"Best Learning Experience Ever Invented"

Head's up. The gauntlet is about ready to fall.

Prove to me that ANY academic experience is better aligned with School 2.0 -esque goals than a "design studio".

(Psst: the same type of "design studio" that existed a 100 years ago, before the "industrial age" school was even a curse word!)

Go ahead. Prove it!

(photo link)

My biases as a 'school design' kind of guy on this topic are pretty entrenched. Even more so after having taught architecture/design/planning to high school kids over the last few years.

That being said, I'll let James Barker, the President of Clemson University say it for me via a 3/08 article in The Chronicle of Higher Education:

"In my view, the architecture design studio is the best learning experience ever invented to produce the kind of deep, engaged learning and creative graduates that are so needed today."

Did you hear that? "...the best learning experience ever invented..."

He continues:

"Small groups of students work with a master teacher on a semester-long or yearlong team project to design solutions to a specific problem or to meet a particular need. Some projects are purposely fanciful, purely imaginative. Others, often the best projects, tackle real problems for actual clients."

Why does he say that?

"That's because architecture offers one of the last Renaissance educations available. At its best, it strikes just the right balance between art and science, the creative and the pragmatic. I often tell people I learned everything from plumbing to poetry in architecture school, and I use every bit of that knowledge as president of Clemson University."

As a trained/licensed architect, he's a rare breed in the University President camp. As a voice of learning in the future, hopefully his ideas aren't so rare.

Why?

Take a gander at this gem he offers:

"It seems, at times, as though our entire campus is one big studio. My goal is to have every undergraduate participate in such a research or creative-inquiry experience before he or she graduates."

Or:

"On a much deeper level, however, I believe architectural education offers a model of how we can meet some of the clearest challenges facing universities today.

How do we teach creativity? Where do ideas come from? How do we educate fact-based critical thinkers and individualists? How do we then teach those students to communicate, to understand one another and other cultures, and to work well together as part of a larger team?

Those are the demands and expectations of higher education in the 21st century. It is a matter of national concern in a world where prosperity aligns so clearly with innovation and a creative, knowledge-based economy, and we must not fail."

You a fan of School 2.0 and all that jazz? Like that Dan Pink fella?

Really?

Then tell me ONE academic program -- that encompasses EVERY intellectual and hands-on discipline you can think of -- that matches the "design studio" pound for pound in terms of what YOU think should define learning in the future.

Oh, yeah, and don't forget this:

"And, as the American Institute of Architects says on the Web site of its Communities by Design initiative: "There's a reason you became an architect. It wasn't just about buildings. It was about people, it was about making communities more livable.""

NOT just about buildings. Not at all.

Amen!

Comments

[Fred Bartels]

Christian,

Go hang out in your school's upper school art studio. If you have a well-developed visual arts program it is going to look and feel very much like an architectural design studio. In my book on learning with laptops I proposed that if you want to know what the classroom of the future will/should look like all you need to do is visit your art department's spaces.

Fred

[Theo Kuechel]

I agree 100%, I have not found anything that comes close to the UK Art Schools in the sixties. Formative experiences that I still drawn upon regularly, and have always tried to include somehow in teaching, at any level.