A year of grounding

THE TEAM: Serkan Deniz, Helin Guvenc,  Ella Heltai-Dahlke, Rajan Kasi, Richard Nash, Riddhi Padhiar, Amber Vaughan Perrett

Research Aim: How can we develop our pedagogical approach to Architecture foundation courses to help prepare students for meeting the challenges of training in today’s extraordinary times?
How can we do this through the concept of ‘learning through making’; connecting young people to each other, nature and the built environment industry during the early stages of their careers?

The Facilitators: Foundation Architecture & Design team

We undertook a series of gardening and material processing workshops, alongside students from various year groups on built environment courses, to understand the theory behind the ‘Year of Grounding’ module, the module tutor’s approach to teaching and most importantly engage in the ‘learning through doing and growing’ pedagogy.

We used this experience to assist in developing a task and brief for the foundation students, which we used as an opportunity to link with our other project - Purdown Percy in Stoke Park.

Methodology: When approaching teaching methods, videography and soundbite teaching was discussed. However, a visible change in student attention spans and phone addiction pushed the group to prioritise hands on, physical activities and tabletop discussions. Teaching sessions explored material processing, prototyping, the basics of bracing/ joining to form structures and collaborative working. Throughout these sessions the group split into ‘tutor’ and ‘observer’ roles to test different techniques and assess engagement to review and re-configure their approach.

Lessons learned so far?!: Making lesson plans is time-consuming!
Always have a backup activity or teaching option and be okay with things not going to plan.

Deliverables: The final teaching session was ‘Build Day’ where the foundation students assembled one of three structures (Beacon, Pier, or Bridge) made of salvaged materials such as bamboo and inner tubing from bicycle wheels. It was a successful day for both sets of students, and an excellent opportunity for feedback on teaching methods. This feedback was collated into a document for the client to consider in future module co-ordination.