A pedagogy of anachronism: learning through a misfit between theory and practice

Abstract

This paper presents a pedagogy of anachronism where learning occurs through a misfit between theory and practice. It was developed and tested in a class taught from 2016 to 2019, where students repeated Kevin Lynch’s original 1960 experiment on cognitive mapping in a location much smaller in scale and with a very different social composition from the cities that Lynch analyzed. The deliberate misfit transformed a method designed to understand user perception into the very problem itself, provoking students to ask important epistemological questions and recognize the situatedness of theory. A pedagogy of anachronism resists the uncritical instrumentalization of canonical ideas and trains students to think deeply about the normative and epistemological basis of design/planning practice. The paper ends by suggesting different types of misfits that can extend this pedagogy for other learning objectives.

Keywords:

• critical pedagogy
• Kevin Lynch
• cognitive mapping
• urban design and planning
• anachronism

Acknowledgements

The author thanks Anna Shea Kleinsasser and Kimberly Yi Lum Geok for helping to organize and code the empirical materials for this essay. Also, a note of acknowledgement to all students of the class, as well as Yale-NUS and Tembusu College, for participating in this experiment. Finally, the author extends his gratitude to the editors and two reviewers for pushing him to clarify the objectives and contributions of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 University Town is a new extension to the campus of the National University of Singapore that opened in 2011. It contains six residential colleges, a liberal arts college as well as various research, educational and recreational facilities.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kah-Wee Lee

Kah-Wee Lee, Ph.D. Architecture (Designated Emphasis in Global Metropolitan Studies), is an Associate Professor at the Department of Architecture, National University of Singapore. Email: [email protected]