Collaborative Professionalism

A common theme running through contemporary debates about professionalism and lifelong learning is the asserted requirement for individual responsibility in continually updating personal skills and knowledge. This personal maintenance of one’s employability clearly applies to professionals working in the various spheres of the built environment and also in higher education. The wider context of the learning society and emphasis on lifelong learning for a knowledge-based economy provide important structural elements in drawing attention to the need for individuals both to ‘perform’ and continually to learn and critically reflect. Importantly, individuals are required to demonstrate quality and, ultimately, to take responsibility for managing their own employment viability in a range of complex contexts.

This professional developmental pursuit takes a different form in the academic environment. Beaty (1998), for example, has highlighted the dual requirements facing academics where there is a need to extend an explicit knowledge base in a subject discipline alongside understanding appropriate ways of facilitating learning and understanding. This so-called double professionalism potentially provides useful opportunities for sharing the requirements of professional development with students. Indeed, in the classroom there is scope for teaching the facets and responsibilities of modern professionalism together with modelling the reflective practitioner. Importantly, academics’ wider profiles and activities may also be considered integral to the professional learning environment for students, though how students shape their own professional identities in respect of this cultural context is open to question.

In terms of developing and maintaining academic effectiveness, it would appear that there are a number of different ways in which individual educators may work to enhance their teaching skills but also seek to make sense of the contemporary responsiblities of academic scholarship and professional education through teaching programmes, research activities and scholarly dissemination. Systematic self-study or action research or working with peers can variously assist securing relatively more transformative individual learning. Importantly, built environment academics often have access to the possibility of working with colleagues from different disciplines and this is an opportunity that should not be squandered. Gaining perspectives from outside one’s professional discipline can be highly beneficial in seeing issues afresh and identifying new modes of joint working. Scope for collaborative learning may arise through the use of peer observation (or review) of teaching, for example, providing opportunities to gain insights from both students and colleagues, as well as seeing how the same teaching spaces can be used in different ways by other disciplines.

From a disciplinary angle, useful opportunities exist for peer learning through the peer review process involved in publishing scholarly articles. Both re-view processes, however, have the potential to assist professional enhancement in different ways by creating new windows for seeing issues from a fresh perspective. A dedicated commitment to collaborative peer learning in particular may unleash professional potential, although this necessitates care in building relationships and nurturing mutual trust (Peel and Shortland, 2004). In pressured environments where a sense of personal ambition for professionalism will likely demand further creativity and innovation, working with colleagues and peers will potentially become increasingly important, and require active attention to emotional aspects. Ways to develop a contemporary model of professionalism, and methods to support collaborative learning, then become essential in preparing our students for the modern workplace if they are to move beyond the atomised acquisition of skills and competencies to a mode of shared collaborative learning in complex professional environments.

This Issue

This international issue comprises four co-authored papers and concludes with a sole authored paper. Though not a themed issue, it is nevertheless interesting that the articles complement each other, raising questions about inter-relations between professional institutes, professionals and practitioners, and pointing to different skills sets relating to shared learning and collaboration. Related to this, there are associated insights into questions around civil society and citizenship and different communities of learning. Interestingly, the research studies reported also variously reinforce the argument that creativity and innovation can be fostered through various modes of collective working.

The issue begins with a timely paper on assessment and formative assessment in particular. The paper provides a comprehensive literature review and a detailed case study of different perceptions on the use of formative assessment in one institution. In their discussion of how to balance educational effectiveness and resource efficiency, Marilyn Higgins, Fiona Grant and Pauline Thompson from Heriot-Watt University, Scotland, highlight some of the challenges involved but also describe a number of practical and novel ways in which developmental support can be provided to students. Importantly, the study highlights the importance of reflecting on feedback and readers of the Journal may be interested in using the reflective template developed for this study in their own practice and institutions as a way to share insights and develop strategic approaches to assessment.

The second paper reports research by colleagues based at Aalto University, Finland, namely, Jonna Kangasoja, Mikko Mälkki, Sari Puustinen, Jukka Hirvonen and Raine Mäntysalo. Their survey and analysis offer a useful comparative perspective to international debates on planning education and competencies. Interestingly planning does not exist as an independent professional education in Finland and thus the authors bring an inter-disciplinary perspective to the discussion around professional identity and the consequences of acculturation in a particular disciplinary and professional milieu. Significantly, the debate and insights drawn will no doubt be of interest to academics and practitioners alike.

Hui Cai and Sabir Khan are based at Georgia Institute of Technology, USA, and offer a thoughtful study of how first year students make use of a hot-desking studio environment. The nature of, and pressures on, studio teaching is a familiar topic to readers of the Journal but here the authors address a less researched area, that of the relationship between the physical studio and learning. This focuses on the culture of the studio learning experience and the findings add to our understanding of the variety of benefits of this learning space and how adaptable the studio format can be in practice. The methodology used provides a rich case study and will be of potential benefit to educators wishing to better understand and use the complex of inter-relations of the studio to enhance the student learning experience.

The penultimate article in this issue, Demonstrating New Possibilities for Playful Collaboration: Claystation [Making Auckland], is a collaborative paper by New Zealand colleagues, Cris de Groot of the Unitec Institute of Technology, Bonnie Parfitt from McCormick Rankin Cagney, and Dory Reeves and Kathy Waghorn from the University of Auckland. Claystation is an event platform that aims to engage people in the process of design through structured play which raises questions about how to foster active participation and stimulate interaction in multi-player contexts. Their study reports an action research project of a three-day participatory event using pictures and video together with reflections from participants and observers. The paper provokes questions about the type of environment and techniques which are appropriate to stimulate creative thinking.

This issue concludes with an article written by a practising planner, Judith Winters, who addresses the issue of children’s participation in planning and regeneration in the classroom. This paper is interesting on a number of counts. First, the paper provides insights into the continuum of planning education, the concept that education and professional training extends across one’s life-time. Promoted by the Royal Town Planning Institute (2003, p.4) as a way to understand professional knowledge progression, the concept is also important because it asserts the ‘general educational needs of an interested civil society’. Second, the paper provides an interesting perspective on the potential ways in which the built environment can be integrated into early learners’ curricula and facilitate understandings of citizenship. Finally, the paper is to be welcomed since the project on which this paper was based was undertaken as part of a Master’s programme. As such, the paper further extends the notion of an academic continuum and the importance of professional collaborations across academic-practice contexts. Taken as a whole, this issue provides a welcome range of new insights into addressing contemporary professional challenges.