Transformative Pedagogies: Trajectories Towards Transformative Design Education

How can architectural education prompt and support students to embrace architecture as a transformative process towards shared understandings and a call for shared actions? Transformative pedagogy has been defined as “a learning process that seeks to contextualise contemporary issues as active learning instruments for pro-active response” (Salama 2015, 310). In this paper, the authors will present three trajectories for promoting transformative pedagogy that comprise a non-self-referential approach to architectural education: Othering, Complementing, and De-gendering. The authors describe each trajectory in relation to course offerings and learning experiences at the School of Architecture and Community Development (SACD), University of Detroit Mercy and illustrate the transformative pedagogical theories and practices that inform and support an educational model and transdisciplinary content that is built outside-in versus inside-out. We conclude that adopting this transformative pedagogical framework can support a radical shift in architectural education that historically has prioritize disciplinary knowledge and skills rather than responsibilities to others, communities, and societies.

https://doi.org/10.35483/ACSA.Teach.2023.22

Volume Editors
Massimo Santanicchia

ISBN
978-1-944214-44-9