The Pedagogical is Political
The Routledge Companion to Architectural Pedagogies of the Global South
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Section 3: The Pedagogical is Political
The Pedagogical is Political
Extract from the introduction by
Extract from the introduction by
Harriet Harriss, Barry Curtis, and Ashraf M. Salama
Harriet Harriss, Barry Curtis, and Ashraf M. Salama
The third section of this companion offers a number of positions and cases that reveal subject-situated efforts to develop and implement pedagogies that are not only sensitive and responsive to their social, environmental, and political contexts, but grapple with larger questions of social justice, too.
This section begins with Cathi Ho Schar’s chapter on decolonization and prison design reform, which calls for pedagogies that serve to enable greater integration between systems and spaces to address institutional inequities. This involves a collection of place-based and community-engaged approaches and resources critical to creating more just institutional environments, remoteness of official judicial and architectural discourses from their traditions and concerns. Following this, Kirsten Dörmann, Solam Mkhabela, and Jennifer van den Bussche present a two-year design studio in Rosettenville in the suburbs of Johannesburg, South Africa that encouraged students’ to use a pop-up board game called Streetwise Six, to facilitate effective visualizations of local people’s stories into their designs for a community space.
A similar advocacy for pedagogies that empower and educate a wider community beyond architecture students alone, Yashaen Luckan’s chapter advocates for greater recognition of prior learning (RPL), illustrating how a validated model founded on decentralised learning and the evaluation of a complex body of knowledge, skills, and competencies that are not independent of values and worldviews shaped by lived experiences, could serve to catalyse alternative epistemologies of the Global South.
Writing across a range of regions, the work of Michele Gorman Jolanda Morkel, Hermie Elizabeth Delport, and Lindy Osborne Burton presents a case study featuring four pedagogues simultaneously and synchronously committed to collaborating across the four continents of Africa, Australia, and North America during the first year of the pandemic. It addresses the potential of remote connection as an opportunity to expand the exchange of materials, including culturally diverse philosophies and perspectives and their efforts to expose structural inequalities that characterize the traditional architectural design studio.
Another example of how to remedy the malaise of classroom-based pedagogy is presented by Smita Khan, who argues that the development of humane sensitivities in every academic discipline is critical, especially so in architecture and planning, offering a qualitative, ethnographic account of a B.Arch course that was designed and implemented in an Environment- Behavior Studies (EBS) class at Visvesvaraya National Institute. Department of Architecture and Planning, Nagpur, India. In the context of Chile, the work of Beatriz Maturana and Anthony McInneny presents a case that integrates critical issues on public space and protest, for considering the site of discourse as the site-as-studio, and for architectural education to place greater value on students engaging in local processes over institutional principles.
Brian McGrath unpacks the binary discourses based on the fundamental navigational directions of North/South and East/West by closely examining the recent history of the internationalization of architectural education at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, Thailand. The chapter emphasizes that the reform of architectural education today can be achieved by recognizing transversal forms of decolonial knowledge production beyond geographic and disciplinary boundaries. With reference to their own live project teaching at Beirut Arab University (BAU) in Lebanon, Nabil Mohareb and Ghina Yamak underscore the key challenges facing the implementation of live project pedagogies that in their case, despite international recognition, was forced to revert back to studio-based teaching after three successful years.
The section concludes with Mark Olweny’s call for disruptive experiments designed to challenge the historic and unquestioned traditions of contemporary architectural education that emerge from embedded ontological and epistemological positions. Focusing on East Africa the chapter instigates an in-depth exploration of the very essence of architectural education, and its inherited pedagogical approaches to appreciate their impact on how architecture itself is perceived and practiced. He invokes the notion of ‘invented traditions’ and explores the ways in which they were inappropriately and insensitively applied to architectural education in East Africa.
Harriet Harriss (RIBA, PFHEA, Ph.D.) is a qualified architect and Dean of the Pratt School of Architecture in Brooklyn, New York. Her teaching, research, and writing focus upon pioneering new pedagogic models for design education, as captured in Radical Pedagogies: Architectural Education & the British Tradition, and for widening participation in architecture to ensure it remains as diverse as the society it seeks to serve, a subject she interrogates in her book, A Gendered Profession. Dean Harriss is also recognized as an advocate for diversity and inclusion within design education and was nominated by Dezeen as a champion for women in architecture and design in 2019. Her latest book Architects After Architecture (2020), considers the multi-sector impact of an architectural qualification. Visit here for more information
Ashraf M. Salama (FRSA, FHEA, Ph.D.) is Full Professor in Architecture and Director of Research at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK. He has led three of architecture in Egypt, Qatar and the United Kingdom, two of which he has founded and was Head of the School of Architecture at the University of Strathclyde (2014-2020). With experience spanning across many contexts, he has been the director of research and consulting at Adams Group Architects in Charlotte, NC. He has published 14 authored and edited books including Demystifying Doha, 2013; Architecture Beyond Criticism, 2014; Spatial Design Education, 2015; Building Migrant Cities in the Gulf, 2019; Architectural Excellence in Islamic Societies, 2020; and Transformative Pedagogy in Architecture and Urbanism, 2021. He is the UIA 2017 Recipient of Jean Tschumi Prize for Excellence in Architectural Education and Criticism. Visit here for more information
Ane Gonzalez Lara is an assistant professor of undergraduate architecture at Pratt Institute School of Architecture. Ane is the co-founder of Idyll Studio. Her professional work with Idyll balances social and cultural concerns with extensive formal and material research. She has developed academic research initiatives as part of her studio teaching that have examined the United States-Mexican border and the Korean demilitarized zone. She received her Master equivalent degree from the Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura, Navarra, Spain. She is a registered architect in Texas and Spain. Prior to working at Pratt, she taught at the University of New Mexico and the University of Houston. Her research interests include pedagogy, and social and climate justice topics as they relate to the built environment. Visit here for more information
Barry Curtis is Associate Director of Doctoral Programmes at University of the Arts, London. He was previously Professor and Head of Arts Research at Middlesex University, and has taught at the Open University, the London Consortium, The British Film Institute, Birkbeck College and the Royal College of Art. Barry is Experienced Tutor with a demonstrated history of working in the design industry. Skilled in Contemporary Art, Museums, Research Design, Lecturing, and Cultural Heritage. Visit here for more information
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