Reflections and Prospects

When the (former) Centre for Education in the Built Environment (CEBE) established the Journal for Education in the Built Environment (JEBE) in March 2006, there were certain foundational principles, including critical engagement with learning and teaching and reflective practice. Echoing Shulman's (2000) exhortations that educators mine their own courses and classrooms as ways to advance understanding of teaching and improve the student learning experience, JEBE set out to enhance built environment education theory and practice. Seven years on, it continues to provide an important medium for disseminating what has been discovered, discerned, conceptualised, and experienced. Poised to enter its eighth year, it is timely to reflect on JEBE's contributions. This is particularly appropriate as the journal moves to a new platform provided by the Higher Education Academy.

At the outset, JEBE was a core element of CEBE, itself an integral part of the wider Subject Network of the UK's Higher Education Academy. The journal's first editor, Mel Lees, then at the University of Salford, outlined the aims in the journal's first editorial:

CEBE's overarching mission statement is: To help built environment educators shape knowledgeable, skilled, distinctive, adaptable and creative graduates. As part of delivering this mission, JEBE will be a mechanism for fostering a community of teacher-researcher practitioner scholars engaged in rigorous research and reflection of their practices.

He further stated the journal's ambition to:

… become one of the principal international homes for peer-refereed papers on built environment-focused educational research and theory.

(Lees, 2006, p. 1)

So how are we doing?

Since 2006, JEBE has published two issues a year. As PDF downloads have increased and with interest spanning the globe, it is evident that a community of built environment scholars is developing. The scope of the journal was initially directed at meeting the core disciplines of architecture, construction, housing, landscape, real estate, transport, spatial planning and surveying. In practice, however, JEBE's content and reach also serve related fields, such as urban regeneration, sustainable development, urban sociology, urban geography, urban economics, and public administration. International drivers for the enhancement of educational practices and development of relevant curricula continue to emanate from different national governments, educational policies, evolving practices, and professional domains. Importantly, fostering interdisciplinarity in built environment research and education, and furthering multi-professional practice, remain critical.

It is interesting to speculate on why interdisciplinarity features so highly and why JEBE is increasingly attracting international interest. It is evident that there are a number of global explanations for why traditional professional boundaries within the built environment are changing. Many urban development projects tend to be driven by the requirements of national or international capital investment decisions. Projects may be financially, technically and organisationally complex. Such complexity has led to changes in the relationships between different professions, for example, between project managers and architects. A world-wide shift in the understanding of the role of local governments — from provider of services and regulator — to enabler and partner — has also meant that traditional roles of planners, architects, transport and housing managers, for example, have become blurred.

Employers in the private and government sector commonly state their need for flexible built environment professionals and this is having knock-on effects within higher education institutions — in teaching styles and formats, programme design and offer, and the nature of research activities and outputs. Typically, professionally accredited curricula are developed in collaboration with employers, whilst research funders seek the engagement of end-users in research studies and encourage multi-disciplinary projects. While substantive and discipline-centric research journals in built environment's sub-disciplines exist, an important motivation for JEBE continues to be to provide a niche outlet for high quality academic debate across convergent sub-disciplines. Hence, JEBE's focus is to span professional and disciplinary boundaries, and to disseminate knowledge between and across conventionally discrete sub-disciplines, offering mutual learning prospects.

The journal strives to provide an international forum for discussion and debate on subject-focused and interdisciplinary aspects of teaching, learning and scholarship. Adaptable and creative graduates need to be mobile as prospective employment opportunities become borderless. Committed to supporting research-informed learning and teaching, JEBE provides a means for disseminating the findings of well-founded academic investigations to a specific academy of scholars concerned with enhancing the student learning experience and improving the built environment professional knowledge and skills base. JEBE has built a strong following by fostering high quality academic debate about the way knowledge is generated, codified, taught and learnt across the built environment.

As a peer-reviewed scholarly journal, the intellectual quality of JEBE has been secured by using a breadth of international and respected reviewers. In its early phase, editorial practice involved developmental support to authors and a scrupulous commitment to copy-editing by the much valued Editorial Assistant, Diane Bowden. An emphasis has been on enhancing the intellectual rigour of theoretical development and practical application and raising the overall quality of built environment educational thinking and practice. To this end JEBE has published empirical research papers; theoretical papers; and major review papers that disseminate original and authoritative ideas. Moreover, a particular editorial emphasis is placed on authors explaining the wider and internationally relevant purpose and merits of their theoretical and methodological approaches. This is because JEBE intentionally seeks to build bridges between teaching and research, theory and practice, academia and professional and vocational practice, and for an international audience that is typically wider than that assumed by many discipline-focused journals. We particularly welcome articles therefore that advance theory and demonstrate application, and which are written in an accessible way to address a multidisciplinary readership. The increasing number of PDF downloads of JEBE articles is testimony to the journal serving the needs of a strong built environment academy and is indicative of a robust built environment academic culture to support practice with sound pedagogical theory.

Reflecting on the first seven years of JEBE, the content, scope of interest and breadth of material published has actively embraced a range of topics. To date, the journal has attracted scholarly commentary on, for example, generic issues, such as the relationships between teaching and research, and the nature of scholarship; and topical matters of shared concern, such as feedback and assessment; the use of new technologies; the changing skills base within the built environment; reflective practice; sustainable design; and professional development. The journal has assumed an important role in the dissemination of original theoretical innovations on built environment topics and in making clear links between different paradigms. Articles have variously synthesised or advanced theories and professional perspectives, or explained and illustrated the merits of particular theoretical and methodological approaches. Demands on the built environment are experienced differentially, however, across time and space and articles that widen the appreciation of intrinsically complex methodological or theoretical discussions are important in advancing our shared appreciation of contemporary challenges in different learning contexts.

In addition to theoretical critiques, JEBE has published scholarly articles that add value to existing pedagogical scholarship and research. Papers have offered major reviews of specific topics, or meta-analysis of empirical studies. Articles have addressed disciplinary distinctiveness in built environment disciplines or explored the places in between. Incorporation of new technologies has provided an important pedagogical impetus, but so, too, have practical issues, in relation to facilities and resource use and managing the increase in student numbers. Similarly, transitioning between school, university and employment is illustrative of some of the key issues exercising university management and curriculum designers.

The nature and content of the articles published in JEBE clearly demonstrate that the journal is responding to topical issues of immediate relevance to practitioners and educators, whilst simultaneously being alert to government higher education policy. Explicit attention to teaching, research and scholarship in university mission statements is but one indicator of the growing importance of a professional and peer-reviewed journal to disseminate relevant built environment educational material. Moreover, the multi-disciplinary character of the built environment means that professional bodies take a particular interest in the quality of teaching and learning with professional linkages and accreditation of courses a particular feature of this sector. This is a matter of shared international concern, as may be illustrated by the approach adopted by the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS), for example. The RICS has a partnership approach in place to manage professional accreditation which involves working with university partners in, for example, Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, India, South Africa, the UK and the United States. Such partnership arrangements involve accredited programmes meeting quality principles, including each higher education institution's engagement with high quality research and strategies for ensuring all students enjoy the highest quality teaching environment. Standards, here, are understood as broader than the quality of teachers per se, addressing the overall quality of the learning and teaching environment.

Authors who have published in JEBE are diverse in discipline, experience and institutional provenance. They range from relatively new academics to professors, demonstrating the ways in which dedication to enhancing learning and teaching is a life-long commitment. Indicative of the breadth and depth of interest, topics are varied, embracing, for example, health, comedy improvisation and Second Life. Reflecting its founding constituency JEBE has published a number of papers from built environment educators working in architecture, construction, planning and urban design. Moreover, as part of its undertaking to widen and facilitate ease of access, JEBE has, thus far, retained its status as on-line and open access journal (Peel, 2008). Although the majority of papers published in JEBE have been from authors based in UK institutions, a significant number are from Australia, the USA and northern Europe. There are also a number of co-authored papers, including inter-institutional collaborations, involving colleagues from South Africa and Venezuela, for example. Reflecting on the early aspirations of the Journal's founders, Professor Chris Webster (University of Cardiff) and the first Editor, Mel Lees, JEBE can visibly demonstrate its status as a principal international home for peer-refereed papers on built environment-focused educational research and theory.

This Issue

This issue opens with two papers examining studio teaching. The first is a collaborative proposition developed by Ken Yocom, Gundula Proksch, Branden Born and Shannon K. Tyman, all based at the University of Washington, USA. In many ways emblematic of the spirit and purpose of JEBE, the authors assert the diversity in both modes and methods of education in the built environment disciplines and point to the bridging ethos required by contemporary urban conditions. They indicate a requirement for curriculum designers to grapple with the weft and warp of preparing graduates for careers in the built environment in order to cope with contemporary complexity and they propose a framework to support interprofessional collaboration. Sensitive to the specific ways in which architecture and planning educators tend to use studio space, the authors examine professional training in an interdisciplinary, integrative and collaborative learning format using a team-structured studio approach. Framed as a progressive tryptic, the experiment aimed first to foster student creativity through active and rigorous experimentation; second, to develop collective understanding; and, third, to promote interdisciplinary collaboration. The paper offers insights into the practical challenges of supporting emergent professionals simultaneously to appreciate their own and others' disciplinary identities and to interpret and communicate potential synergies.

The second co-authored paper by colleagues Hannah Vowles, Jim Low and Holly Rose Doron from Birmingham City University in the UK focuses on student and academic attitudes towards the use of studios in architectural education in the UK context. Usefully, whilst the paper reflects a perennial concern around the perceived benefits of the studio as a dedicated social, and relatively informal, learning space, the authors bring the topic alive with contemporary student perspectives on studio culture. This is timely, given that changes in student learning habits and new fee structures across the devolved UK have brought different metrics to how studio learning is perceived and how scope for peer and tutor face-to-face interaction is potentially valued. Direct quotations from student focus groups indicate how differently students view the studio environment. It is evident that how studio space is used — and for what type of social learning activity — is evolving as both technology and remote learning opportunities expand. The findings indicate that studios as a physical and dedicated space for constructive (though not necessarily formalised) dialogue are perceived as integral to a wider learning and socialising experience, but that the nature of the exercises and activities undertaken is all important.

In contrast, the third paper in this issue examines the use of the live project, engaging students in situated learning outside the studio. Part of a broader international interest in live projects, the basis of OB1 LIVE is to take first year undergraduates out of the classroom and enable them to put theoretical ideas into context in the city. The authors, Jane Anderson (Oxford Brookes University, UK) and Colin Priest (University of the Arts London, UK), explain how the use of an innovative ‘architectural agency’ approach provides students with access to community-based clients, effectively positioning the lecturer in a new role of tutor-as-agent. The paper critically discusses the work of the architect and poet John Hejduk, and the authors revisit his ideas around student collaboration to reflect on the experiences of OB1 LIVE. Drawing on a range of projects over five years, the paper suggests that a new model of social learning is evident where students, tutors and communities have the potential to co-learn. They identify new learning roles, dynamics and relationships as the ‘tutor/practitioner’ acts as the critical agent in facilitating and negotiating a particular ‘student/client bond’. In pioneering this venture, it is evident that the management of risk and expectation are vital elements if nascent professionals are to be supported to work with, and learn through, communities.

The penultimate paper is concerned with complex problem solving and the need to tackle what Rittel and Webber (1973) termed ‘wicked problems’. Specifically, Julie Davidson and Anna Lyth from the University of Tasmania, Australia, critically reflect on how to integrate and embed education for climate change adaptation into an established planning programme. They discuss aspects of curriculum design, offer a synthesis of selected pedagogical values and approaches, and consider how attention to climate change adaptation can transfer to — and inform — other core planning capabilities. Their paper goes some way to addressing the futures planning concerns raised by Freestone (2012) in the previous issue, and offers insights into practical ways in which different educational approaches can be deployed. In assessing the relevance of problem-based learning, adaptive learning and self-reflection, networked learning, critical thinking, and linking theory to practice, the authors offer strategies for professionals to confront ‘wicked’ situations characterised by change, complexity and uncertainty. The paper also encapsulates some of the dilemmas involved for curriculum designers when considering the appropriateness of mainstreaming new knowledge into existing programmes.

Focused on population wellbeing and health equity across the whole community, the final paper presents findings from a novel studio pilot study based on a ‘scholar-in-residence’ model. The paper, in many ways, epitomises some of the ways in which built environment education is expanding, necessitating new combinations of skills and knowledge (see also Ellis et al., 2008). In their discussion, Marcus Grant, Elena Marco, Paul Pilkington and Sarah Burgess, all based at the University of the West of England, Bristol in the UK, outline a growing concern with health inequalities in the built environment, explain the rationale for an interdisciplinary approach, and advocate an applied and integrative mode of learning to understanding the determinants of health. Building on ‘Artist in Residence’ schemes, the concept of the ‘Public Health Residency’ was designed incrementally and as a first step to fostering transdisciplinary learning. The study explains how access to a public health practitioner affords students alternative opportunities to engage with interdisciplinary enquiry and to connect a range of built environment and design issues that affect public health and wellbeing. Based on the research findings, the pilot indicates that the learning benefits and added value of such an inter-disciplinary approach extend well beyond the students to the health practitioner and tutors. The initiative clearly raises a raft of new issues, such as how to fund innovative teaching approaches and how to create opportunities that allow for unanticipated learning outcomes amongst all those engaged in the learning environment.

Taken together, the papers in this issue serve to emphasise that interdisciplinarity, innovation and integration remain critical for those working in the built environment and that the nature of the (sub-)disciplines involved are certainly not pre-determined. As demographic profiles change, the realities of a new environmental determinism take hold, economic disparities become more evident, and technologies continue to proliferate, both the form and function of education in the built environment will need to change and adapt, necessitating new pedagogies, new curricula and further opportunities for sharing research and for exchanging ideas about theory and practice. Moreover, it is evident that there is the potential for expanding the learning opportunities afforded by ‘town-gown’ relations and new tutor-practitioner-student dynamics to be explored. As this issue demonstrates, exchanging these ideas across international borders can but strengthen the pool of knowledge from which we can all draw.

The prospects for JEBE are very good.