Signature Pedagogies and the Built Environment

In a lecture hosted by the National Research Council’s Center for Education, Shulman (2005) contrasted the different roles and responsibilities of faculty staff teaching students within subject areas or disciplines and those teaching students intending to practise within a professional area. Given the practice-oriented fields in which many built environment students go on to be employed such a distinction is evidently important. In particular, the asserted differences invite questions around professional specificities in terms of knowledge and skills and the relative idiosyncrasies of individual built environment disciplines. Moreover, considerations around the nature of professional education and its intended outcomes drive to the core of the sometimes uncomfortable relationships between universities, industry and the professions (Griffiths, 2004). These debates are critical for the aspirant professional.

Shulman’s (2005) remarks were made in the context of teaching specific practitioners — in his case teachers — and he observed that:

when you’re preparing someone to teach, then preparing them to know, to think, to understand what they need to understand in order to practice is just the beginning. There is much more. The educator in a profession is teaching someone to understand in order to act, to act in order to make a difference in the minds and lives of others — to act in order to serve others responsibly and with integrity.

His argument is of considerable interest because he asserts that knowledge is professionally grounded and situated; that professionalism is ethically based and service-oriented; and that experience of a signature pedagogical approach reinforces professional formation and professional preparedness. It follows that individual professional disciplines invoke discrete professional pedagogies which serve to facilitate integration into specific cultural environments.

Grounding his comments in relation to the work of the Carnegie Foundation’s studies of education in the professions, Shulman characterises professional education more generally as a synthesis of three apprenticeships. These he describes as comprising:

a cognitive apprenticeship wherein one learns to think like a professional; a practical apprenticeship where one learns to perform like a professional; and a moral apprenticeship where one learns to think and act in a responsible and ethical manner that integrates across all three domains. (2005, emphasis added)

Such a holistic apprenticeship model, it is held, prepares students with knowledge for action. This tripartite conceptualisation has particular resonance for educators working in the built environment where students are exposed to a range of future professional routes; indeed, such routes are often professionally accredited and explicitly mapped in accordance with specified learning outcomes. In line with professional body requirements, formal education is followed by a period of practice involving an assessment of professional competence based on critical reflection (see McCarthy, 2011). The on-going maintenance of chartered membership and professional competency to practise is then assured through continuing professional development and adherence to a professional code of conduct (Peel, 2005). Taken together, these progressive stages form an educational continuum that reinforces and shapes a particular professional identity. The significance of Shulman’s (2005) signature pedagogy concept is that it suggests that individual professions bring distinctive teaching and learning instructional strategies into play. In seeking to stimulate debate about this concept with respect to the built environment, I use this editorial to consider briefly some of the interesting issues raised by the notion of signature pedagogies.

Signature pedagogies: ritualising the visible and accountable student?

It is useful to note, perhaps, that Shulman’s (2005) construction of signature pedagogies appears to flow from his articulation of what it means to be a professional. Previously Shulman (1998, p.525) elaborated the features of a profession as comprising ‘moral vision, theoretical understanding, practical skills, the centrality of judgment, learning from experience and the development of responsible professional communities’, thereby emphasising both the technical and moral dimensions of preparing for professional activity. This summary of the characteristics of professionalism emphasises individually informed action but also highlights membership of a wider professional community. Socialisation into particular communities of practice then comes to the fore.

In advancing the concept of signature pedagogies, Shulman (2005) contends that instructional strategies are intrinsic to the way individuals are prepared for professional practice. In effect, he argues that specific learning strategies within the professions are tightly linked with individual disciplines. This can be illustrated, for example, by the use of active participation of students in clinical rounds in medicine where students are encouraged to observe, practise (experience) and teach (reflect), colloquially dubbed the ‘see one, do one, teach one’ principle. Shulman highlights a number of interesting points about this approach to learning in clinical practice. First, there is the routine nature of the round, involving a multi-generational cohort. He suggests that this method of peer learning and acquiring practical experience almost assumes the status of a ritual. In effect, participants progressively learn the rules of engagement and assume new roles and responsibilities. Second, and within this small group bedside context, he highlights the visibility of participants within each clinical team, emphasising that students must remain alert as they might have to perform at a moment’s notice; remaining anonymous is not an option. This brings into play a third feature of signature pedagogies, that of student accountability to the professional group.

Visibility and accountability can also be achieved in large group contexts. The importance of the design of the physical learning environment is particularly evident in Shulman’s law school example. In American colleges lectures conventionally take place in a curved auditorium where the very curvature of the seating assists students to see each other and the lecturer. The conditions of visibility, audibility and public accountability are further reinforced through a routinised approach initiated from the first year of law degrees where lecturers randomly invite a student to provide an oral account of a case. The use of the case dialogue method and so-called ‘teacher-as-sniper’ model then involves asking a different student (again randomly) if he or she agrees with the explanation given by the first student. The logic of this approach is that students cannot be certain when they might be called upon to perform and are thus being primed for public speaking and case analysis. Moreover, every student is thereby encouraged to come prepared for class, accountable to the cohort, and alert to the art of answering in the heat of the moment. This style of teaching is founded on introducing students to the cultural rules of the game in first year so that they can build up this professional capability.

Drawing on these two different examples, Shulman asserts that signature pedagogies may become distinctive in relation to particular disciplines. He suggests they are often embedded and routinised so that students become habituated to that style of thinking and performing. Relatively pervasive across institutions they thereby become an intrinsic feature of the socialisation of that profession. Interestingly, Shulman warns against introducing unnecessary novelty in teaching approaches since, contrary to arguments that innovation stimulates student interest, new instructional strategies risk placing additional strain on both students and lecturers due to the costs involved of assimilating new teaching, learning and assessment arrangements. Instead, Shulman contends that students are best motivated by exciting material. It follows that if a professional education has a recognisable pedagogical approach that persists over a programme and related courses students can build up their expertise, transfer to another institution for a year abroad, for example, and take feedback from their performance on one module into a subsequent course. There would also appear to be arguments to support the development of students’ confidence since familiarity with the pedagogical approach can allow students to focus on acquiring new knowledge. Furthermore, instructional techniques to encourage constant visibility through individual contributions can also build public accountability and confidence through practice. Shulman (2005) also highlights that developments in new technologies have a role to play. He points to the potential afforded by the applied use of audience response systems which can record and identify student performance in class. In countering suggestions that strategies to increase the public visibility of students can cause anxiety (see, for example, Peel et al., 2010), Shulman (2005) suggests that (professional) ‘maturation involves transforming debilitating fear into tolerable anxiety’. Indeed, he observes that whilst live interactions with students can generate uncertainty for both students and lecturers, such contexts of uncertainty and dealing with the unexpected are germane to professional activity and help to prepare students for practice.

Implications for the built environment professions

As a relatively new concept, little has been written that explicitly discusses the usefulness of signature pedagogies and the relevance of the notion’s core characteristics in the built environment. In the context of architecture, however, one can point to the ubiquitous use of studio as a signature pedagogy, as the increasing number of JEBE articles relating to studio teaching testify. Moreover, the ‘crit’, also an established component of architecture, clearly exhibits the characteristics of fostering the visibility and accountability that Shulman (2005) advocates. Added to this, there have been a number of related debates raised in JEBE with respect, for example, to competency-based training (Newton, 2009); professional enculturation (Kangasoja, et al., 2010); and cognitive apprenticeships (Johnson, 2009) which address different aspects of professional socialisation.

In the context of this journal, the notion of adopting signature pedagogies for teaching students with particular professional trajectories and modes of practice in mind raises some interesting questions. For example: does a tripartite apprenticeship framework apply to the built environment subjects? If they indeed exist, what are the signature pedagogies deployed across the built environment? If they are well established are these instructional strategies still appropriate? Are particular apprenticeships emphasised over others? Are any aspects overlooked? To what extent are such signature pedagogies unique, shared or transferable? Are defined built environment signature pedagogies complementary or at odds with pedagogies used in related professions? Following on from this: if specific pedagogies exist do they prepare students for multi-professional team working and inter-disciplinary learning within the built environment (see also Chapman, 2009)? Does professional socialisation through a dominant signature pedagogy inhibit multi-disciplinary working or does it re-affirm a sense of professional identity and prepare students for a particular professional embodiment? Or, more broadly: to what extent do signature pedagogies assist or hinder the potential for forging creative collaborations across very different professional arenas (for a related article see Ellis et al., 2008)?

Shulman (2005) contends that signature pedagogies within the professions persist over time and space. Understood in this way, there is a risk that signature pedagogies become entrenched and foster silo professionalism that potentially undermines collaborative working. Arguments in the built environment sector in favour of working across boundaries or in public-private partnerships have challenged professional bureaucracies and cultures and assert the need for collaborative capacity building (Sullivan and Skelcher, 2002). Following Coughlin et al. (2010) and McElroy and Coughlin (2011), there appears to be scope for the transfer and exchange of signature pedagogies across very different disciplines and there is also a case to explore further the extent to which co-signatory pedagogical approaches might assist novice-professionals to work in multi-disciplinary teams in the built environment. Alert to the imperative of supporting students to cope with diversity, complexity and uncertainty, Kreber (2009) asserts the importance of being sensitive to teaching and learning within and beyond disciplinary boundaries, acknowledging that, whilst certain knowledge and practice is context (and professionally) specific, there are also occasions where concepts, procedures and practices are required to be context-transcendent. A challenge is thus to develop appropriate built environment instructional strategies to support our students to perform, assume a leadership role, and to be morally accountable within and across professional domains.

This Issue

This transatlantic issue begins with a paper by Rachel Sara from the University of the West of England in the UK that considers the potential of live project work across disciplines in higher education. The study is also concerned with facilitating student learning in both a university and community context. Sara states that it is difficult to simulate certain skills, such as professionalism, in a higher education context alone and advocates integrating live or real projects into the repertoire of architectural education since university offers an in-between space to support student learning. Emphasising the added value of students working in the community whilst being supported by the academy, this approach resonates with Shulman’s (2005) moral apprenticeship (to serve others responsibly and with integrity). Echoing Dewey’s earlier ideas (see also Shulman, 1998) this approach serves to embed the head, hand and heart elements of signature pedagogies. Sara reports a comparative study examining the use of live projects in one faculty but in two different subject areas — architecture and information technology — arguing that live projects not only offer a transformative pedagogy but are also transferable across disciplines and subject areas.

This article is followed by a joint paper by Joanne Tippett and Angela Connelly from the University of Manchester and Fraser How from How Creative enticingly entitled: ‘You Want Me to Do What? Teach a Studio Class to Seventy Students?’. This paper won the 2011 Excellence in Teaching Prize of the Association of European Schools of Planning (AESOP) and offers a fresh perspective on studio teaching. The innovation they discuss stemmed from the very real pressure on staff time and resources to undertake studio-based education, in which traditionally students apply ideas to a real site. Since this (signature) pedagogy tends to require a high degree of tutor time to be spent with students, staff may find this increasingly impractical, given resource constraints and increased class sizes. The paper critically reflects on the use of a hands-on toolkit, Ketso®, which enables interaction, iteration, and the synthesis of ideas within and across groups. The toolkit enables students to map and layer ideas using creative thinking techniques alongside spatial analysis. In contrast to Sara’s approach, the methods allow the tutor to simulate aspects of community consultation, without directly contacting the community. The toolkit also provides a mechanism for building up the expertise and input of Graduate Teaching Assistants by providing a re-usable and recording resource. Taken together, these two papers offer different perspectives on how to build professional expertise.

The third paper by Micah Gideon Modell and Colin M. Gray, both from Indiana University, USA, also considers studio practice but through an examination of personal territory in a Human-Computer Interaction Design Studio. Their study explicitly defines the studio in architecture design as a signature pedagogy. They explore the physical use Master’s level students make of a publicly accessible studio that does not explicitly provide the customary personally-dedicated student work space. Similarly driven by a concern with maximising resources, the authors investigate how flexible rather than dedicated studio space was utilised by students in practice. Given the traditional and sustained use of private studio space in which to develop creative solutions over time, the shift to a transient study environment clearly has potential implications for student behaviours and learning styles. The results provide insights into the management of alternative studio space and transitional and shared learning environments whilst the methodology offers potential application for student space use in other disciplines and contexts.

The penultimate paper is also prompted by resource considerations and students’ experiences of the learning environment. Carla Lopez del Puerto from Colorado State University, USA, considers what effects selected environmental variables, specifically lighting (functional), acoustics (functional), temperature (physical) and colour (aesthetics), have on graduate students’ perceptions about their graduate school experience. This research fills a gap in the literature since the majority of previous studies focused on the influence of the built environment on undergraduate students. Given that graduate students likely have different educational motivations for studying than full-time undergraduates, the author argues that there are practical and financial reasons for understanding whether investing scarce resources in enhancing the university real estate might be better directed towards programme enhancements and marketing career benefits. Indeed, she concludes that there are clear differences between undergraduate and postgraduate environmental concerns and suggests that careful consideration needs be given to the design criteria of the built environment intended for use by specialised, stand-alone professional programmes.

The final paper by Joseph Allison and Wei Pan from Plymouth University, UK, reports action research on the implementation and evaluation of efforts to better integrate critical thinking into Problem Based Learning (PBL) in environmental building. The challenge addressed by Allison and Pan is twofold. First, it relates to teaching in a multi-disciplinary programme context. Second, it involves enabling students to acquire a deeper sense of what critical thinking means in practice by embedding this activity into a specific project. The methodology used involved a literature review, questionnaire surveys, group interviews, observations, and reflections providing a rich account of the experiences and issues faced. Practical suggestions for feedback loops indicate that supporting students to practise and acquire critical thinking skills requires explicit attention. This is paramount as critical thinking is identified as an important skill required by employers. Yet, there is evidence that, to date, insufficient attention is paid to assisting students to recognise and perform critical thinking. Given that PBL is a heterogeneous pedagogical approach used across a range of built environment disciplines, the paper is a helpful addition to our shared understanding as it stimulates reflection on how critical thinking can be incorporated in a meaningful way to reinforce practical relevance. Taken together, the collection of papers in this issue offers some interesting pedagogical and methodological ideas for potential transfer across professional boundaries within the built environment and beyond.