Identificación del Caso: Caso #2 FileZilla

Having considered some of what has been observed over many years of watching, teaching and making sense of what students and teachers are doing in the studio, some patterns start to emerge. We begin to repeatedly come up against particular concerns when we consider how students learn and how teachers teach about sketching. If we are to improve the ways we teach and students learn about sketching these interconnected concerns need to be addressed. To bring these into the foreground,

there is a lack of attention given to helping students learn to progress their designing

helping students learn to use their sketching as part of their designing is not often an explicit focus of studio teaching

students are unsure as to how to go about their sketching and are not aware of the ways it can be used to inform their designing

teaching sketching as a skill is quite different to helping students learn how to use their sketching

students and teachers are not necessarily seeing that sketching can offer a way into accessing how students are thinking and in turn designing

help is needed to see below the surface of sketching to get to the underlying thinking associated with it

there is a hesitancy to openly discuss the thinking associated with students' sketching

students and teachers do not have a language and an associated terminology to articulate, discuss and make sense of how sketching is being used, therefore limiting exchanges amongst students and between students and teachers

without a language to articulate and a means to make sense of how students are using their sketching, it is unable to become an explicit focus of the teaching and learning studio.

These concerns suggest that our current teaching is out of alignment with what students are needing to learn and likely to limit students further along the path of their architectural studies. Limit in the sense that if students have not been able to consciously develop using their sketching as an integral part of their designing, their sketching is likely to remain isolated from their thinking. In not associating sketching with developing an architectural understanding, for these students sketching will not be a contributor to their emerging architectural disposition, which in the light of the significance architects place on sketching, would be a considerable shortcoming.

Our studio teaching should be able to do better than this and it would seem there is need to change our teaching and learning practices, if we are to better meet the needs of our students. Over the course of this chapter we have considered how students learn to sketch in the studio. We have observed our teaching focuses on what is readily noticed, our teachers are not appreciating the need, neither do they have ways to see beyond the surface of students' sketching to get to the underlying thinking and we have turned to wider research to see if particular findings might tell us more about these concerns. But we keep meeting the same and I suspect central issue, that is without a language to articulate the ways we use our sketching as part of our designing we are without an understanding of and a means to make explicit what is fundamental to our architectural outlook. We need to find ways to bring an explicit focus on sketching into design teaching. How do we do this? How might we think about such changes, what might they be and on what basis do we make them?

This thesis is directed towards addressing these concerns. The following chapter explores how through research we might approach doing so.

Chapter 3

An orientation

Introduction

Positioning the research and its aims

Initial intentions

Founding synergies

Experience lies central 63.

Describing different experiences 69.

Sketching is an expression of an experience 73.

Sketching depicts relationships 76.

An association between sketching, seeing and learning 79.

Characterizing a way of seeing 80.

Attributing meaning 87.

Learning involves change 88.

The 'what' and 'how' of learning 89.

From undifferentiated to integrated wholes 90.

Placing students at the centre of learning 93.

Being truthful to students 96.

ARCHITECTURE design sketching COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY thinking processes EDUCATION students and learning

sketching in relation to thinking learning in relation to thinking learning in relation to sketching six primary concerns

Introduction

This chapter explores how research into students' learning about sketching might be approached so as the findings help enable sketching to become an explicit focus of teaching and learning in the design studio. The research is positioned across three domains of knowledge: architecture, cognitive

psychology and education and this chapter looks across these domains to establish a series of aims and intentions. Aspects come to the fore through a consideration of what research into sketching and learning has to offer and when seen in relation to each other give rise to a series of synergies which provide a basis upon which a brief for an investigation is established.