within a complex web of dynamic interactions between humans and non-human agents and use this perspective to describe informal learning processes; Methodologically, we focus on the scale of the ‘sociomaterial assemblage’ rather than the scale of the single actor; pedagogically, we reevaluate the role of the design instructor and offer an Actor-Network approach to design learning processes.
Barak Pelman is an architectural educator, learning designer and researcher. He is a member of the Bezalel Art and Design Teaching Center, the director of the Hybrid Pedagogy Lab and a faculty at the Bezalel School of Architecture. In his research, Barak is conceptualising contemporary learning processes based on sociomaterial approaches and developing new learning environments, tools and pedagogies for art, design and architectural education.