Education Committee

The Education Committee leads ACSA’s efforts to improve the effectiveness of architectural education through best practices. The committee oversees and recommends, as necessary, actions to cultivate and disseminate these best practices.

Elgin Cleckley

Assistant Professor
University of Virginia
Charlottesville, VA

Shawhin Roudbari

Assistant Professor
University of Colorado Boulder
Boulder, CO

Malini Srivastava

Assistant Professor
University of Minnesota
Minneapolis, MN

Anna Georas

Associate Professor
Universidad de Puerto Rico
San Juan, PR

Patricia Morgado

Associate Professor
North Carolina State University
Raleigh, NC

Sara Taketatsu

Vice President
American Institute of Architecture Students
Washington, DC

Mark Pearson

Professor
College of Dupage
Glen Ellyn, IL

Jeffrey L. Day

Professor
University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Lincoln, NE

Alexis Gregory

Associate Professor
Mississippi State University
Mississippi State, MS

Education Committee

Areas of focus for the committee include:

teaching
access to higher education (including demographic diversity)
student success
educational assessment
relationship of architectural education to higher education
education-to-practice transition
curriculum development
preprofessional or nonaccredited architectural education

2020-2021 Education Committee

Specific Charge

Power Dynamics and Racial Equity. The Education Committee is charged with examining the experiences and reflections of architecture students and faculty with respect to power dynamics and racial equity in program-level governance, curriculum decisions, policies and procedures, and how faculty and students perceive these dynamics influence success in the academic context. This work will involve collecting quantitative and qualitative data from students and faculty and comparatively analyzing these data between and among racial groups, with a particular emphasis on the experiences and reflections of Black and indigenous students and faculty members. This work should identify barriers as well as models that equitably include voices of Black and indigenous students and faculty of color in architecture’s academic contexts.

Deliverables

Online events in collaboration with AIAS and NOMA that foreground research questions related to the charge;
Collection of qualitative and quantitative data from students and faculty related to the charge;
Publish draft report on data collection to support long-term term development of guides for equity in architectural education.
Create final report that consolidates outcomes of events and research findings.

Summary of Previous Relevant Work

In 2018-19, the ACSA Education Committee completed a review of how pedagogy has been addressed within the field of architecture over the past twenty years. This work included an assessment of ACSA activities as well as those of other organizations that support architectural education. This work identified a need for more development of the practice of teaching and learning in architecture.

Open

In case you missed it… The last piece in the series, Where Are My People? Middle Eastern and North African, covers a group of people who continue to face mass discrimination and combat popular misconceptions about heritage and religion.
#acsaresearch by @kendallanicholson

#acsa #wherearemypeople #middleeasternarchitects #northafricanarchitects #architecture #design #teacharchitecture #architecturalresearch

Open

Incorporate the 2022 AIA COTE Top Ten for Students Competition into your fall curriculum. Deadline: January 12, 2022.

Each year, the competition recognizes ten exceptional student design studio projects that integrate health, sustainability, and equity, evaluated following the same categories of the AIA COTE® Top Ten Award for built work, and the AIA Framework for Design Excellence (now adopted as the basis of professional practice and awards across the AIA).

#aiacotetopten @aianational #cotetoptenforstudents #cotetopten #designcompetition #studentcompetition

Open

TAD 76:2 Engineering Call for Papers
Deadline: January 15, 2022
Theme Editor: @chrisfordaia

Engineering seeks to attract, curate, and forge a combined body of knowledge shaping the built environment from a more action-integrated perspective. Questions include but are not limited to: What are the catalysts and constraints affecting greater integration across architectural and engineering processes? What are the attributes of high-performing integrated design teams? Which features of engineering research ecosystems or architectural design culture are suitable for emulation by collateral disciplines? How are integrated curricula today nurturing meaningful and productive interdisciplinary action between tomorrow’s architecture and engineering professionals? Which state-of-the-art engineering practices are enhancing the built environment to meet twenty-first century challenges?

#tadjournal #tadcallforpapers #callforpapers #tadengineering #engineering

Open

#2021Teachers • @prattsoa The closing Plenary, Climate Pedagogy, asked practitioners the tough questions of ‘How can the act of building be a form of Climate pedagogy’ + ‘ 'How must we renew and adapt the focus of our design pedagogy to address the fact that our home ( the globe ) is on fire.’ The conversation will be introduced by Harriett Harriss Dean of the @prattSoa, with presentations by Kiel Moe The Gerald Sheff Chair in Architecture at Mcgill University and Albena Yaneva Professor of Architectural Theory at the University of Manchester. ⁠⁠
⁠⁠
The closing Plenary, will begin today at 1PM EST with a closing remarks by Ole Gustavsen and Harriet Harriss⁠⁠
@prattsoa @aho_architecture_design @Prattinstitute @acsanational #curriculumforclimateagency⁠⁠

Open

#2021Teachers • @prattsoa Audrey Fischer @audreysbreakfast of Yale University will present their image, Preserved + Saliocene as a part of the juried Virtual Exhibition – Imag(in)ing a Future Imperfect. ⁠⁠
⁠⁠
“Cartography has historically been used as a tool to create boundaries of private land for extractive purposes. Infrastructure‚ is a method of colonization‚ a conceptualized nature as a space and material to be manipulated into a technological system of connections to promote the circulation of capital and goods. This method of colonization has been perpetuated through technologies of surveillance. Located on a lithium mine in Bolivia's Salar de Uyuni, the plant camouflages itself by leveraging a unique property of the salt flat: the mirror effect. During the rainy season, a thin film of reflective water coats the surface of Salar de Uyuni and renders it unphotographable by causing incoherent aberrations in the digital sensors of satellite-mounted cameras. Inspired by prior experiments with 3D scanning's ability to offer a second life to transparent objects through glitches in photogrammetry scans, the plant's own proprioception system would allow it to begin siphoning water to its salty flesh to recreate the mirror effect. The plant will erode and reclaim its colonized grounds of extractive capital and create shelter from the surveillant gaze of satellites under its reflective body for fauna in the area.”⁠⁠

Open

#2021Teachers • @prattsoa Marcos Barinas of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign on Managing Negotiations as a part of the session Design Agency moderated by Hakkan Edehol of the Oslo School of Architecture.⁠⁠
⁠⁠
The study of coastal cities has been traditionally conditioned to a Eurocentric vision of space, where the importance of the metropolis and its infrastructure is imposed over the singularities of the people's relationship with landscape and nature. Coastal cities in the West Africa have are potential laboratories of climate adaption for building and social space… The mangrove forest is a very important environmental ecosystem for the future, but it is also a space of political resistance. It is the perfect expression of Black Atlantic Modernism: Transgressive, transatlantic, inclusive, always renovating itself through resistance; a social ecumene where culture is not rooted in the past nor floating away to the future. However, mangroves are one of the most threatened habitats on earth, with an annual loss outpacing other tropical rainforests. Mangrove in Africa are rapidly declining, It is estimated that an additional 25% will be lost by 2025 due to rapid development in coastal cities. The studio focuses on challenging traditional methodologies embracing science and big data towards more creative collaborative processes. ⁠⁠

Open

#2021Teachers • @prattsoa Marianna Charitonidou, of ETH Zurich will present Mobility and Migration as Constituting Elements of Urban Society: Migration as a Gendered Process as a part of the session the Architecture of Migration moderated by Marianne Skjulhaug, Oslo School of Architecture and Design.⁠⁠
⁠⁠
“Unauthorised immigration has emerged as a generalized fact in all Western economies in the post-Second World War era. Over the last four decades, there is a changing paradigm in migration studies that are gradually paying more and more attention to the gender composition of the migration streams. This trend of studying conjointly gender and migration phenomena becomes more and more dominant. Special attention will be paid to methods of gender and migration scholarship drawing on social science approaches, treating gender as an institutional part of immigration studies and establishing legitimacy for gender in immigration studies. The presentation will reflect upon the implications of establishing methods based on the endeavor to merge migration studies, urban studies and gender studies for the perception of the concepts of placemaking, displacement and domesticity, on the one hand, and for how the mobility from city to city is understood within the contemporary transnational context, on the other hand. Particular emphasis will be placed on the relationship between the migration processes and social sustainability.”⁠⁠
⁠⁠
@prattsoa @aho_architecture_design @Prattinstitute @acsanational #curriculumforclimateagency

Open

#2021Teachers • @prattsoa Moa Carlsson, Remo Pedreschi + Simone Ferracina of the University of Edinburgh will present Business as unusual: pedagogical experiments in the session the Cross Discplinary Climate Classroom moderated by Xenia Adjoubei of the Nikola Lenivets Classroom. ⁠⁠
his paper presents a selection of courses and pedagogies, developed by academic staff at University of Edinburgh, that seek to take the environmental crisis as an opportunity to prototype novel construction materials, fabrication protocols, and architectural design methods, foregrounding an open-ended design process that privileges encounters with pre-existing materials over the architect’s own aspirations and ideas. These practices encourage a direct engagement in material processes through experiments and full-scale prototyping, embodying a probabilistic approach according to which final outputs are drawn and developed from the material processes themselves. These approaches demand that work be not (only) assessed according to final outputs (the beautiful or considered object or building as desirable outcome), but in relation to the technical platforms, material flows, supply chains and labour practices associated with them, questioning our very assumptions and biases in the adjudication of meaning, beauty and value. ⁠⁠
⁠⁠
@prattsoa @aho_architecture_design @Prattinstitute @acsanational #curriculumforclimateagency⁠⁠

Open

#2021Teachers • @prattsoa Aleksandr Mergold of Cornell University and Jason Austin of University of the Arts @aus.mer Present Core Samples Through the Building and City: Past, Present and Future Seen Through Objects, Materials, Debris and Drawings as a part of the session Abstract by Nature moderated by Luis Callejas, of the Oslo School of architecture.⁠⁠
“Core-sampling has long been used as a method to uncover hidden conditions by archeologists, geologists or glaciologist (or medial doctors, on a much smaller scale of biopsy) by physically extracting fragments of the natural and built elements embedded into their contextual situations as a coherent object. This investigative process, instrumental to understanding the various complex strata, served as a generator for several architectural design studios. The concept of core-sampling was used to investigate specific buildings and larger urban conditions, in order to map, reveal, and muse upon the past, present and future of a complex, messy multi-dimensional construct that is an architecture that has been in use, misuse or disuse for a number of decades.⁠⁠
⁠⁠
The presentation will examine the idea of an architectural core-sampling as an analysis and representation technique on the examples of work in two design studios. One dealt exclusively with a factory building, constructed in phases over the last 100 years in a small post-industrial town, now so contaminated that its preservation, as well as its disuse, is guaranteed by the virtue of its environmental degradation. The other took on a large north-American post-industrial city as a multi-cultured and multi-layered environment in which core-sampling was used to probe the possibilities of operating within the strata normally out of scale and reach to architects. ⁠⁠
⁠⁠
@prattsoa @aho_architecture_design @Prattinstitute @acsanational #curriculumforclimateagency⁠⁠

Founded in 1912 by 10 charter members, ACSA is an international association of architecture schools preparing future architects, designers, and change agents. Our membership includes all of the accredited professional degree programs in the United States and Canada, as well as international schools and 2- and 4-year programs. Together ACSA schools represent some 7,000 faculty educating more than 40,000 students.

Stay in Touch

Enter your name and email below, and we’ll send you the latest ACSA news and events.

Fill out my online form.

Other ACSA Websites

Education Committee

Education Committee

2020-2021 Education Committee

Summary of Previous Relevant Work

Already have an account?

I’m new here

Stay in Touch