Volume 10, Number 4

HOW DO YOU LEARN?

By Robert A. Findlay
Professor of Architecture and Chair of the CTE Board
email: rfindlay@iastate.edu

The other day a student dropped by my office and posed the question, "How do I learn about architecture? I know what to learn because my teachers continually give me information and criticism of my work, but I want to know how one learns about architecture." Having recently completed a dissertation about learning in design, I was somewhat primed to review a little learning theory with the student to see if anything rang a bell with him, or whether he could make sense of the concepts. We found ourselves in a more thoughtful discussion regarding learning than I normally experience in day-to-day interactions. This brief essay is a reflection on our conversation.

I began by suggesting that learning involves making meaning; individually and collectively within himself and among other students, teachers, and eventually clients, the public, and the profession. Learning is a process of actively participating rather than passive receiving. We discussed how our personal experiences build up meaningful relationships, collections of experience that are codified into disciplines such as architecture; and that these disciplines are ever evolving over time adding more layers of experience.

Thomas Kuhn described the social construction of knowledge, including the concept that disciplines are social constructs such that they are what most of us believe they are at any point in time, and that education is the acculturation of the novice into the prevailing knowledge base. I described Donald Schon's review of the student-instructor exchange in studio in which it appeared that the student was challenged to eke bits of that collective knowledge from the instructor in order to join the profession. In another learning setting, Kathryn Anthony studied the studio jury process which often finds the student presenter confronted with a panel of reviewers who seem to be speaking a private, impenetrable language. Anthony concluded with a plea for a more inclusive, less adversarial learning environment.

So I suggested to the student that learning to design is a process of delving into the individual's values and experience, something we perhaps call intuition, and applying that introspection to professional and societal concerns that are associated with the problem at hand (issues such as codes, prevailing styles, client requirements, and building contexts).

My visitor described his experience in previous semesters in which the instructors were often at his side with fairly quick approval or disapproval of what he was doing, but that level of attention was no longer present. I thought we should talk about where he might be on a developmental scale as the curriculum and pedagogy move up Perry's scale from dichotomous thinking to the ambiguity of multiple realities. He said that one instructor would frequently ask him to "go back" and make sure that his work was related to the student's generative idea, or concept, for his design activity and design product.

That instructor seemed to be able to see his idea, perhaps more clearly than the student, and would express his opinion about whether or not the student was on track. In subsequent studios, students are given both more complex problems, with external considerations, and more independence in generating ideas and design procedures. The student noted that in his last studio, the reviewers collectively noted that they could not see the relationship between his initial conceptual thinking and the eventual product of his design work. The intermediate steps were missing in his presentation. The instructor, being concerned about the larger problem parameters, had not "been there" to monitor the process, and the student apparently did not carefully document the continuity, if any, of his thought process. As in any good research, I advised him that he should journal his design activity to track his individual thinking, to connect it to other knowledge, and to explain it to others.

Like many disciplines, architecture is in a time of unsettled inquiry about the importance of what we do and how we go about it. This condition provides considerable freedom for the student to draw connections between introspection/intuition and the problems at hand, but also subjects the students to responses reflecting diverse professional and public tastes and values. It is an exciting time in which the actions of young faculty and professionals can affect the thinking of the discipline and profession. They are not being inculturated into a fossilized professional code, but are being socialized into the exciting activity of its ongoing development.

Ever the teacher, I suggested some readings to the student. He he said that he is setting aside an hour or two each day to read outside of course requirements, in order to find himself in this process. Besides the war stories related by Schon and Anthony, I suggested Michael Benedikt's Toward a Real Architecture and Peter Bachelard's The Poetics of Space. The student returned the next day to announce that he had located the latter book and that he had figured out that in dealing with the growing complexity of projects set before him he had been setting aside his inner self. He described Bachelard's chapter on the house (the students' current problem type) as being rich with its associations of the author's personal memory about the way he dealt with the contemporary world. I reminded him that design and learning are a continuous play of what is before you and what you already know, constantly drawing on your personal experience and our collective experience found in recorded and built forms.

My visitor concluded that no one had talked to him like this about learning before, nor had any of his instructors spent so much time with him about his education. I found this exchange to be as valuable to me as to the student because it confirmed the utility of my recent investigations into learning. It became clear to me that we were discussing active, project-based learning that involved analysis, synthesis, and evaluation - high on Bloom's taxonomy of educational objectives in any discipline.

References

Anthony, Kathryn, Juries on Trial: The Renaissance of the Design Studio, New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1991.

Bachelard, Gaston, The Poetics of Space, Boston: Beacon, 1969.

Benedikt, Michael, For an Architecture of Reality, New York: Lumen,1987.

Bloom, B.S. et al, Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. Vol. 1: Cognitive Domain, New York: McKay, 1956.

Findlay, Robert Allen, Learning in Community-Based, Collaborative Design Studios: Education for a Reflective, Responsive Design Practice, Ph.D. dissertation, Oxford, England: Oxford Brookes University, 1996.

Kuhn, Thomas P., The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd Edition. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1970.

Perry, William G., Jr., Forms of Intellectual and Ethical Development in the College Years: A Scheme, New York: Rinehart & Winston, 1970.

Schon, Donald, The Design Studio: An Exploration of its Traditions and Potential, London: RIBA Publications Ltd., 1985.