The Personal is Pedagogical

For a profession so concerned with finding spatial solutions, we’ve proven incapable of finding the social solutions needed to make our profession more equitable. When we claim architecture serves the needs of people, it seems we aren’t talking about our own people. And as much of this book seems to evidence, many of us feel marginalised by our profession, facing unreasonable expectations, poorly remunerated, and barely belonging. Yet, here many of us still are. If understanding a ‘people problem’ starts with understanding ourselves, then a collective solution can only be predicated on our ability to question our individual behaviours in our everyday practice and teaching. We can’t continue to see the internal inequalities of the architecture profession as a third party problem. This applies just as much to pedagogy – our methods and practices of teaching – as it does to practice. Neoliberalism³ maintains that professional hierarchies are generated by different levels of ability and experience, and that these are essential to maintain competitive advancement. Those positioned lower down the food chain, or who don’t get promoted, are simply not good enough, and only a few of us have what it takes to get to the top. Within this system, success is contingent on us assuming gender androgyny rather than identity, separation rather than collaboration, and by competing with each other rather than against the problem. But if we assume that in shaping education we will change the profession in which these individuals go on to practice, what role does pedagogy and its proselytisers play in changing professional inequality? Moreover, are women academics – who are problematically positioned within the academy – best placed to tackle the problem, or due to their minority position, less able than men to do so?

Design Heroine Architecture, all-female start up formed by Harriet Harriss and Suzi Winstanley after graduating from the Royal College of Art in 2003

Wicked Sisters

If the late Zaha Hadid’s media reputation is anything to go by, women architects seeking to belong to the minority starchitecture canon must assume stereotypically masculine behaviours.⁴ However, none of the successful female practice directors I know well assume the ‘unbelievable arrogance’⁵ attributed to Zaha – in fact, quite the opposite. They are more often driven by a crisis of confidence, as opposed to conceit, surrounding their talent. Female academics are no different. Academic isolation is endemic and collegiate activity has been eroded within an increasingly under-resourced and oversubscribed sector – for all academics, not just women.

For women academics, however, minority status, particularly in positions of leadership, means there are gender-specific ‘role model’ pressures to contend with, involving increased levels of scrutiny that serve to further exacerbate levels of isolation.⁶ Women academics across the disciplines have also reported taking greater responsibility for nurturing and supporting colleagues and students and performing more academic ‘housekeeping’ as ‘good department citizens’ than their male counterparts,⁷ despite the fact that they are more likely to be part-time and paid less.⁸ Like women architects, their career progression and remuneration fails to reflect that of their male academics, further augmenting the pressure to work longer hours in pursuit of elusive promotions.⁹ While many comparisons have been made between the isolation-generating, long hours culture of architectural practice and design studio all-nighters, that academic life suffers similarly remains relatively undiscussed.¹⁰

The increasing casualisation of the academic workforce further contributes to a sense of precariousness,¹¹ which has implications for both the quality of the teaching and the quality of life any employee should feel entitled to. The combined implications of these pressures may account for why many women academics are significantly less likely to have children than their male colleagues and than women in other types of employment.¹² Indeed, a US study revealed that women academics with children were working close to 100 hours per week when housework and childcare were factored into the equation.¹³ And while the feast-famine structure of the academic calendar gives the illusion of extended periods of rest and recovery during student vacation periods, the reality is that student down-time is consumed by assessment, performance metrics analyses, forward planning and management, meeting research output demands, and only briefly depleting inboxes.

Consequently, female academics concerned about a lack of collegiate spirit or sense of support from other women, should not view this as evidence of a lack of need or desire to commiserate or collaborate in finding solutions. However, we cannot wholly attribute the problem to the academe, any more than practitioners can wholly blame their architectural practices. Added to the isolation and precariousness, women’s increased susceptibility to ‘imposter syndrome’ – the feeling that despite our achievements, we are about to be identified as failing¹⁴ – ferments into a particular kind of competitiveness, one where self-preservation seems decidedly lacking. This was illustrated at a recent debate in London on gender in architecture when an esteemed Harvard academic and architect proudly shared how she had returned to the office hours after a caesarean section, haemorrhaging, and against the advice of her physicians.¹⁵ The message to a mixed-gender audience overwhelmingly under the age of 35 was clear: to be a successful woman architect takes not only talent and passion but to act as if physiologically indestructible, too: willing to secrete infants between client meetings as evidence of commitment to the field. Some 30 years after it was first published, it’s disappointing to observe that the corrosive characteristics of female competition identified in Laura Tracy’s text, The secret between us: Competition among women, still persist.¹⁶ In her view, women have been socialised against fully participating in their economy and history by becoming secret competitors, creating a willingness to remain silent that has rendered us complicit in our own subordination.¹⁷ Subsequently, it may well take changing how we treat both ourselves and each other to send a better message to students about other ways of teaching and doing architecture. Arguably, no amount of pedagogic pioneering can prove effective if we fail to take pedagogy personally.

Archigrrle fanzine, Manchester School of Architecture, 1998

Power Pedagogies

Despite the ever changing nature of professional practice, architectural education has sought to limit what can and can’t be considered the activity of design in three ways:¹⁸ by pedagogically persisting in recognising and promoting male-centred actions;¹⁹ by generally allowing only those ‘leading the discipline’ to set benchmark precedent and mastery;²⁰ and by failing to acknowledge and respond to the male-centricity of its theorisation processes.²¹ The dominant pedagogic model in schools of architecture is the design studio, which aims to reproduce the characteristics – and, by implication, the typically hierarchical power relations – of professional practice. The design review or ‘crit’ has remained the assessment model of choice for more than 200 years, despite the lack of concrete empirical evidence proving its competitive and hierarchical nature is necessary for the training of professionals.²² Instead, architectural education venerates what Reyner Banham dubbed a ‘black box’ process, ‘recognisable by its output though unknown in its contents’,²³ and what Helena Webster described as ‘connoisseur’ processes where educators assume the role of, ‘a wine-taster of many years experience, not able to describe exactly what they are looking for but “knowing it when they find it”’.²⁴ Within this culture of pedagogic permissiveness – where the workings of teaching and assessment are obscured – tutor prejudices towards students can be more easily passed off as design discernment. Perhaps it is the contingent and socially constructed nature of what constitutes ‘good’ design that explains why architectural education remained largely under-theorised until relatively recently. A more sinister view might assume some educators fear that a robust pedagogy – one that offers consistency and parity – might infringe on the creative and speculative benefits of ambiguous teaching methods.

But for educators seeking to experiment with gender sensitive, gender neutral, or gender inclusive pedagogy, the model chosen will only succeed if it remains flexible enough to acknowledge that there could be many ways of working and many possible answers, not least because professional practice itself is full of ambiguity and uncertainty.²⁵ Attempting to remove ambiguity from design studio teaching and assessment altogether may not only prove impossible but it might also play into the hands of today’s neoliberalist audit culture, curtailing experimental pedagogies and experimental design portfolios. Instead, a ‘negotiated ambiguity’ – one where students’ work can be considered against the backdrop of their individual lives, and that they can assume a role in shaping – might better address the power inequalities within both prescriptive and permissive pedagogies.²⁶

Never Say Die, MA Architecture Design Thesis, Samuel Douek, CAMP-er-VAN, modified queer performance space

Co-Authored Pedagogies

Gender is, of course, not the only fruit. Women academics are most often from ‘privileged class and ethnic backgrounds’,²⁸ revealing the complex ways that gender intersects with the other identity ‘categories’ that cannot be separated out into discrete and pure strands.²⁹ Furthermore, students have been informed that they now operate within a post-feminist and postcolonial era where legislation has put an end to discrimination. The consequence of this is that students are encouraged to attribute negative learning experiences to themselves and not the system.³⁰ Perhaps even more concerning is that these individualised explanations for academic success and failure have been characterised as bespoke study options that support the needs of the diverse learner.³¹

As a result, pedagogies that overemphasise the value of ‘personalised’, ‘differentiated’ and ‘independent’ learning³² have become unwittingly complicit in the blame game, and distract educators from a more serious examination of how best to support the learning needs of an increasingly ‘super-diverse’ student cohort.³³

Architecture schools have also taken advantage of the fact that many students have been preconditioned by negative education experiences, meaning that they arrive at university with what Gill Crozier would describe as a damaged ‘learner identity’, willing to accept the likelihood of failure due to their disadvantaged background or outsider status.³⁴ These ‘strangers in paradise’ are in fact underserved by pedagogies that are a poor fit for the person, rather than the other way around. However, they are ‘damaged’ enough to accept that their academic performance is a personal rather than a structural or pedagogic problem.³⁵

Whereas ‘the educational milieu that incorporates these values simply reflects, reinforces, and reproduces the workings of the culture in which it is embedded’,³⁶ one of the core functions of higher education is in fact to challenge and advance established knowledge. A way forward is to involve students in questioning how their gender and other identities are categorised, even if these categorisations are nuanced by the intricate ways in which they intersect with different social contexts and spaces.³⁷ Historically, previous studies have sought to assert that women and other minorities learn differently, looking to biology rather than society to explain academic performance differentials as a means to perpetrate learner segregation.³⁸

Arguably, if gender identity, ethnicity, disability, class, and sexual orientation are understood to impact on educational performance, this should be considered a barometer of institutional rather than individual failings. Rather than ignore how students’ often multiple identities impact on education, we should be exploring ways to benefit from them: harnessing student super-diversity as a means to enrich, redefine, and refocus both our discipline and our profession, and to make our graduates better able to serve the needs of a diverse society in professional life. Or as Sherry Ahrentzen and Kathryn Anthony argue, ‘Why don’t our social identities as architects affect the shape of the designed environment? Does our present socioeconomic structure attempt to shape all of us to be a certain type of hired gun?’³⁹

Conclusions

If gender-free or gender neutral education plays into the hands of neoliberalist agendas that would have us blame our educational failures upon our personal decisions rather than our biological and socio-economic differences, what are the alternatives? The evidence suggests that even gender sensitive pedagogies⁴¹ risk becoming fixed and compromised by the shifting intersectional challenges presented by our multiple identities. Indeed, we exist beyond our fixed identities, occupying categories that may not even have evolved yet, and possess identities – such as age and ability – that are changed by time, not by volition. By implication, our pedagogies must not only be open, flexible, and negotiated, but perhaps most importantly, critical. Indeed, the very existence of this book demonstrates that awareness of or sensitivity to the problem is not enough. What’s needed instead is what Paolo Freire described as critical ‘consciensisation’,⁴² whereby students are able to question the categories in which they find themselves, scrutinise the knowledge frameworks that drive them, and confront those whose interests and agendas these categories best serve.

By doing this, educators empower students to become authors of new forms of knowledge, which, all universities are by definition committed to producing. In today’s school of architecture, even women of the same age, class and ethnicity display massive differences in how they tackle identical design problems. By implication, these categories don’t prescribe a way of doing things any more than they offer a sense of belonging, and as many feminist writers have noted, the shared identity of gender has failed to secure a sense of female communality.⁴³ Instead, as feminists such as Alison Weir explain, we experience a continual ‘shift from metaphysical to an ethical and political model of identity: from a static to a relational model… that focuses on what matters, what is meaningful for us – our desires, relationships, ideals.’⁴⁴ Arguably, this could be applied to any category of identity besides gender. Consequently, an education committed to diversity in all its forms should pledge to support and enable this life-determining, vital, and even fragile process of transformation and emergence in all of our students – unequivocally, with compassion, not just conviction, and by holding nothing back.

It is hoped that this short analysis of the ways in which students’ educational experiences are informed by pedagogic, disciplinary and structural influences has given us a lens through which we might better discern the range of prejudices affecting our profession, and not just the problems faced by women alone. As both a disciplinary and professional community, we have yet to successfully address these imbalances, but before us is an opportunity to collectively open up the possibilities for experimental discussions that can scrutinise, challenge, and reconfigure things differently. However we can’t do this by waiting for societal and economic meta-structures to shift, or without a will to make this personal rather than solely professional and to reveal who we are, share our experiences, our stories, our hopes, and our difficulties. We have to be conspicuous in committing ourselves to widening participation in our discipline, and to becoming more representative of the society we seek to serve. We need to renew our vows to social justice, beginning with how we treat each other. By raising awareness of privilege and not just inequality, and acting to mitigate these,⁴⁵ we create the environment in which we can change the nature of the architecture profession that only a societally representative cohort can offer. Without it, universities and indeed the profession will only continue to miss out on creating a richly diverse academic environment geared towards maximising social, and not just spatial, impact. We are not exonerated just because the discrimination we are struggling with can be found in multiple social and professional contexts besides our own. As long as architects insist they are able to transform society at the scale of the master plan (or mistress plan, for that matter), to change the society of our education programme or our practice office is surely well within our capability.