As a product of design education, the learning environment I am most familiar with is the design studio. Reflecting particularly on how I learned, it is clear that the studio experience had a profound influence on how I think and work.
My memories of the studios that I have inhabited are diverse:
- The studio was my home away from home — a space and time for learning from my colleagues and a place where it was relatively safe to try out new ideas and risk.
- The studio was a collaborative space — it was where I learned (sometimes with great angst) to work with people of differing thinking processes and behaviours than mine.
- The studio desk was the contact point between me and my professors — I was lucky to have such a one-on-one approach to learning.
- The studio was a place that I learned (am still learning) not to be defensive, to listen to critique and to use it to improve my work.
In 2007 there was a National Forum on Studio Teaching at the University of New South Wales — and there have been other fora since http://www.studioteaching.org/?page=publications. The document is housed on a website called the Studio Teaching Project. I like the way they have honed their definition of studio:
…in the educational context, studio can be identified as one or more of the following learning constructs
A culture, a creative community created by a group of students and studio teachers working together for periods of time
A mode of teaching and learning where students and studio teachers interact in a creative and reflective process
A program of projects and activities where content is structured to enable ‘learning in action’
A physical space or constructed environment in which the teaching and learning can take place
And the characteristics of studio learning:
Studio is regarded as a mode of learning through action and making. This process forms the basis of an investigative and creative process which is driven by research, exploration and experimentation; making and constructing; and critique and reflection. The principle characteristics of studio learning usually encompass the following combinations:
- Learning through project-based work
- Learning through ‘praxis’
- Learning through tool or skill based workshop activities
- Learning from first hand observation
A studio environment is very much about peer learning. Instructors/professors set the learning environment with projects and activities, but then they take on much more of a facilitator role than in other classroom settings. I can still clearly remember learning moments from interactions with my classmates in 1974 at the University of Guelph.
The environment was focused on the learner. And this focus put responsibility onto me. It helped me mature. And I am grateful to my parents who were smart enough to send me to a vocational counsellor as I struggled through first year Science at UBC in 1969. I took a battery of tests and it came up that my aptitude was not for science at all — but for music, journalism and architecture. I then took a mechanical aptitude test and scored as the average man – which I thought was a-okay. But the person in charge at the time thought that this meant I was less suitable for architecture than landscape architecture. He clearly didn’t know much about either.
But it didn’t matter — it set me on the course of a studio education. And I am hoping to introduce that type of education in the Sauder School of Business. Stay tuned for the next blog.