Since my university moved all of its coursework online in March of 2020, like most professors, I have taught my class on Zoom. Forced to adopt new tools and methods, teaching design studio online has allowed the (relatively) seamless flow between different media in a way that would never be possible in person. With a few clicks of my mouse, I can annotate a PDF of my student’s floor plan, post a link to a precedent on Divisare.com, and drop it into Google Streetview. That is, while we’ve lost face-to-face interactions, physical models, and trace paper, I can still easily provide verbal and graphic feedback to my students’ designs and expose them to new ideas.
Ever conscious of the effects of our environment, architects, urbanists, and designers were quick to go meta, speculating on the political and pedagogical implications of our newfound digital classrooms in the time of Covid. Early on in 2020, Places Journal created a forum, Field Notes on Pandemic Teaching, in which professors around the world shared their ruminations in the first months of this radical reorganization of architectural education. In design, changes in the learning environment are directly related to the very subject matter we teach.
Online learning allowed a shy student to tell me in a breakout room that they don’t know how to manage workflow between different software. I could refer them to the TA for help. It allowed another student to take a Caribbean vacation in the middle of the semester. For all of us, it eliminated our commutes to school. It also meant the end of the socializing, casual conversation, and fun that comes with sitting in a room together.
Design educators generally accept the notion that even if architecture itself cannot fundamentally change society, the projections we generate, the images we create of an imagined future, should be of a progressive kind, imagining a more equitable society. Nevertheless, in teaching students the skills to visualize this future, present inequities are unavoidable: Online learning has been a huge inconvenience, particularly for students who have to work, take care of their family, or have inconsistent access to high-speed internet.
When a student accidentally unmuted and offscreen yelling between family members was briefly broadcasted for their whole class to hear, the inescapable distractions of domestic life on their education came into full view. Indeed, my two-and-a-half semesters of teaching online at a public university confirmed what a University of Arizona study found about the effects of the move to remote learning national scale: “disruption was much larger for lower-income students.” Furthermore, of my twelve students, one was forced to withdraw, confirming another of the study’s findings, that one in ten college students would delay graduation due to the pandemic.
... one in ten college students would delay graduation due to the pandemic
As I think about what the coming fall semester will look like at universities across the country and world, I wonder how we might take back physical space for our sanity and enjoyment—sitting in a circle discussing a model or drawing, going on a real site visit. I also think about how Zoom, Miro, and the continuously expanding world of social media might supplement our pedagogy, inviting people in other parts of the world (or our cities) to attend a review or comment on a design.
How might Zoom school make design education more public, connecting an inward-facing pedagogy with the people we are supposedly designing for? Why shouldn’t our reviews be on Instagram Live? Why shouldn’t a mobility-impaired student attend a virtual site visit? Why shouldn’t a student with a full-time job be able to call in for some of their desk crits? If online design education has forced us to see the way our pedagogical model preferences the already privileged, how might we use our new tools to rethink expectations in a way that takes students' actual lives and economic realities into account, instead of pretending that the political aspects of architectural education are relegated to the future worlds we imagine?
Dante is a PhD student studying the History and Theory of Architecture at Princeton University. He is a licensed architect in New York State.
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A few days ago, I read a text from someone that with a certain solemnity explained why it is impossible to teach architecture, and especially Design Studio, online. “God save us all!” the article seems to say, in between lines. I won’t say that certain arguments did not make sense. They not only sounded relatively convincing but also that out of romanticism or disciplinary rigor, there are some “virtues” of sharing a table, drawings, and models that I still believe in and deeply enjoy. Getting rid of a tiny piece of cardboard that represents a wall but also an obstacle for modeling space, folding time after time a piece of trace paper for studying a sequence of sections, pinning drawings up at the walls, and other pedagogical maneuvers are the very heart of “studio culture”, two words that only the “initiated” seem to understand. Studio culture refers, in practical terms, to the huge amount of energy and exchanges that happen when professors and students engage in dialogues, critiques, and unexpected conversations under one roof. Almost like in a play, students and professors “perform” their choreographies, in an attempt to engage, intellectually and physically, others in the acquisition and exchange of knowledge. Under this idea, the walls that shape the studio space seem to be not only physical boundaries but rather a fundamental foundation for architectural learning. But we live in strange times, where the value of physical encounters has been quickly run over by the still somehow uncertain, somehow suspicious, virtual space. Then we might ask, is it really impossible to teach design studio online? If the studio, as a space for the exchange of knowledge, is not an option at least for now, and perhaps for a while, are we unable to teach architecture? Manicheism sounds to me like an excuse to perpetuate models and shut down curiosity and possibility. Changes are usually tough and uncomfortable, but almost never impossible to achieve. Changes just require an open attitude, readjusting tools, redirecting methods, and as with everything, it also requires starting with a question that replaces the “it is impossible” for an almost naïve “how can we do this”?
Eight years ago, my tasks as a professor at the School of Architecture and Design at IE University pushed me to a then-challenging experience. Students in our university, during the second part of the Spring semester, go for internships all around the world, shifting radically the traditional relation between student-professor and studio as the place for encounter. I was asked to teach in that semester, and the skepticism around that model of education was truly penetrating. Seeing my students through a screen, having them all there, or navigating a new set of tools and rules were already many changes, but the least of my challenges. Understanding the new calibration of times, engagements, and the new “shape” of the conversation, was. Having my students engaged and me being engaged, was. Knowing how to change from a fully sensorial experience, the tact of cardboard, the smell of laser cut wood, the noise of a hammer nailing a model, to a purely visual and verbal, was. Since then, I have learned many things on how to occupy, perform and play in this new “space” of the virtual. I do not know it all, every year something makes me revise my online behavior and performance, but these are some of the things I have learned that I will share for converting the skeptical (or to make them even more), and perhaps, only perhaps, help the new ones in a strange, but nevertheless interesting and enjoyable, way of teaching.
Below, four of my “tools”, born out of intents for understanding the differences between the more traditional educational environment and the relative, and today extremely relevant, new virtual environment.
ENGAGEMENT
There is certainly emotional and intellectual comfort in seeing each other and sharing one meter of a table and being surrounded by others. Instead, in this mode of online education, you are alone with your screen, feeling awkward as the camera points to you, and listening to your voice echoing in the room. In this mode of online education, we are all together yet separate. I always start the class, with a short chit-chat conversation, something that can unite us in the “universal” concerns about the weather, the political figure (or joke) of the moment, and so on. These small talks are not about architecture nor very sophisticated pedagogical tools, they are, simply, a strategy to feel connected, to throw some laughs, and to sense we are all together in one place. After all, we are all people. Rather than boringly waiting for your time to present on the screen, we start with the sensation that even if I am in Spain, Daniella in Venezuela, and Xinyi in China, we are all together in one, nevertheless particular, space for interaction. These chitchats are repeated during the class, for trying to keep us all engaged at the moment, and in this particular “room” we all share.
POINTS OF CONNECTIONS
In our online classes, all our students are connected at the same time, looking at the same screen and therefore, the same project. But being virtually connected does not always translate into truly and fully being there. A very effective tool for increasing the engagement of the students with the class but also with the course is to find points of connections. Usually, as the students work under the same brief, finding similarities or even contrasts happen frequently. I try to point out the specifics of those points of connections and ask for them to chat, sometimes during the class. Those bridges are usually effective tools to trigger a conversation, and why not, steal, share, to evolve together. I learned by doing it that these bridges not only work well in keeping my students awake and engaged during the courses but also increases their critical skills. Being able to articulate a rapid response to my question and invitation to participate in the chat, or to think about why was I putting those two projects together truly works for connecting with others while connecting with their own critical self.
COMMENTS TWO WAYS
It might be sometimes challenging to be able to make all the comments the students deserve, draw with them, and manipulate the material in this new “studio” environment. The times on the screen often seem shorter for me, between technological issues, connecting with each one, and the adventures of Wi-Fi connection depending on where we are at, the clock seems to accelerate. Years ago, I started to ask the students to submit their work a day before our class. With the time on my side, I review the work, made comments, leave references, and make some red marks before returning the work to them some hours before our class. When we meet, they have seen already my critique, and we engaged in much longer conversations that are not about the minutia of plans, sections, and some other drawing, but rather about the strategy, the general picture, the narrative. Having these two ways comments allow me to be in the more efficient control of time, and to them, to be able to focus the conversation with me on what is crucial for the development of the project, as the other “stuff” is already there waiting for them.
AUTONOMY
Online education requires discipline. Distraction or procrastination is as far as a click! Not sharing the space, and for instance, not feeling the pressure of the context, could be a risk factor for the development of a project. However, there are ways of helping avoid the attention diversion, by simply laying out the times. I usually make a timeline, as appealing graphically as also specified in the relation between time, content, and production. Students are not always skilled in time management and organization, and they might sometimes, miscalculate how to be in good shape each week. This practice, at least in my experience, is not only good in terms of making clear for them what it takes to arrive at a good final review but also helps them to consider the model for organizing their own times. Having the “original” timeline, they now can shift things around according to the needs of their specific projects. Understanding time, being able to administer it, and managing production on your own terms and without the social pressure of the context translate into acquiring autonomy.
These are a few of my tools. Every year, every group is a different creature, and little nuances and adaptations are needed. I am far from having an online pedagogy manual, after all, this was born merely out of practice and the seek for understanding a then-new environment for me, for challenging my skepticism, and for how not to reject it as for being different. As such, I hope that these simple quick notes help others to get inspired in many other pedagogical maneuvers I am sure are out there, and for the skeptical, to think that perhaps it is possible to teach architecture online. It is not impossible, it is just different, and perhaps, in the way the world moves, a fundamental skill to develop for the new “normal” we might face as a society, but fundamentally as educators that might have to learn to learn again.
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