Introduction to Architectural Structures: Lessons Learned from Parti Pris Pedagogy

摘要

The architectural academy recognizes mathematics and its distance from the design process as the primary challenges confronting structures educators in the liberal arts environment. Although architecture and engineering educators have pedagogical polarity, the germaneness of mathematics is not the fundamental problem. The psychology of how we learn has changed. Educators frequently model structures with a bottom-up approach through the gradual accrual of prerequisite knowledge, which follows the older associationist-behaviorist paradigm. In the newer cognitive paradigm, scientific psychologists recognize that the mental framework, or schemata of the learner, supersedes the prerequisite knowledge. The cognitive paradigm suggests that explicit information precedes the discovery of implicit knowledge in a top-down approach, in harmony with the life experiences inside the architecture studio culture. The studio project engages the parti pris process that begins with a central big idea prior to its refinement. A need exists to explore a pedagogy that commences with the central idea of architectural structures. This paper outlines a new approach for a structures pedagogy that reverses the content sequence to parallel the architecture student schemata in an introductory architectural structures course. A quantitative analysis of unobtrusive data describes thirty-one second-year architecture students studying in either a traditional associationist-behaviorist course content sequence or a reverse content parti pris cognitive sequence at an institute of higher education rooted in the liberal arts. The findings indicate that the parti pris pedagogy improves student performance in non-graphical multiple-choice examinations. The educational lessons learned offer reflections in the areas of instruction, content, and student outcomes.