So I’ve been reading a lot of Critical Pedagogy lately – Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, bell hooks’ Teaching to Transgress, and, currently, Jesse Stommel and Sean Michael Morris’ An Urgency of Teachers. I find myself both in strong agreement, nodding along and thinking ‘Yes!’, and at the same time with strong doubts about whether and how to translate it to engineering education, especially with first year’s BSc courses.
The question of how Critical Pedagogy applies to STEM fields has been addressed, but still: almost all the examples and proposals from its main proponents and practitioners appear to relate to liberal education humanities classes.
Design education, whether in engineering design, architecture, or other design disciplines, is a little bit in-between outright mechanics and maths classes and full-on humanities education. On the one hand, it is a matter of thinking critically about the world and your values and goals in relation to it, it empowers, it is already sometimes a liberating experience, I believe. But on the other hand – again, especially at the lower levels, in introductory projects – it very much has the feel of ‘training’ and ‘instruction’ as opposed to true education that is interactive and egalitarian from the outset.
As a design teacher, you do act from a position of authority, the authority of expertise. You have a skill, a set of abilities, that your students don’t yet have. They came to your faculty because they want to learn how to do what you do. And for that to happen, they need to submit to your instructions. First they need to do without understanding, before being able to look back critically and understand why it is you had them do certain things (Cf. Donald Schön).
Now that I’m writing this, I realize that student numbers make a big difference here. In a studio of ~25 students, it’s actually not so difficult to be truly responsive, to interrogate students’ ideas and ideals together as a group. With ~750 first year’s students, in 14 clusters of 8 groups of 6 or 7 students, together with a small army of coaches and student assistants, it’s a whole different story. There, you’re practically forced to put up a sort of obstacle course for the students to run through, egged on and managed by strict deadlines, and then to respond only in a much more limited way, only to selected work by a limited subset of students.
Perhaps the main obstacle to transforming my pedagogy, then, is simply the raw numbers? That would be ironic, as it’s exactly that massive quality of more and more classes that contributes to students learning to just do what’s required, to listen, and to adapt to how things are, instead of developing their own critical awareness.