Critical Pedagogy

Inclusive learning

Inclusive Learning Toolkit, 2023 - ongoing

This 'project in development' is being co-produced by students and staff from the Sheffield School of Architecture to support and promote a culture of inclusive learning within and beyond the school as part of our ongoing work as a 'social school of architecture’. We acknowledge that being an inclusive school is very much a ‘work in progress’ and that there is much work still to be done.Taking the format of a googlesite, the toolkit includes our inclusive learning manifesto, which articulates a collective understanding of what inclusive learning means for the Sheffield School of Architecture. The manifesto is structured as a set of values and a forward looking agenda. A library of best practice case studies and downloadable learning templates then serves as a resource to distribute responsibility for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion within the school, empowering staff and students alike with the tools to build and sustain an inclusive learning environment that reflects our values. Our future ambition for the site is for it to become an open platform sharing ideas across schools and this would be the first step in moving towards that.Toolkit, EDI, Pedagogy, Participation, Critical pedagogy, Wei Shan Chia and Cith Skelcher

Feminist pedagogy

SSoA Feminist Library, May 2020 - Present

In March 2020 SSoA staff and students organised a Feminist Teach Out to explore feminist foundations, fields and futures and celebrate 20 years of feminist activity at SSoA. Many participants at the event expressed interest in having access to the work produced in the school over the years under this banner.During the last decades, numerous students have produced design and theoretical projects addressing feminist topics and methodologies which remained invisible to the wider School community. Much of the feminist work in the School took more intangible forms such as conferences, events and discussions which remained fully or partially unrecorded.The Feminist Library at SSoA will include an archive, in which previous outputs (dissertations, publications, theses, design projects, event recordings and testimonials) will be documented and stored, and a live part in which new events, activities, and debates will be posted in real time. The Feminist Library will be launched during a special event in November and disseminated across UK and international HE institutions. This will be a key resource for students and staff and will ensure that SSoA continues to set the agenda in feminist pedagogy and research.Website, EDI, History and Representation, Pedagogy, Participation, Critical pedagogy, Carolyn Butterworth and Cith Skelcher

Feminist pedagogy

Feminist School of Architecture Teachout, 5th March 2020

20 years ago SSoA staged a 'Feminist School of Architecture take over', where organisers and collaborators took over the tower for a day, running a series of events exploring gender, politics, power and space. This year's strike provided the opportunity for teaching staff and students alike to come together this time out in the city to restage this event 20 years on and to explore what a 'Feminist School of Architecture' might mean. The tone of the event was both critical and celebratory, with a range of discussions on topics from intersectionality and housing through to feminist pedagogy and more interactive/performative pieces including testimonials and a feminist activity mapping exercise. The event captured a growing resurgence of feminist activity within the school and has planted ideas for further events and initiatives, such as the SSoA Feminist Library.'We have been teaching online for a week now and I had the chance to talk to some of the students who were at the teach-out. During the tutorials they express with enthusiasm how the event was a transformative experience for them and explain how this influenced their manifestos and positioning. These are brief but powerful moments that show how the Feminist School of Architecture have created alternative routes of thinking for students.I wanted to share with you the invisible consequences of our collective experience that I think is as powerful as the invisible virus intruding in our collective bodies'Emre AkbilEvent, EDI, Pedagogy, Placemaking, Critical pedagogy, Catherine Skelcher

Image Equality Project Introduction and Links.docx

Student resource and research

Image Equality Project, 2020 - ongoing

The Image Equality Project has the simple aim of creating a more diverse range of source images of people, for students to use in their design work. The initiative was established in 2020, to create an open access resource for the School that offers png and CAD/vector line images of people that are more diverse in their: ethnicity, ability, activity and social grouping. It is hoped that this will enable students to inhabit their work with people that are more specific and relevant to context, programme, location, brief, agenda and approach.‘Intersectionality’ was used as a critical framework to develop the inclusive archive of bodies that could otherwise disappear in intersectional margins. Intersectionality is a Black feminist concept introduced by Kimberle Crenshaw and was initially used for critiquing discrimination and/or exclusion of black women in feminist and anti-racist politics. Thus it is important to produce embodied representations at different intersections: black+women, asian+disabled, non-binary+white.By introducing 2nd Year undergraduate students to Crenshaw's work and in enabling them to reconsider how we categorise and discriminate by the representation of peoples in their design work, students started to collect a more diverse set of representative people and consider in more depth the implications of their decisions. It also provoked students to consider how the representation of people in their work conveyed a socio-ethical position about their values as an architect. The archive of source images is a live resource that students are encouraged to contribute to, in order to keep it diverse, relevant and useful.Journal Article, EDI, History and Theory, Pedagogy, Critical pedagogy, Emre Akbil and Leo Care

Page updated

Google Sites

Report abuse