The research project asked:

How might co-production be embedded into a socially engaged pedagogy?

I had set out to explore this through on-site teaching on Broadwater Farm Estate with the aim of supporting students to undertake social research. The original plan was that the studio would be based on the estate for 8 weeks. This would later be reduced to 6 weeks as the students had grown dissatisfied with the on-site conditions and their learning experience. Their satisfaction also affected the number of responses received to the questionnaire. As a result, I took the decision to extend my group of participants to include UAL’s BA Architecture course leaders and design tutors within and beyond architecture to explore how the situated teaching on the estate might be approached differently.

My participants were as follows:

• Students
• External Collaborators
• Course leaders
• Design tutors from architecture and other disciplines (one architecture tutor teaches at a different university whilst the others where UAL tutors)

My data uncovered the following key themes:

• Structure
• Ethics
• Period on site
• Live projects
• Benefits of social research
• Social research tools and methods
• Client or Community
• Student experience
• Culture

Each group of participant focused on particular areas more than others. For example, the two students’ responses that I had received focused on ‘Structure’, ‘Social research tools and methods’, ‘Ethics’ and ‘Student experience’, whilst the design tutors focused more on ‘Live projects’, ‘Client or Community’, ‘Benefits of social research’, ‘Culture’, ‘Structure’ and ‘Ethics’. I provide a summary of each participants’ key focus below.

Students

The students expressed a need for a defined structure of teaching approach on the estate, so that the expected outputs are clear. They also highlighted that they needed support with methods for engaging with residents on the estate. Whilst they understood the importance of being on the estate regularly to help with their understanding of the lived experiences of residents, they thought that the amount of time on site was unnecessarily long and could have been shortened to 4 – 5 weeks to obtain these insights. They also expressed discomfort about occupying space on the estate, questioning the ethics of doing so when they had access to high specification and well-resourced spaces at CSM.

Student Participant A provided the following response:

“While the community center was great to connect with people, we’re also invading their space and taking up a huge amount of room. While everyone at the center is so nice, at time it feels uncomfortable to be students from a university like CSM using a space that’s really not there to serve us …”

Course leaders

An initial meeting with me and my co-tutor was organised to discuss the studio’s progress and the students’ feedback on their experience. To maintain the students’ confidentiality, the details of feedback has not been included in the research. However, a follow-up meeting was arranged to reflect on lessons learnt and to explore ways of improving the teaching approach going forward. Key themes that surfaced during this discussion included: ‘Student experience’; ‘Structure’, ‘Social research methods and tools’ and ‘Culture’. The discussion surrounding ‘Student experience’ highlighted issues around language difficulties that the social research task might prove to some of the students. The lack of infrastructure on-site was also raised as an issue that would significantly impact student experience. The course leaders suggested that it might have been better to have alternated the teaching days on-site, so there could be some access to infrastructure to deliver studio briefings whilst still holding some teaching on the estate. This echoed Student Participant B’s response to the on-site teaching:

“It is true that regular site visits are helpful in understanding the site. In my personal opinion, it would be a good idea to conduct field visits and classes in school classrooms alternately to discuss what was learned from the field visit and understand in advance what to see during the next field visit.”

The course leaders suggested the following to help improve the structure of the teaching:

1. Create a better balance between sessions at CSM and on site

2. More clear tasks and times for each site date (follow-up with site brief)

3. Provide tools for site engagement

It was agreed by all participants of this meeting that how to create social research tools needs to be taught to support students’ site analysis across the course beyond my design studio.

Student Participant A had also mentioned that greater support was needed beyond the co-produced studio manifesto:

“It was good but I feel it was too focused on HOW to gather/ask/introduce yourself to residents rather than what to ask them to get the best results. It felt very flimsy when we actually put it to use since most of it was just common sense.”

It was discussed during the meeting with course leaders that there is currently a misalignment between the Spatial Practices manifesto and the teaching practices across the course with regards to community engagement and live projects. It was suggested that examples of participatory projects should be presented to students, whilst also developing the culture across the course team generally.

External Collaborators

The external collaborators responses covered ‘Ethics’, ‘Structure’ and ‘Culture’. Overall, they welcomed our approach and expressed a keen interest to continue the collaboration. There was an acknowledgement that whilst the ethical and reciprocal approach had been clear and well organised for one stakeholder, Haringey Council, it had been less clear for the community group that had provided the design studio access to space within the community centre. To address this in the future, it was suggested that a financial budget or student volunteering time should be set as part of the studio brief.

External collaborators expressed an interest in wanting to see greater engagement between the students and residents particularly during the studio’s design review (crit), which was held in the community centre. External Collaborator Participant C suggested the following:

“I feel like it pushed the students out of their comfort zone but they somewhat reverted to normal ‘review’ style. For me, the best part of the review day was the lunch break where some of the students discussed their work with residents, and it would have been great if there could have been more of this. Perhaps this is a lesson learnt for the idea of a ‘internal review’ vs ‘public review’.”

Further suggestions of how the experience could be improved aligned with the need to promote the culture of socially engaged practices in the studio. External Collaborator Participant C added:

“Strong encouragement of benefits of embedding within sites and communities to students

(maybe some sort of co-created ‘Charter’ as a first task?).”

Design Tutors

My final group of participants were design tutors who carry out socially engaged practices as part of their pedagogical approach. I interviewed four tutors, two of which were architects and two others whose practices sit within product design. Most tutors discussed how ‘Live projects’ were crucial to structuring a site situated teaching practice. This echoes some of Student Participant A’s response to my studio’s teaching delivery on the estate:

‘… I really do get how important being on site is, but maybe it’s a good idea to make the site visits more rigorous and hands …’

(Student Participant A)

Tutor Participant E had described how the object of production that arises out of a ‘Live Project’ becomes part of the process for conducting social research, and are therefore intertwined. Whereas Tutor Participant F described ‘Live Projects’ separately to fieldwork where the studio is not based on-site, but the students are required to “go out” to conduct social research. Tutor Participant D had used an interesting phase during the interview regarding the carrying out of an activity to gather information:

‘… using clay as a listening material…’

(Tutor Participant E)

and went on to describe the preparation of the structure that is considered prior to the activity:

‘… It’s basically a designed workshop … who’s the group you’re going to be engaging with? … What’s the context of engagement? … What’s the goal of engagement? … What might be an appropriate design of engagement using clay?

(Tutor Participant E)

Tutor Participants D, E and F referred to collaborating with clients that have specific requirements, which the students can deliver within a pre-agreed time period. Tutor Participant D linked an identifiable client that has clear and specific needs with ‘Ethics’ and opportunities for achieving reciprocity. The participation of communities in socially engaged teaching and learning for some of the tutors was an area that needed careful consideration to avoid the exploitation of communities in a knowledge extraction process that fails to be mutually beneficial.

‘You have to be quite careful about the ethics of it because in the end what is the purpose of the research and how does it benefit the community that you are researching in. Those are quite tricky questions.’

(Tutor Participant G)

Tutor Participant F like the course leaders highlighted the need for students to be taught how to conduct research, which has typically not been part of the architectural education.

‘… it’s not part of architecture training to teach social research techniques. I don’t even mean deep academic level, I mean in terms of designing a questionnaire, and that in itself requires a lot of upskilling.’

                                                                                    (Tutor Participant G)

All tutors mentioned the importance to human-centred and participatory design of immersing students in places in which they propose to intervene. They offered some helpful suggestions of what to consider when I next undertake a situated teaching and learning approach. These included Tutor Participant D’s suggestion of going beyond the pre-designed participatory workshop to ‘infrastructuring’ as a verb, whereby one is starting small with low stakes and gradually building on as parties in the collaboration, including clients/communities, feel more confident in the process. Participant F suggested foregrounding the ethos of co-production strongly in the teaching and learning methodology by encouraging the students to design the structure of the activities once the overall aims and deliverables have been set by myself and my co-tutor. Tutor Participant D suggested seeing this teaching as part of a longer research project, and therefore, taking place over several years within which the students’ learning is nested.  

The Register

Analysis of the register showed that there were high percentages of students’ attendance on the days that the teaching was held at the university. The only time the equivalent percentage was achieved on the estate was during the design review.

Conclusion

The themes that I concluded were of high importance following the information that the research participants provided were:

• Structure
• Ethics
• Social research tools and methods.

Each of these provide the conditions for the other themes, in that if structure of the teaching material and social research tools are designed well, then they will subsequently improve students’ experience and confidence, and contribute to the course’s approach to socially engaged teaching. The three headline themes are also interrelated as ‘Ethics’ is connected to how the teaching is structured to achieve reciprocity. Co-producing social research tools and methods with the students also is central to how the structure is approached. If students have been included in the process of developing the teaching structure, tools and material, then they have the opportunity to shape them to meet their needs. 

Whether reciprocity is better achieved when communities are approached as clients’ needs further investigation. On the one hand, it avoids the lack of clarity and lack of reciprocity as experienced by the community group on Broadwater Farm Estate, Wheelie Tots. On the other hand, if the structure of the teaching is centred on delivering a designed object for a client, some students might potentially avoid the social research altogether as the data suggests that students felt less confident approaching residents and finding out about their lived experience on the estate. This suggests that social research should be approached distinctively in its own right separately from the delivery of a design brief for a client.