Pushing the Envelope of Built Environment Education?

Patrick Geddes was an acknowledged polymath. A professor of botany, sociologist and founder of modern town and regional planning, amongst other things, Geddes argued that ‘a teacher’s outlook should include all viewpoints … Hence we must cease to think merely in terms of separated departments and faculties' (Macdonald, 2009). Adopting what today we would define, perhaps, as an interdisciplinary — or indeed transdisciplinary — perspective, Geddes tended to look for the big picture. Drawing on his local and practical observations growing up in the Tay Valley in Scotland, for example, his exposition of the ‘valley section’ explicitly traced the inter-connections from source to sea, and inter-linked the ‘natural’ occupations of miner, forester, shepherd, peasant, gardener and fisher. Activities, he suggested, variously evolve or degenerate to shape the present and inform the future. Critically, Geddes (1904, p.108) argued that ‘a city is more than a place in space, it is a drama in time’ illustrating the essential dynamism of built and natural environments, together with human endeavours.

Geddes was motivated by addressing practical issues of the day. He advocated the case for a more systematic study of cities, emphasising connectivity and coordination. Moreover, he highlighted essential complementarities between diverse scientific activities, notably between what he differentiated as the ‘Sociological Observatory’, involving observing and recording, and active experimentation associated with the ‘Sociological Laboratory’. In promoting a more ‘orderly and comprehensive’ approach to city planning in the early 20^th century, Geddes (1904, p.104) pointed to contemporary examples of the synergies to be derived through synthesising science and art. He used an innovative lexicon and drew attention to established linkages between chemistry and agriculture, biology and medicine. Geddes argued that, notwithstanding obvious connections made between vital statistics and hygienic administration, or commercial statistics with politics, science and art were relatively less well integrated in emergent ideas of city planning. Specifically, he made the case for community being considered an integral element of a city's material and immaterial structures and functions over time.

More than a century later, debates increasingly appear to emphasise the need for professionals to work within, across, and between groupings operating in built and natural environments. As discussed in an earlier editorial (Peel, 2009), important questions then turn on how to facilitate what Boyer (1990) advanced as the scholarship of integration. In articulating the case for interdisciplinary and integrative studies, Boyer (1990) pointed to critical challenges presented through exogenous and endogenous forces re-shaping knowledge boundaries.

Boundaries, however, are highly diverse. Depending on how we conceptualise and/or feel about them, borders can, for example, be relatively fixed or porous; static or elastic; reassuring or challenging. Whilst, on the one hand, defining clear parameters may be essential for completing a project on time and on budget, on the other, crossing frontiers is likely to be necessary to create new knowledge and understanding. As part of its publicity for a Master of Science in Sustainable Design, the School of Architecture at Carnegie Mellon University, for example, notes: ‘We are looking for students that are critical thinkers, are intensely curious about the built environment, are committed to positive change, and who are not afraid to push the envelope and take risks.’ A road map drawn up by Vanegas (2003, p.5365) suggested that a deep appreciation of the ‘contextual envelope’ was a prerequisite to stimulating an industry-wide debate to facilitate built environment sustainability at the strategic, tactical and operational levels. Resonating with Geddes' ideas of interlinking individual elements and systems, with spatial and temporal scales, Vanegas' (2003) thinking reasserts the connectivity and coordination required by sustainability principles.

From a spatial planning perspective, grouping and classifying people, development and activities by their location in space forms part of a broader approach to coordinating built and natural environments and forward planning to support sustainable growth. In this context, political boundaries may be understood as socio-spatial markers of difference, through delineating specific legal, territorial and sovereign entities (Novak, 2011). In practice, state power and influence co-exist with day-to-day realities of human activity and natural ecosystems. People, goods and services various travel and flow across — or are differentially restricted by-jurisdictional boundaries. Natural ecosystems, such as those associated with the coast, tend, however, not to respect administrative boundaries (McGlashan and Duck, 2010). As the European Union has progressively enlarged its membership, for example, different cross-border relations have emerged with diverse implications for socio-economic patterns of behaviour. In teasing out an inherent paradox of national borders, Novak (2011, p.743), for example, suggests that ‘[t]hrough their territoriality, political boundaries inscribe a state-centred order in space, both materially and discursively’ whilst simultaneously affording a ‘dynamic b/ordering process’. Borders — like professional bodies — can variously release creative potential or restrict and contain. The notion of dynamic b/ordering then offers both a way of thinking about ordering professional knowledge whilst emphasising that working across distinct professional boundaries opens new — and potentially productive — intellectual spaces.

In her work examining the drivers and rationales for, development of, and prevailing policy interest in, promoting interdisciplinary practices in higher education, Chettiparamb (2007) highlights certain dynamic tensions. Interdisciplinary and disciplinary approaches each afford different opportunities. Arguments for interdisciplinarity are predicated on perceived limitations and gaps through taking a (mono)disciplinary lens to explain or address complex problems (Chettiparamb, 2007). Those who defend disciplinary rigour challenge these assertions. Moreover, in practice, disciplines tend to be quasi-stable as they likely evolve and re-position themselves in relation to an ever-changing context. Within the built environment, for example, an emphasis on complexity and multi-professional working is variously pushing curriculum designers explicitly to address interdisciplinarity, with evidence suggesting that disciplinary focus, module content, and teaching styles differ across institutions of higher education (Chettiparamb, 2011). Thinking about these ideas in the context of JEBE provokes some interesting questions.

In creating a scholarly platform for bringing together pedagogical theory and practice, JEBE seeks to offer a new space for thinking about an appropriate blend of art and science to inform built environment education. As such, a contemporary interpretation of Geddes' Valley Plan might then be populated by professional interests around landscape, transport, architecture, housing, construction, real estate, surveying, urban design, and planning. In offering a vehicle for the dynamic b/ordering of different professional activities, there is scope then, and in the spirit of Patrick Geddes, for JEBE to provide a forum for observation and experimentation. Here, interdisciplinary scholars, those who work outside defined disciplines or within defined interstices between disciplines, may perform useful boundary spanning roles and variously offer fresh perspectives, validate existing disciplinary realms, or stimulate intellectual synergies. Seeing built environment education as drama in time invites us, perhaps, to be more willing to take risks. In this way, JEBE acts as a crucible for different viewpoints and hopefully sparks new thinking. Yet, the challenges are great. Are we doing enough in built environment education to support our graduates for the personal and professional challenges they may likely face? As Higgins and Morgan (2000, p.117), writing in the context of professional planning education, argued:

As change becomes more rapid and discontinuous, it is crucial that there are people in the profession that are able to turn problems into opportunities, while acknowledging the contradictions. Often, this involves seeing things from a new perspective and breaking away from traditional ways of thinking that may have lost their meaning.

In seeking new meaning, are individual disciplines (only) pushing the envelope of discrete bodies of professional knowledge? Are educators inside the right envelopes with the right people? Are existing envelopes the problem? Or should we be tearing up the envelopes? The following papers provide some fresh perspectives.

This Issue

This issue begins with a written version of a keynote address delivered by Robert Freestone at the 3^rd World Planning Schools Congress in Perth, Western Australia in July 2011. Whilst the paper speaks directly to the Congress theme — Planning's Future — Futures Planning: Planning in an Era of Global (Un)certainty and Transformation, Freestone's conclusions raise pertinent questions about the desirable attributes of all professionals working in future built environment contexts in terms of values, ethics, skills, competencies, and qualities. Informed both by a survey of staff and students from universities in New Zealand and Australia and extensively referenced, Freestone is purposefully polemical in challenging contemporary educators to reflect critically on the extent to which planning curricula are fit for purpose in addressing global trends and future needs. His international review of futures planning curricula inputs highlights that conceptions of the future continue to change over time as conditions change. He notes that curricula have begun to incorporate new techniques, but questions whether these are sufficiently robust and widespread. He makes a compelling case for futures methodologies appropriate to meet unpredictable challenges and uncertainties facing the planet, greater reflexivity by professionals involved in planning, strategic visioning based on defined ethical parameters, and critical thinking informed by a sound appreciation of a wide range of questions to be posed. Freestone's paper offers both a historical overview of futures thinking and practical suggestions for ways forward in terms of curriculum design. It will thus be of interest to students and educators concerned with different modes of futures thinking and practice.

A new topic for JEBE is this issue's second paper based on research undertaken by Marco Amati and Margot McNeill from Macquarie University, New South Wales. Their discussion reports a pilot study of Second Life and considers learning from, and through, virtual worlds. The paper complements Freestone's argument since the authors' starting point is that planning as an activity is concerned fundamentally with communicating the future, and it is in this context that they investigate the pedagogical potential afforded by virtual world technologies. Focusing on a particular postgraduate planning unit concerned with Sustainable Urban Regions, accessibility and Crime Prevention through Environmental Design, the paper explores the possibilities and pitfalls of teaching planning using virtual worlds, complementing a tendency to rely on mapping and visualisation techniques via Geographical Information Systems. The authors explore the pedagogical affordances of virtual worlds beyond studio teaching, indicating its relevance to work-based learning, role plays, and simulations, for example. The paper provides a tantalising and very accessible introduction to Second Life, drawing interesting parallels with traditional land use planning and the introduction and development of regulatory controls in virtual worlds. The study offers a very particular ‘space’ to explore norms, values and behaviours, and may prove to be a ‘virtual’ launch-pad for further empirical studies across the built environment.

Reflective thinking and practice are the focus of Andy Roberts' study which is one of two papers in this issue concerned with assessment. Roberts' research develops a dynamic model to categorise different types and focus of interest deployed by students in their architectural portfolio-writing. Given, in part, the emphasis placed on reflective practice and professional development for those working in the built environment, reflection remains a subject regularly discussed by contributors to JEBE (e.g. McCarthy, 2011). A particular challenge involves enabling students to differentiate between descriptive/recording exercises and relatively more transformative/deeply reflective thinking. Roberts' paper not only provides a practical assessment rubric for tutors to determine in a consistent way where and why students focus their reflective energies, but proposes a model that could potentially assist students to move towards higher levels of reflection. Important distinctions are drawn with respect to how students internalise reflection and use it variously to ‘reflect’ what they believe to be their tutor's expectations or as a means to take personal ownership of their learning and personal development. Whilst the empirical focus for this tool is architecture, the findings have application across the built environment.

Lloyd Scott (Dublin Institute of Technology) and Christopher Fortune (University of Salford) address issues of formative assessment. Various aspects of assessment have been the subject of research presented in earlier issues of JEBE, recognising the central role that assessment plays in students' engagement with their learning and ways in which formative or developmental approaches offer assessment for — as opposed to of — learning (see, for example, Zou, 2008). A multiple assessment strategy approach was proposed by Lam (2008) in relation to construction-related subjects and which incorporated a formative element, whilst Smith's (2011) elaboration of how students perceive feedback in ‘the crit’ teased out a complex of developmental and summative assessment dynamics. Further complementing Roberts' paper in this issue, Krezel and Morris (2010) explored embedding a reflective model of self-discovery reinforced through assessment of professional practice in project management. Importantly, Higgins et al. (2010) made a useful contribution to these debates in their examination of practical dilemmas confronting staff between educational effectiveness and resource efficiency when considering ways to employ formative assessment. Scott and Fortune's contribution is to add further empirical insights into the extent to which formative assessment is — or is not — embedded into students' learning experiences. They make a case for a more explicit scholarship of assessment and a sensitive application of Biggs' (1999) constructive alignment which emphasises clearly articulating learning objectives and is based on a solid appreciation that teaching and learning are socially constructed. Efforts on designing assessment for learning, they argue, should provide students with an opportunity to understand fully what is expected from assessment; why, when and how assessment is being used; and involve authentic learning and assessment tasks.

The final paper is located in the sphere of sustainable construction education and examines theory and practice in Research-Informed-Teaching. The paper stems from research funded by the (former) Centre for Education in the Built Environment as an Innovative Project in Learning and Teaching and offers wider lessons for colleagues working in the built environment interdiscipline. The lead author, Wei Pan, is based at the University of Hong Kong, while (former) colleagues Paul Murray, Debbie Cotton and Helen Garmston are at Plymouth University in the south-west of England. Picking up a theme previously explored in JEBE (e.g. Roberts, 2007), the authors review the literature regarding the contested and layered relationships between research and teaching in contemporary higher education curricula. Specifically they use empirical research to investigate barriers to articulating, executing, and embedding research as part of the student learning experience. Helpfully, they present a multi-pronged strategy for supporting institutions and individuals to enhance research-teaching relations. Based on experiential insights and critical reflections from staff, students, and graduates, they offer a rich synthesis of academic, industry and learner voices to inform and guide research-informed teaching ambitions.

In questioning and pushing the envelope of existing practice, each of the papers in this issue variously seeks to make a practical contribution to enhance student learning experiences and to improve graduate capacity to make a positive contribution in the built environment. The literature reviews alone provide a valuable resource for JEBE readers new to these topics, and the authors' arguments and practical insights will no doubt stimulate thinking in relation to curriculum design and delivery.