Pedagogical Values Statement
The following principles, when taken collectively, embody my pedagogical position on the role of design education and the responsibilities of design educators.
As an educator and administrator, I believe that:
It is the centrality of the design studio experience that distinguishes design education from most other forms of academic and intellectual inquiry. Not only does the design studio provide the necessary arena to develop individual creativity, it is also a testing ground for ideas, a forum for research and a place of presentation and debate. The process of analysis, synthesis and proposal is reinforced by an iterative model that develops over the sequence of instruction that increases in complexity and sophistication. While knowledge increases rapidly and integration of new skills must occur at every moment, it does so without losing sight of, compromising or contradicting all that preceded.
Design learning best takes place in a structured environment of shared values that are made clear by a collectively understood and agreed upon pedagogical model that becomes less constrained and controlled in the later years as students develop fluency and mastery of their discipline.
There is more that unifies the various design disciplines and departments in a College of Architecture and Environmental Design than separates them and that interdisciplinarity should be highly valued.
Design erudition and the valorization of design and its allied arts should be ubiquitous in the university; both as a subject area within the general studies curriculum and as part of disciplinary specific professional design degrees. Our universities and the schools of design need to do a better job of educating citizens to understand and appreciate design. If we are to continue constructing a vibrant arts culture, every citizen should be an educated and erudite consumer of “design” and the fine arts and that is in part the work of the university.
The creative activity as a from of scholarship which is produced by faculty in professional design schools located within research universities should be recognized in the university as having equal value to the more traditional forms of research and scholarship that our colleagues in the sciences and the humanities produce.
As professional design schools, we must be diligent in ensuring that students of design receive both an expansive humanist general education along with their discipline-specific training and professional skills.
The professions of architecture, interior design and landscape architecture all have their own specific bodies of disciplinary knowledge that can be transmitted from one generation to the next and which should be taught using sound pedagogical methods. While the methods of teaching may vary by instructor, course and sequence, they should generally involve both didactic instruction and Socratic dialogue.
The models of the Teacher-Scholar and the Teacher-Practitioner are both valuable. The academy should have a role and a place for both.
The study of the building arts (whether it be in a pre-professional or a professional program) is both a specialized discipline and a critical discourse; involving intellectual inquiry and conceptual thinking as well as skill-based training and formal techniques. As such, it should be informed by a constellation of intellectual ideas and by a grounding in professional competencies.
Good design thinking involves both the responsibility of contextual accommodation and an opportunity for the advancement of new ideas and that these are neither mutually exclusive nor ideologically contradictory.
A belief in the value of the city and in the value of the natural landscape and that smart design should valorize and sustain bot
A belief in the modern movement’s societal commitment to imagine and construct healthier, more responsible and more affordable structures and environments.
A belief in the power of innovation and progress.
A belief in the value of the historical continuum and the value of constraints imposed by tradition and convention.
A belief in the relation between aesthetic expression and construction method.
A belief that critical design thinking is a form of intellectual inquiry and that the domain of design knowledge is emerging as a distinct domain of knowledge with a history and a methodology. The domain constitutes a third domain of knowledge within the academy that is both independent of and complimentary to the sciences and the humanities.
A belief in the idea of the city, and a belief that it has been and will continue to be the most potent expression of a society, a culture and the collective will of a people.