Note - This paper is linked to the ‘Control through Interaction’ positioning statement, because it describes a scenario that re-evaluates an accepted power hierarchy and places the user of the space in a directly collaborative relationship with the space itself.
Back to basics teaching methods can be described as a top down subordination of the student where the broader social and cultural norms are impressed upon the pupil. This traditional method is seen as a generational impartment of the moral and behavioural expectations that adults see as a requirement for participation in broader society. It requires the student to obediently and meekly yield to the information given by the teacher – questioning the information, or even the authority of the teacher is not an option.[1]
Today, there is still a high level of attention paid to traditional teaching methods. Some typical aspects of traditional learning that still prevail include rote learning with little or no attention paid to actually understanding the content, and maintaining a strict timetable of when in the development of the child certain items on the curriculum are learned. These strategies ignore the different ways of learning that children respond to and punish and fail student who cannot keep up with the schedule. The two problems exacerbate one another if the student does not fit with these very specific methods of learning, leaving them demoralised, isolated and left-behind. Furthermore, these methods of coercion conform the child’s development to the dominant religious, gender, class and language trends, homogenising the population and ignoring the individual.
The provision of an alternative method for pedagogy is not new. Indeed John Dewey, the prominent educational reformist, envisioned the role of education as an interactive, life relevant extension of democracy as early as 1897, although he only rounded out his theories with the publication of Experience and Education in 1938. A consistent theme in the writing of Dewey was to address democracy and its role in politics, education and journalism. Throughout his life, he argued that both education and learning are social practices and that, when scrutinised, the educational environment is also a social institution. According to him, in this environment, social reform could and should take place. The education of the student must be focused on allowing him/her to realise his/her full potential and to understand how they can use that potential for the greater good. He deplored the idea that education be about the acquisition of a pre-determined set of skills.
The theory of project based learning (PBL) has been developing since the early 50’s and is heavily related to the stance the Dewey took in terms of the students’ role in the classroom. Constructivist learning, especially the writings of Piaget (1952), Vigotsky (1978) and Rorty (1991), also plays a dominant role in PBL. Jean Piaget, the father of Constructivist Learning theory, held a firm belief that “the child is someone who creates their own moral world view, who forms ideas about right and wrong, and fair and unfair that are not the direct product of adult teaching and that are often maintained in the face of adult wishes to the contrary”[2]. He proposed, drawing on Kantian theory, that morality developed out of peer interaction and actual experience and was independent of authority or structures of power. Through his experiments in peer interaction as a ‘genetic epistemologist’, he was able to observe moral concepts such as reciprocity, justice and equality develop in the child separate from parental influence.[3] His theories can be distilled into a few core concepts.
· The MIND is in the head; focus on cognitive reorganisation.
· STUDENT AUTONOMY; thinking and learning responsibility in students’ hands to foster ownership.
· MEANINGFULNESS AND PERSONAL MOTIVATIONS; Learning related to personal ideas and experiences.
· CONCEPTUAL ORGANISATION/ COGNITIVE FRAMING; information organised around concepts, problems, questions, themes, interrelationships; activities frames within thinking related activity.
· PRIOR KNOWLEDGE AND MISCONCEPTIONS builds on prior knowledge and addresses misconceptions.
· QUESTIONING; promotes individual inquiry with open-ended questions; encourages question asking behaviour.[4]
Schools and organisations that lead the way in this kind of pedagogy include the Minnesota New Country School (11-12 grade), Indian Valley Academy (6-9 grade), High Tech High (6-12 grade) and KIDmob (7-8 grade). All four address the issue of student motivation in different ways. Minnesota New Country School’s primary focus is on learning life skills in projects that develop their own small community.[5] Indian Valley Academy in Greenville, CA focuses on projects that develop skills to direct students into the professional sphere; they actively mimic problems associated with certain professions and then intern 7th and 8th graders into those disciplines. High Tech High in Chula Vista, CA uses the lure of technology, and the pride associated with creating something. And KIDmob runs three-day design based intensives that focus on making, new skills, community centered projects and most of all fun. For many students, the achievement of high grades is not a motivating factor. These organisations aim to redirect that motivation into something that the students will respond to.
My research so far has struggled to find architectural typologies that either confront the deficiencies in the more traditional model, or specifically enable project based learning environments. High Tech High comes the closest, by having large pre-fabricated structures that can easily be repurposed as programme evolves, technologies change and the school develops. The design benefits from a clear hierarchy of public/private space to enable different scales of project collaboration while taking advantage of the mild Southern California climate with an outdoor learning Environmental Research Center, where student learn by doing. By and large, project based learning environments occupy the spaces of former back-to-basics schools and have to repurpose the space to subvert the implicit hierarchy in the architecture of the old regime.
This research addresses both structures of power and structures of change and is ripe for investigation. It adheres to my abstract of re-evaluating the hierarchies of power and subverting the representations of space.
[1] Experience and Education. John Dewey. P 1-5. Kappa Delta Phi (1938).
[2] Gallagher. P26. (1978)
[3] My Pedagogic Creed. John Dewey. P6. EL Kellogg & Co (1897)
[4] The Stanford Problem Based Learning Initiative. http://ldt.stanford.edu/~jeepark/jeepark+portfolio/PBL/skipintro.htm
[5] Passion for Learning: How Project Based Learning Meets the Needs of 21st Century Students. P11. Ronald J Newell. Rowman & Littlefield Education (2006).
