All the properties in Studio Properties are phenomena you might encounter in a design studio in an educational institution. Some of them you might never have experienced, and some you might encounter every day.
Some are different, in the sense that they are properties of many educational environments, not just studio. In the cluster Cultures and Power the property Critical Pedagogy rests on extensive bodies of knowledge from a range of educational contexts.
Critical pedagogy names and addresses the inequities and injustices in education. It is an approach to education that regards teachers and students as equally responsible for co-creating the curriculum. Fundamentally, critical pedagogy seizes the political potential of education as means of liberating both teachers and students from forms of oppression.
Like many teachers who identify with the tenets critical pedagogy, I first encountered Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed as a student, in my case during a seminar course at the University of Sheffield taught by Rosie Parnell, now Professor of Architecture and Pedagogy at Newcastle University. Rosie included the book as part of a wide ranging reading list that allowed us as Masters students the opportunity to interrogate the extent to which we were in control of the form and content of the knowledge we were learning.
Freire based his writing on a model of literacy education for rural farmers (far removed from studio education in architecture). Much of what has followed in my subsequent two decades of educational research and practice has been related to a fundamental question: to what extent can architectural education fully engage with the principles of critical pedagogy? And I am living up to the liberatory principles of critical pedagogy in my own teaching?
What is perhaps most exciting about critical pedagogy in studio is its possibility for supporting teachers and students to collaboratively build a framework for embodied and empathetic action, one which is simultaneously pedagogical and political.
Educators in design disciplines can engage with the principles and values of critical pedagogy in various ways. As a Masters student, I first started to think practically about applying critical pedagogy to design education during annual live projects at the University of Sheffield School of Architecture. These six-week-long projects introduced groups of students to a real client and community outside the university. Sometimes these groups both designed and built small structures for their clients, but in many cases, their work was focused on researching and presenting feasibility studies or design proposals that the client could then take forward. By developing a response to a real person, a real situation and a real need (as opposed to a theoretical design brief written by a teacher or the student themselves) students are exposed to the complexity and richness of designing in the real world. They develop empathy for the clients and communities they work with, and their design work becomes embodied.
Live projects were already the subject of doctoral research, notably Rachel Sara who coined the concept of them existing ‘between the studio and the street’. Her work emphasises that while live projects give students an opportunity to design outside the simulacra of design practice in the studio, they also reinvigorate the studio as a place of critical reflection and discussion.
In my subsequent research, I came to understand live projects as critiques of normative educational models. By engaging students with the world outside the studio, live projects require students to critically examine their assumptions about the knowledge and skills required by the curriculum.
As we explain in the property Critical Pedagogy, while critical pedagogy can be a property of studio, it is not an innate property of studio. Furthermore, while certain aspects of critical pedagogy can be found in studio practices and approaches which are widespread – they are not always recognised as such. We have observed many studios operating which seem to be opposed to the principle of teachers and students being co-creators of a curriculum of liberation. This may be understandable – to be a critical pedagogue in studio requires determination to overcome the deeply embedded power structures of the university.
