Teaching architecture through community engagement
By Hirbod Norouzianpour
Strategies for service learning in architectural education
Service learning is a structured learning experience that combines community service with preparation, reflection, and demonstration. Many academic fields, especially related to social sciences and health, are accustomed to this approach, yet it is not well established in design fields like architecture. Service learning (SL) can be summarized as a structured educational experience that tries to bring community service (engagement) and education together. It is important to not confuse SL with similar traditional approaches like the “charity model.” In the charity model, activities are co-curricular; the focus is mostly on the number of hours, focusing on students’ personal growth and providing a service to the community. In contrast, in the SL model, the pedagogical strategies emphasize the application of knowledge and using reflections to comprehend experiences in a way that is dialectical and mindful. Moreover, as a reciprocal and collaborative approach, the partnership between students and the community will benefit the recipient and the learners.
This relationship is based on symbiotic learning between the community and students. Although communities or organizations might benefit from SL, the service that they are receiving is not the main focus of these engagements. The community or the organization is seen as a co-educator, creating a learning environment and opportunities for students. A common misconception about SL is that the community partners need aid from students. In many cases, educators and the community must come up with a plan to involve the student in the process and create an opportunity that might not be a need. Additionally, this experience improves students’ skill sets by exposing them to real-world problems, giving them profound knowledge, dissipating stereotypes, reinforcing their sense of civic responsibility, and increasing awareness of career options. However, the nature of this approach can be challenging for students, instructors, and communities. Some of the challenges are related to the short period of the semester and its schedule. Likewise, weather or unexpected circumstances such as the pandemic can affect this teaching process. Moreover, inter-communication between stakeholders complicates SL because, in comparison to the traditional syllabus and established teacher-student relations, there are other players who should be considered. The instructor needs to build trust among all stakeholders, plan for the duration of the engagement, and prepare all sides before it starts. Commitment is another issue that can be challenging: The instructor needs to put a system in place that ensures students and the community are obligated to the terms in the short and long run. Finally, considering the diversity of people we are involving in the process is a key factor for success.
Besides those general challenges, other issues should be taken into consideration when it comes to the architecture curriculum. Considering the long tradition of architecture education, from the Beaux-Arts and Bauhaus schools in Europe to the NAAB-accredited schools in the United States, one of the challenges is introducing SL as an alternative method to this well-established system. The concept of SL is not difficult for classes and studios to adopt, but bringing faculties onboard can be a struggle. Also, it is complicated to find projects, organizations, and communities that are willing to engage with the school for the long term. This is particularly hard for architecture projects because most of them are costly, with tight schedules and several phases.
A successful SL process includes five stages: investigation, preparation, action, reflection, and demonstration, presenting a beneficial framework for the curriculum as the core of this model. Although every stage is referenced individually, they are interconnected and may be experienced simultaneously. The role of the instructor is to ensure that students meet the class learning objectives within this framework. Courses in architecture need to improve imaginative and creative-thinking skills, as well as the ability to analyze and critically assess problems, communicate and work in a team, and see the big picture while giving attention to the smallest detail. They also must impart a general knowledge of history and cultural and environmental concerns. SL not only helps with many hard skills that are crucial for architecture students, but it also enhances many soft skills, like communication and leadership, that would be difficult to address in a usual studio setting. More important, this approach increases the awareness of social responsibility among students and in some cases leads to a better understanding of cultural diversity, which is necessary for having truly sustainable and resilient architecture.
The first stage is investigating students’ level of curiosity and exposing them to the true needs and problems in the field. The second stage is preparing students by providing the knowledge they will need to fulfill course objectives. The third stage is taking action, based on the inquiry that has been done at the first stage, by implementing them in the four different types of service: direct, indirect, research-based, and advocacy. Reflection, as the fourth stage, is a crucial part of service learning and asks students to look back critically on what they have done in this process. This includes analyzing the situation, understanding the development process, planning, and even improving self-awareness. The last stage is demonstration, which can be translated as a presentation.. The students will practice sharing their insights and achievements during each stage to varied audiences (inside and outside of the school). These five stages make sure that students gain experience with a dependable and flexible structure that they can employ with confidence in similar situations. Accordingly, four action plans for architecture education curricula are discussed in the following, with some course suggestions.
Direct service requires students to serve others in person and have face-to-face interaction with community members. This direct interaction helps students learn to communicate effectively with different stakeholders, have a better understanding of society’s diversity, and gain profound knowledge about context. Direct service can be used for small adaptive-reuse and interior design projects, individually or in teams. Also, this can be a feasible method for updating traditional “community design centers” at design schools that work as professional firms and serve clients. This type of service involves students more in the programming phase, letting them analyze the community and the context, employ knowledge gained in other theory classes, reflect on their personal experiences, and eventually present the result to the community. The author had a similar experience as a student in spring 2016 during ecoMOD studio at the School of Architecture and Planning at the University of New Mexico, in which several student teams and faculty, under the supervision of John Quale (the architecture program’s chair and professor), worked on design-build projects for Habitat for Humanity. The only thing that makes this studio incomplete as an SL experience is the lack of a reflection component.
Indirect service requires students to assist an organization to fulfill a need but not interact with community members. Many schools facilitate professional engagement through internships, but most focus only on general exposure to the field, without having specific educational objectives and following the five stages of SL. Design schools can partner with organizations and architecture firms to assign goal-oriented tasks to students during internships, ask for reflection and demonstrated outcomes, and eventually evaluate students. In courses like systems integration, which teach the practical aspect of design, or courses related to sustainability and historic preservation that have a specific procedure, students can highly benefit from being mentored by professionals in those fields while learning different software.
Research-based action encourages students to conduct research on a problem and report their findings to an organization or the public. This method teaches students to analyze and assess problems critically and enhance their presentation skills. This can be easily implemented in many design-leadership, programming, and history/theory courses. In the SL method, students should find a way to present the outcomes to a community or organization that might be interested. A similar approach is common in historical preservation courses, but it should be reevaluated in the SL framework. In this approach, the investigation stage is important because students are going to discover a problem in a context, such as a building that doesn’t meet ADA codes or has a high carbon footprint, analyze the situation, and choose the right methods to present the findings.
Advocacy is an interesting type of action, requiring students to inform others about the importance of an issue and suggest ways to improve the situation. This approach is mostly missing in architecture schools, but it is getting more important as we move toward healthier and more sustainable communities. To raise awareness, students need to know the subject well to be convincing and accurate. This can be applied to courses that deal with code and regulation, social justice, programming, sustainability, and public health issues, especially at the graduate level. This process will highly improve students’ critical-thinking and leadership skills.
The nature of architecture education gives it great potential for incorporating the SL framework to enrich the experience of students in many ways. By creating this reciprocal relationship with communities, organizations, architecture professionals, and universities, we can create an effective framework for teaching, research, and community engagement in architecture education . In the SL method, like any other, students are evaluated at the end, so it is important to set defined progress measurements in the syllabus that can also reflect the insights of the community or organization. Finally, as the architecture design paradigm shifts toward sustainability and social justice, there is a growing interest in and need for community engagement and practice-based learning methods like service learning, and we need to optimize this method in architecture education.
Author Bio:
Hirbod NorouzianpourHirbod is a part-time faculty, teacher-assistant, and a fellow of the Engaged Pedagogy Graduate Fellowship program at University of New Mexico.