Tracing the evolution of a parallel-engaged architectural pedagogy of care in South Africa

Abstract

Purpose

Tracing the development of a parallel-engaged pedagogy of care that extended and adapted the critical and transformative pedagogies of Freire, De Sousa Santos and hooks to the South African context. The development of this transformative pedagogy addresses the local conditions of an architectural design studio at a postcolonial, post-Apartheid and post “Fees must Fall” protests South African university. This pedagogy used practice-based design research to build a more conscious, critical and careful design practice in both students and educators.

Design/methodology/approach

The pedagogy was developed through participatory action research, over five years, from 2019 to 2023 including two years of the COVID-19 pandemic. Parallel and active engagement of students and educators within a nurturing and caring environment evolved from year to year, through a conscious and critical reflection on the process. Student surveys, reflective essays and focus groups unearth the impact of the parallel-engaged pedagogy of care.

Findings

The parallel-engaged pedagogy of care was shown to support and scaffold students becoming more conscious, critical and careful in their design practices validating diverse lived experiences as generative for design and important for social justice and transformative equity.

Research limitations/implications

The parallel-engaged pedagogy of care is part of a global shift to more transformative pedagogies that address student diversity and decoloniality.

Originality/value

Through dismantling traditional hierarchical teaching modes, the pedagogy is more student-led, agile and adaptable. Through centring and demonstrating care in the pedagogy, students are encouraged to develop both self-care and care in their design practice. This is especially critical in the South African context where the cultural capital of the institution, with its roots in colonial and Apartheid education differs from that of the majority of students of colour.

Citation

Felix, S.L. (2024), "Tracing the evolution of a parallel-engaged architectural pedagogy of care in South Africa", Archnet-IJAR, Vol. ahead-of-print No. ahead-of-print. https://doi.org/10.1108/ARCH-05-2024-0204

Architectural pedagogy in South Africa has historically been based on imported colonial European models:

(The) condition of architectural education and practice in Sub-Saharan Africa, where most educational models were imported from, when not even imposed by, colonising countries … (requires) reconceptualising curricula to allow for a plurality of different voices to be heard. (Berlanda, 2017, p. 69)

These imported models have created an “abyssal line” (De Sousa Santos, 2014) dividing South African society decades after the end of historical colonialism and apartheid. Whatever lies on the indigenous side of that line is still largely invisible and deemed irrelevant. The global resistance against abyssal thinking acts against epistemicide, where colonial domination involves the deliberate destruction of other cultures’ knowledge, memories, ancestral links and manner of relating to others and nature (De Sousa Santos, 2014). In South African higher education, apartheid followed colonialism in the suppression of diverse local ways of knowing and being.

The contestation of inherited models of architectural education commenced shortly after the end of Apartheid in 1994 with the opening up of South African universities to previously excluded students of colour. At the time, Low and Smuts questioned whether existing architectural schools in historically white universities could provide a transformative [1] architectural pedagogy noting the depth of their institutional culture based on these imported models (Low et al., 1997). Under Apartheid only historically white universities offered architectural programs, as the universities set up separately for the Black, Coloured and Indian populations had limited courses and reduced academic scope. Therefore, “black” students, incorporating Black, Coloured, Indian and Asian students wanting to study architecture were required to obtain special ministerial permission to study at historically white institutions [2]. Berlanda on arriving at the School of Architecture at the University of Cape Town fifteen years later noted that these inherited colonial models of education were still present and questioned both the scholarly value of the imported models and the discrepancy between the formal aesthetics and the material living conditions of local people (Berlanda, 2017, p. 69).

In South Africa architectural programmes were slow to transform their curriculum after the end of Apartheid. Saidi foresaw the student protests of 2015 when in 2005 he noted that “to continue to teach in the way they had always done in the past would lead to learner dissatisfaction at some point in the future” (2005, p. 13). These “Fees Must Fall” and “Rhodes Must Fall” student protests prompted a thorough examination of the pedagogy across all schools of architecture, indeed across all universities. “Fees Must Fall” protests commenced with challenging the increase in fees amidst the student affordability crisis at universities. A parallel “Rhodes Must Fall” protest requested the removal of all colonial-era iconography from universities including the Cecil Rhodes statue at the University of Cape Town, and alongside this the reinvention of academic programs moving away from colonial-era models that had been slow to transform since the end of Apartheid in 1994. Both protests coalesced into demands for a “free decolonized education” (Jansen and Walters, 2022, p. 51). At that moment it was acknowledged that a different kind of pedagogy was required that spoke to students’ lived experience. Acknowledging indigenous knowledge systems as not only equal to a Westernised canon but more relevant to the South African context.

When protesting students demanded a decolonized curriculum, it was, therefore, a criticism lodged within a politics of knowledge that recognized the lingering intellectual legacies of colonial and apartheid education, reflected in what is taught (knowledge content), how it is taught (knowledge hierarchies), and, for some, by whom it is taught (knowledge authorities). (Jansen and Walters, 2022, p. 7)

These protests arose from the alienation experienced by black students who were now in the majority in historically white universities but still felt as if they did not belong. Claiming their space within institutions that did not recognise or acknowledge their identity and their history was part of the underlying issue that drove the protests, exemplified by one black woman student’s protest placard “Look at me, I am here” (Lange, 2019).

Architectural pedagogy, both what was taught, the curriculum, and how it was taught, the underlying pedagogy needed to be transformed. A decolonised architectural education was required which interrogated the institutional culture and its capacity for transformation. Could these institutions be changed and transformed from within? Makhubu (2021) questioned whether as per Lorde (2018) you can dismantle “the master’s house with the master’s tools?” echoing the questions Low and Smuts had asked (1997). Toffa concurred, stating that the architectural profession in South Africa is still complicit in reproducing colonial forms of domination and dispossession along racial lines (2021). South African institutional culture was slow to transform in response to the 2015 student protests, where decolonization intentions were watered down through “bureaucratizing, disciplining, regulating, marginalizing, and domesticating radical curriculum change” (Jansen and Walters, 2022, p. 20).

The changes were largely left up to individual academics to implement, based on various institutional decolonization strategies. In architecture schools, these changes started before 2015, with the Architectural Education Forum Africa at the International Union of Architects World Congress held in Durban, South Africa in 2014, and continued with the “Architectural Education @ all scales symposium” held at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in 2016.

Architectural schools within these institutions also have particular cultures that work against transformative change. Payne noted how through studio reviews and critiques architectural schools often reinforce their culture, and force students with different cultural capital to conform (2015). South African students from diverse cultural backgrounds therefore face a double challenge when entering formerly white institutions, the lingering colonial and Apartheid culture of the institution and the culture of the architecture school. Students need to grow in confidence and resilience to deal with this continued acculturation. Concurrently, educators developed strategies which validate students’ individual cultural capital, thereby supporting an alternative transformative architectural/design pedagogy at the intersection of class, race, gender and social justice:

• (1)

  Inclusive educational and professional access (Felix, 2018; Luckan and Pillay, 2019)

• (2)

  Collaborative, socially and culturally sensitive interdisciplinary learning (Szentesi, 2022)

• (3)

  Care and support especially for previously disadvantaged students (Felix, 2018; Janse Van Rensburg, 2016)

• (4)

  Student-centred approach: recognizing students’ indigenous knowledge, socio-cultural contexts, workload and lived realities (Olweny et al., 2021).

• (5)

  Teachers as facilitators in an engaged pedagogy (Hendricks et al., 2020; Saidi, 2005)

• (6)

  Playful learning: “embracing local ways of knowing and being” (Cassim, 2020, p. 524)

• (7)

  Plurality of voices (Berlanda, 2017)

• (8)

  Multi-cultural curriculum addressing a politically, socially and culturally changing society (Saidi, 2005)

• (9)

  Nurturing creative confidence (Gachago et al., 2020)

• (10)

  Embodied and reflective material practices exploring diverse lived experiences (Bahmann, 2022)

• (11)

  Feminist perspectives on material knowing (Stone-Johnson, 2022)

All these educators were working and trying to transform the system from within. At the University of Johannesburg, however, there was an opportunity to create something new. Lesley Lokko, Amira Osman and Finzi Saidi, amongst others, came together to found a new post-graduate school of architecture, the Graduate School of Architecture (GSA). Lokko spoke of shifting from the euro-centric Beaux-arts, Bauhaus and RIBA roots upon which architecture schools in South Africa based their education, to a more transformative pedagogy of diversity in choice and content (Lokko, 2017). However, it is ironic that this new transformative pedagogy was another British derivative, the unit system, developed at the Architectural Association (AA) in London by Boyarsky in the 1970s. Thus, the opportunity to create a new architecture school structured by and for Africa was missed. Nonetheless, the new GSA, although still deriving its structure from elsewhere, did transform the curriculum, creating a space where students and staff who were marginalised at their previous institutions could redefine design research and practice on their own terms.

These transformative pedagogy strategies, at the GSA and other schools of architecture in South Africa reveal a “significant paradigm shift in the theoretical underpinnings of educational learning theory from ‘behavioural’ and ‘cognitive’ to ‘humanist’ and ‘situated’ theories of learning” (Webster, 2008, p. 64). Transformative architectural design pedagogy builds on critical pedagogy in rethinking the relationship of educator and student in the design studio, critically questioning traditional assumptions and norms. It seeks to reveal the studio, the central site in architectural education, as not neutral but “integral to social, cultural, and political relations that characterize real-life conditions” (Salama, 2021, p. 25) with Salama noting the urgency with which the reimagination of architectural education is required in the current context internationally.

In “Studio recipes for systemic change” the Helsinki Design lab notes similarly that “a successful education system in the future will be defined by how well it handles diversity and enables all students to participate and thrive” (Boyer et al., 2011, p. 54). Similarly, Jackson Bell posits a culturally relevant architectural pedagogy by promoting “invisible cultures” (2014, p. 90) in the design studio, incorporating “practices of critical race theory into a collective pedagogy … engaging diverse cultural experiences in teaching and learning” (2022, p. 206). An architectural pedagogy as per Travis focuses on the student’s learning, developing positive cultural and social identities and supporting students’ critical consciousness (Travis, 2012, pp. 1–2).

In South Africa this urgency to transform architectural education from its colonial and Apartheid past addressing equity and social justice is felt more keenly after the student protests of 2015/2016. These “Fees must Fall” protests started at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), in Johannesburg historically the site of student activism even during Apartheid. Wits students have always been at the vanguard of demanding transformation and change. Many staff members, including myself, are alumni and can still remember the Anti-Apartheid protests often violently suppressed by the security apparatus of the Apartheid Government. Wits University, and more particularly, the School of Architecture and Planning (SoAP) as a site of transformation and decoloniality is continuing its activist role within South Africa through the actions of staff, now agents within the institution.

The parallel-engaged pedagogy of care illustrated in this paper was developed within the third-year undergraduate design program over 5 years at Wits’ SoAP. The pedagogy is developed alongside curriculum methods, which adapt postgraduate practice-based design research methods to an undergraduate cohort. The research presented at previous conferences focused on this adaptation of practice-based design research methods from 2019 to 2022 at Wits, SoAP (Felix, 2018, 2022). The practice-based design research methods focus inward on the student, unearthing personal narratives, and position the student critically within the institution. These methods have been proven to develop conscious self-awareness in postgraduate students (Van Schaik, 2020), and develop positionality (Rendell, 2020). This paper extends that research by focusing on the underlying parallel-engaged pedagogy of care, which was developed alongside the practice-based design research methods, to support decolonial and transformative imperatives. Both the pedagogy and the curricular methods were implemented through cycles of participative action research, which echo the aims of the engaged pedagogy by engaging students in the ongoing development of their education.

Developing a parallel-engaged pedagogy of care in architecture

A parallel-engaged pedagogy of care, my term, developed at Wits, SoAP supports students’ becoming more conscious, critical and careful in design practice in the context of a South African university, with the attendant issues of racial, cultural and gender diversity and socio-economic precarity.

The parallel-engaged pedagogy of care is multi-faceted, parallel, engaged and careful. “Parallel” dismantles the power relations, and racialised constructs between the educator and the student. “Engaged” students and educators are active participants towards their own well-being and actualization. “Care” nurtures the well-being and personal development of students, thereby instilling in them care for themselves, for others and for the life-sustaining web that is our world (refer to Figure 1).

The parallel-engaged pedagogy of care was a supporting framework for a practice-based design research dialogue between educators and students at SoAP, merging self-ethnography, with design pedagogy. In the South African context of racial, gender, economic and cultural diversity, this transformative pedagogy values each student’s voice and lived spatial experience as generative for their present and future design practice, thereby promoting social justice and inclusivity.

In designing a transformative architectural pedagogy in South Africa, what is the desired outcome? Firstly, there is a need for a pedagogy which is reflective of the local socio-economic, cultural and political context. Secondly, it is important to recognise the qualities, values and skills desired in future South African architects. Arguably, there is a core competency of skills which all architects no matter which country they practice in would require, usually legislated by various professional bodies. The South African Council for the Architectural Profession (SACAP) lists these essential skills as:

• (1)

  “Office practice, legal aspects and ethics

• (2)

  Computer applications

• (3)

  Urban relationship

• (4)

  Architectural history & theory

• (5)

  Architectural design

• (6)

  Environmental relationship

• (7)

  Contract documentation and administration

• (8)

  The structure of buildings

• (9)

  Construction technology

• (10)

  Building services & related technologies” (“2021 New_Appendix A The SACAP Competencies.pdf”, 2021)

However, it is broadly perceived that these competencies all have related important behavioural qualities and values, as demonstrated by Savic and Kashef when correlating the European Association for Architectural Education (EAAE) survey results with the Architects’ Council of Europe list of competencies (2013, p. 999).

What are the values and qualities perceived as important for practising architecture globally, and in a postcolonial and post-Apartheid society specifically? To understand society’s perception of these qualities, social media data collection is contrasted with South African student and practitioner surveys, as methodological tools for research. Data responding to the search term “qualities of an architect” was collected from blogs, architecture social media sites and educational and architectural practice sites [3]. The data, including both hard skills and soft qualities and values was weighted for frequency (refer to Figure 2). This list was compared with a local student survey (refer to Figure 3) and practitioner focus groups and survey (de Jager, 2023).

In both surveys (refer Figures 2 and 3), the most common skills noted for architects were creativity, problem-solving and communication. The most common quality is passion. However, in the local students’ survey other qualities and values came to the fore: understanding, compassion, care, patience, personal and social awareness, adaptability and confidence. These values and qualities were not as highly rated in the social media survey, and therefore might suggest a more local postcolonial, post-Apartheid way of practicing. This is corroborated by local practitioners’ who spoke of the need for a “sensitivity to everyday lives/practices of people”; “patience and understanding” of local conditions, and a “commitment to transforming the built environment to support spatial justice” (Architects’ Focus Group 1.2). Another local practitioner survey also reinforced this view with the top values including adaptability; passion; resilience and being people-oriented (de Jager, 2023). The first group of skills can be taught through technical and studio training, but the values require a different kind of pedagogy, that supports being and becoming, rather than knowing (Dall'Alba, 2009, p. 34).

Reflective-diffractive practice-based design research methods were implemented to support and develop students’ being and becoming more conscious, critical and careful in design practice. Reflective methods developed self-awareness, unpacking personal spatial memories and lived experiences, thereby unearthing particular design fascinations in past practice. Diffractive methods critically situated students within a particular postcolonial socio-economic, political, cultural and institutional context. These methods are appropriate for a postcolonial and post-apartheid context because they value a different kind of becoming and being that breaks from a colonial and Apartheid past.

In the context of a postcolonial university and a decolonial project, validating ways of being and knowledge that were actively denied and delegitimized is an “embodied re-membering of the past … against the colonialist practices of erasure and avoidance” (Barad, 2017, p. 56). This re-membering or reconstituting of alternative histories validates the “alternative ways of doing things” or practicing which are embedded in alternative knowledges (Smith, 2012, p. 52). The reflective-diffractive practice-based design research methods, validate the students’ culture, their particular ways of seeing and being and position it within the postcolonial and post-Apartheid institution, architectural discourse and practice. However, It is a decolonial transformative pedagogical practice not only in its methodology but also in the way it is implemented, through a parallel-engaged pedagogy of care, developed over a series of participative action research cycles. All three, the method, the pedagogy and the action research, centre and engage the student in actively reimagining their architectural practices for this place and time. A place rooted still in its colonial and Apartheid past.

The evolving parallel-engaged pedagogy of care used to implement these practice-based design research methods had as much impact on students’ design practice as the actual content itself. This paper unpacks this parallel-engaged pedagogy of care and traces its development over 5 years at SOAP, from 2019 to 2023 in cycles of participatory action research. The participants, including myself as architect-researcher-educator, students and colleagues, co-constructed learning for a more conscious, critical and careful design practice for all. Reflections on the pedagogic process from year to year prompted incremental adjustments. The participatory part of the research is a direct reflection of the “parallel” pedagogy. I learnt about myself, alongside students and colleagues learning about themselves. Together we engaged in a collaborative dialogue with each other unearthing tacit knowledge about our design practices. Luckan noted that participatory pedagogy was essential in South African decolonial education, that teachers should be educators who facilitate learning rather than teach or transmit knowledge (2020). This has also been reported internationally with Salama confirming that “ educators need to move away from thinking of students as passive listeners and encourage them to be active learners” both inside and outside of the classroom setting, enabling socio-behavioural qualities such as “listening and respecting the views of others” (Salama and Maclean, 2017, p. 171).

The implementation period from 2019 to 2023 included almost two years of COVID-19 lockdown. Learning moved online in 2020 and 2021 and was hybrid, in-person and online in the last two years. This affected the pedagogy both positively and negatively.

Engaged pedagogy

In 2019, when commencing third-year design teaching, the new team inherited a rational curriculum developed by Ludwig Hansen, within the Wits model of “engineering with arts” (Luckan, 2020, p. 141). Self-reflection and social reflection were added to this curriculum to support a more conscious design practice. As per the inherited curriculum, students were tasked in their first project of the year with de-constructing their archives of design practice, through analytically re-drawing previous projects. To this re-drawing, reflective engagement with past practice was added, unearthing fascinations and preoccupations. Students engaged with their past design practice, through a meta-reflection across all their previous projects in their undergraduate years. They also engaged with each other and with tutors through social reflection.

This reflection added mutual and active engagement between students and educators towards self-actualization. Social reflection and self-reflection were a starting point for students in the process of finding their own ways of seeing and designing. These local, indigenous ways of knowing are slowly being validated at institutions of higher learning within South Africa shifting away from established knowledge systems.

In this project, the design problem to be solved was the students’ own design practice; therefore, all insights and reflections were valuable.

engaged pedagogy highlights the importance of independent thinking and each student finding his or her unique voice, this recognition is usually empowering for students. This is especially important for students who otherwise may not have felt that they were “worthy,” that they had anything of value to contribute. (hooks, 2009, p. 21)

Engaged pedagogy builds on Freire’s “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” (2017), a seminal work in critical pedagogy that addresses transformation, diversity and marginalisation. Freire proposed a “problem-posing education” model where both students and teachers become conscious makers of their own culture through dialogue, being jointly responsible for a process in which all grow (Freire, 2017). This dialogic engagement requires both action and reflection, as Freire viewed the omission of action as verbalism and the omission of reflection as empty activism.

The reflective dialogue at SoAP, includes reflection on two levels, the self and the social (refer Figure 4). It is also activism, in the sense that the students reconstruct themselves through deconstructing their archives, and their design practices, by drawing, self-reflecting and social reflection.

bell hooks’ Teaching to Transgress (1994) developed on the critical pedagogy of Freire at the intersection of anti-colonial, critical and feminist pedagogies. This radical pedagogy included the recognition of differences of class, race, sexual practice and nationality. She translated Freire’s conscientization to critical awareness and engagement, seeing education as a practice of freedom where the engaged voice of all active participants is not static or fixed. She focused on this engagement, noting that for education to be the practice of freedom everyone needs to labour in the field of knowledge. This “engaged pedagogy” (hooks, 1994, p. 15) is thus more demanding than critical pedagogy. It is a holistic education that recognizes the value of each student’s voice. Each student sees the value of their overall life experiences and how they connect to what they are learning. Students and teachers learn to accept different “ways of knowing, new epistemologies in a multi-cultural setting” (hooks, 1994, p. 40).

The implementation of engaged pedagogy at SoAP, through collaborative dialogue begins to cross the boundaries of race, gender, class or professional standing. In this dialogue educators share their own practice reflections, becoming vulnerable and demonstrating to students how lived experience can be generative for design practice. Through this openness to each other and sharing, the classroom becomes a

field of possibility, [where] we have the opportunity to labour for freedom, to demand of ourselves and our comrades an openness of mind and heart that allows us to face reality even as we collectively imagine ways to move beyond boundaries, to transgress. This is education as the practice of freedom (hooks, 1994, p. 207).

Parallel pedagogy

The engaged pedagogy in South Africa emerges from a specific contextual understanding of Freire’s and hooks’ pedagogies within racially marginalized contexts. South Africa’s context is, however, not identical, requiring an unpacking and situating of both the educators’ and students’ cultural and educational backgrounds. South African educators have suggested that Freire’s “pedagogy of hope” was an ontological need (Grange, 2011), and “not only … resonat[ed] with a revitalized ‘pedagogy of liberation’, or a ‘pedagogy of social justice’ but also … [was] an antithesis of a ‘pedagogy of domination’ which was a defining feature of South Africa’s apartheid legacy” (Ndlovu, 2011, p. 42). However, Freire’s application in a South African context needed to acknowledge that oppression cannot be simply defined, that there are multiple systems of context-specific oppression within an interconnected and changing rapidly world resulting in super-complexity of power relations (Grange, 2011, p. 186). Therefore, the unpacking of the “pedagogy of domination” (Ndlovu, 2011, p. 42) requires a new type of relationship between students and teachers, one that is more parallel in nature and subverts the power dynamics at play.

In 2019, as an architect-researcher-educator, to increase engagement and counter the traditional power dynamics in the studio, I decided to complete the same practice-based design research exercises alongside students, as both a parallel pedagogy, and an autoethnography. It facilitated a different kind of relationship between educator and student in the design studio, one that extended hooks and Freire’s notions of an engaged pedagogy. I re-drew projects from my own past design practice alongside students in the studio and filmed the experience (refer Figure 5). In the parallel pedagogy, I became a student alongside them, I responded to their questions by reflecting on my own work. I was no longer a teacher but rather a facilitator, co-constructing knowledge with students.

After the re-drawing process, all participants engaged in a social reflective dialogue around their de-constructed archives, commencing around my own de-constructed archive (refer Figure 6). The rules of engagement were different from the usual design studio critiques, which can be confrontational and negative. A safe space was created for personal and social reflection, tasking participants with supporting each other’s self-reflection by seeking to understand and find evidence of that reflection within the archive. Alternatively, they could suggest fascinations or preoccupations that they saw within one others’ archive. The pedagogic engagement occurred on several levels. Educators and students actively engaged with each other in a safe space. Participants reflectively engaged with their past practice, unpacking and unearthing new insights using drawing as a research tool.

In a parallel pedagogy, the educators do not teach in the traditional sense of transmitting knowledge. They rather facilitate and scaffold the student’s conscious and critical becoming alongside their own becoming process.

This “parallel” pedagogy echoes De Sousa Santos’ “knowing with, understanding facilitating, sharing and walking alongside” students (2014). A collective formation of knowledge and intercultural translation, developing new hybrid forms of cultural understanding and intercommunication by asking for deep listening (2014). Exploring how an individual’s social formation influences their practice and understanding in communities that struggle against marginality and notions of inferiority.

De Sousa Santos goes further by requesting an epistemological transformation. Moving towards an ecology of knowledge which asks if what one is learning is valid or if what has already been learned should be forgotten or unlearned (2014). In South Africa, when the educator and the student co-construct knowledge in this parallel way, the educator needs to interrogate what remnants of their own Apartheid education should be unlearned, forgotten or contested.

Alongside the feminist epistemology of Grosz (1995), De Sousa Santos (2014) underlies the corporeality of knowledge, acknowledging that struggles are carried out by bodies, and therefore that the body is a necessary mediator of our representation of the world. The relevance to South African architectural design pedagogy is in revealing the postcolonial conditions that linger in architectural cultural production.

In the SoAP third-year design studio, the self-reflective moment at the beginning of the year brings the individual design voice to the fore. It reminds students and educators that design is a tension between what we individually bring with us, our fascinations and preoccupations, and a considered response to site and context. However, our response is also coloured by our institution’s and school’s learning culture.

Pedagogy of care

Shortly after this parallel reflection in the studio in 2020, we moved to emergency online learning due to the COVID-19 lockdown. It was a stressful time for everyone, students returned home, some to difficult circumstances while educators were grappling with redesigning courses for an online environment. Everyone was struggling with the health, economic and social fallout of the COVID-19 lockdown. The teaching team realised immediately that a different approach was required, one that acknowledged the stress under which everyone was living.

Thirty years after the transition to democracy, South Africa remains a highly unequal society. However, various spaces have emerged which offer historically deprived individuals a measure of freedom, sociability and opportunity. One of these is the university campus, and, for architecture students in particular, the design studio. The design studio is a place where underprivileged students can find an enabling environment, space for learning, computer hardware and software and good connectivity (Felix and Silverman, 2021).

However, these spaces of freedom were severely compromised by the COVID-19 pandemic closure of the universities, and the move to online learning. The pandemic sharpened a range of social, economic and digital divides, which were legacies of colonialism and Apartheid. Our initial response as educators was to devise uniform systems of online teaching to replace face-to-face interactions. However, within days of the move to online learning, we discovered that this was not possible without widening the divides between rich and poor, urban and rural, connected and disconnected. We therefore had to devise responsive, customised and flexible ways of teaching to reach every student. This in turn required care and flexibility from educators (Felix and Silverman, 2021). Some students, especially those from rural areas, and/or disadvantaged backgrounds, suffered the most. The design studio for them was a site of freedom, which could not be replicated online.

At SoAP, care was still a largely hidden part of the pedagogy before COVID-19. A cohort of educators were implementing diverse views of care and nurturing in their pedagogies including in the third-year studio [4]. These care strategies attempted to address students’ social and economic differences, largely still colonial and Apartheid legacies. During COVID-19, however, care became central, defining approaches, methods, processes and content.

A pedagogy of care nurtures the being and becoming of students. One cannot teach careful practice without embedding and demonstrating care within the pedagogy itself, within the architectural studio. Care speaks to the respect, concern, consideration and sensitivity which we show ourselves and each other within the studio. If students feel that their needs, desires and lived experiences are met, acknowledged and validated, they can then begin to show the same care and consideration for their design practice, for others and for the life-sustaining web that is our world.

Care has a dual meaning, it is both a mental disposition of concern and a practice as a result of that concern. Care is

a species activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue and repair our “world” so that we can live in it as well as possible. The world includes our bodies, ourselves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web (Tronto and Fisher, 1990, p. 40).

This definition includes action and puts care into practice. Tronto and Fisher further identify four phases of care: caring about; caring for; caregiving and care-receiving (1990).

The practice of care in architecture means “understanding the interdependence of the economy, ecology, labour and future repair” (Krasny and Fitz, 2019). The four phases of care as applied to architecture are care for land and water; care for the repair of buildings and environments; care for skills and care for production (Krasny and Fitz, 2019). Developing care in architectural practice means “architects, urban designers and spatial practitioners may be more enabled to cultivate and protect today’s and future generations’ social well-being and biodiversity” (Rawes, 2013, p. 53). Care is required in architectural practice to address the multiple crises of our world (Krasny and Fitz, 2019).

Within the South African context care is also a commitment to unpack the hidden curriculum within the design studio, the unnoticed discriminatory practices. This unpacking of unacknowledged bias and internalised dominance (hooks, 1994) can be difficult, and therefore needs to be done with consideration and understanding but also critically.

To re-think design approaches and methods around a notion of care that centres on addressing inequality and includes a commitment to social justice is difficult, politically charged and fraught with complications (Boys, 2016, p. 175)

The teaching team and the university responded to the technical problems that hindered students’ online learning during COVID-19 by delivering laptops and data packages to students without access to these necessities. We explored a myriad of different ways to engage with students, from online whiteboard-enabled apps to WhatsApp exchanges of hand-drawn sketches, or telephonic critiques for students who didn’t have data or reliable Internet signal. The class was split into smaller groups, with tutors following up regularly with students work and their mental health. We adjusted previously hard deadlines for projects, becoming more flexible and adaptable in our teaching strategies. We were, in other words, student-led, actively listening to students’ requirements for learning and support, responding to these as best we could.

In this respect, the COVID-19 lockdown had a positive effect on our pedagogic approach. Care became central to the pedagogy, care for ourselves, for our students, for others and for our shared world. Care and empathy were developed by sharing and listening to each other’s reflections. Care also cushioned the emotional, and psychological heavy lifting that was done in the reflective-diffractive exercises where students and educators become vulnerable in their introspection.

Unfortunately, in the still racialised South African society, most of the students who required the most care, and support, whose living conditions were not conducive to learning were black. Care was appreciated by middle class students, but critical to students living in conditions of precarity. Care could thus be seen as a radical decolonial pedagogical practice.

Parallel-engaged pedagogy of care in progress

The parallel-engaged pedagogy rooted in care, developed fluidly by responding to reflections on its development year on year. The personal spatial memory exercise was one such methodological development which arose from the process itself.

As an architect-researcher, the research into my own practice had evolved. I had noticed a gap that redrawing my past design archive had not addressed. Thus, I used photography as a tool to further reflect on my archive. The photographic archive revealed a fascination with colour, texture and materiality the roots of which did not lie in my earlier unpacking of institutional influence (refer to Figure 7). Where did it come from? Upon reflection it became clear that this fascination originated from childhood, playing with colour and patterned scraps of fabric alongside my seamstress mother’s sewing machine (Felix, 2021). This connection to memory was pivotal to my practice-based design research. Hence, I shared this with students through photographs, drawings and reflections on the texture and materiality in my design practice, entitled “Playing with fabric” (Felix, 2021).

Could students connect their past lived experiences with their design fascinations? One student who had been struggling with the initial exercise, reflected on his past, drawing parallels from experiences of living in a Zulu hut with his fascination with light and dark in his design projects (refer Figure 8):

I spent more than ten years staying in a Zulu hut … It shifted my thinking when coming to structures … The main challenge in staying in such a space was natural light and ventilation … This made me consider natural light as an important element … In all the projects I harness natural light to create a special language in all the designs. (Student1908;2021)

This parallel engagement between myself and this student, and our past spatial experiences, was generative, triggering the inclusion of this personal spatial narrative exercise with future students.

This personal spatial narrative commenced with students and educators sitting outside in a grassed amphitheatre under the shade of trees. This natural environment was conducive to deeper self-reflection. Being outside the classroom introduced students to a different relationship with educators. We all closed our eyes, and remembered a special place in our personal history, sitting with that memory, colouring it in our minds for a few minutes. That intense spatial memory was then sketched in our journals. Educators shared their personal spatial drawings, reflecting on how their design practices could be read through their lived experience of that space. One educator spoke of how the boundaries, liminal spaces and thresholds in their spatial memory echoed in their design practice. Students then reflected on their own spatial memory drawings, unearthing possible spatial principles or catalysts for their design practices. They were invited to share if they felt comfortable to do so.

Not all students found the personal spatial memory exercise formative for understanding their design practice. In a focus group discussion, one of the male studio tutors thought that the students were not mature enough in third year to unpack the meaning-making (Focus Group 3; Tutor 2; 2024). However, a few students commented on its impact:

My earliest memory of spatiality is my childhood home. I may not remember every single detail of the home, but I do remember the way it made me feel. I felt safe, comfortable and heard in this house … I am able to feel comfortable even in the way I express myself in design. Feeling like I have a voice. Feeling heard. Feeling seen … When looking at my earliest spatial memory and my fascination with experience, one can see why it is something that manifests in my work today. By looking at my previous projects, it is evident that the deeper meaning and the emotional impact of the space is what I naturally gravitated to. (Student8860;2022)

For some students, the personal spatial memory was generative in a positive way as can be seen above, but others sought to escape their memories:

The common design element amongst my prior designs was an extensive use of glazing allowing generous amounts of light and giving the perception of a much larger, more open space. This all stemmed from an attempt to escape my earliest spatial memory which was a dark and confined passage from a miserable time of my life. (Student2005;2022)

Students were supported in their reflective unearthing of these ways of seeing through their personal spatial memory. Interestingly, many students chose to either reinforce their lived experiences in their design practice or counter them. In both cases, a more conscious practice was encouraged, with students critically questioning whether their personal lived experience was relevant and generative for a particular project’s social context, or whether this natural bias needed to be countered in their design response. The personal spatial memory exercise, both in its content and its pedagogical implementation has proven to be valuable in building students’ conscious and critical practice. One of the tutors in discussing the personal spatial memory exercise’s effect on students in a focus group noted:

What I do think is quite valuable and this is maybe where they get quite passionate is when they have to personalize. (They) remember this particular space … as a child or a first memory and then understand how that has potentially impacted their understanding of space … and understanding that who they are now is a process … a journey … of where they grew up, how they grew up … I think that’s quite powerful. I think some of them make that correlation. Not all of them, but I think the ones that do … it’s quite powerful for them. And maybe,…it starts giving them permission to take their practice of architecture more seriously, that there are patterns that are starting to develop. (Focus Group 3; Tutor 3; 2024)

The embedded principles of parallel engagement resulted in a flattened power dynamic between educators and students, greater care and connection between students, and respect and validation for the different ways of seeing and knowing in the class. These principles had initially been embedded in the reflective projects at the beginning and end of each year. However, through reflection, it became clear that the self-actualization that arose from this reflective research needed to be expanded and put into practice in the design projects themselves. Once again, the reflective participatory action process resulted in ongoing changes to the pedagogy.

In 2023, all design project briefs explicitly included reflective questions about the students’ own becoming process throughout the year. Not only were students expected to address the complex programmatic, contextual and theoretical issues that were the external project parameters. They also needed to address how their own practice was becoming more conscious, critical and careful. To further encourage reflection on their self-actualization, students wrote an essay at the end of the year reflecting on their development. One student wrote “Architecture is (a) receptive journey, an experience that challenges you to go through a process of self-discovery” (Student3485; 2019). The reflection process initiated more questions than answers, with students questioning the nature and meaning of their society (Student3263; 2019) and embracing local ways of being (Student9621; 2019). Students became aware of the evolution of their design processes, reflecting on past failures and incorporating issues they had seen as gaps in their processes such as sustainability and contextual sensitivity (Students0674,4647,8953;2019).

Significant findings

How have students responded to this parallel-engaged pedagogy of care? Unsurprisingly during the COVID-19 pandemic students responded to the care and agility embedded in the pedagogy with a quality of learning which exceeded what we had previously seen. In surveys conducted during the year, students wrote:

I have appreciated how much the tutors have been checking up on us individually to make sure that we are alright. (Student2064000;2020)

(I appreciate that educators could) maintain the requirements of the course but care more about what’s happening to your students. (Student206405;2020)

However, the impact is critical for students from disadvantaged backgrounds, who would have struggled to succeed without care:

… has gone far beyond what is required as a lecturer to help me. I was in an uncomfortable situation during the first weeks of lockdown and I was falling further and further behind. … personally messaged me to see how I was doing and continued to encourage me and arrange extra critiques with me throughout project 2. I honestly would not have gotten through Project 2 without the extra concern and help that … provided me. (Student206400;2020)

In a South African university those students who feel left behind are most commonly students of colour, who struggle to assimilate into a culture so different from their own. Therefore, it was not surprising when student focus group discussions revealed that care was important for the academic success of black women students in particular “We were genuinely cared about” (Black woman student; Student Focus Group 1, 2024). They reported that the level of care, consideration and support received from educators was central to building their confidence for professional practice: “because teachers showed up then we could too” (Black woman student; Student Focus Group 1, 2024). They also reported being told in their first year that the highest percentage of dropouts were black women students. These research findings echo that of other researchers that care needs to be foregrounded “to support black women to remain and prosper in higher education” (Diouf et al., 2023; Zerai et al., 2023, p. 1). Pedagogical care in this context can therefore be seen as a radical decolonial practice supporting students who have multiple odds stacked against their success.

What of the parallel-engaged aspect of the pedagogy? The research findings confirm Hooks’ (2009, p. 21) assertion that engaged pedagogy is essential for students in finding their own voice, and this is especially critical for students who feel they have nothing of worth to contribute. All students spoke, in focus groups, of the importance of finding their own design voice, of gaining conscious self-awareness of their own ways of seeing and exploring space. Black and women students, however, spoke, of how this process towards conscious self-awareness built confidence in their own practice. Notably, white male students did not mention confidence, perhaps as was noted by one black woman student, confidence was natural and normative for them?

I realised during my time studying that okay as a black woman, … confidence wasn’t something that I grew up having. It was like something I needed to come into. I would notice my other classmates, the white counterparts … they seem confident and almost seems very natural to them.

I was thinking about how the differences in how we grew up as black children. It’s like … you’re not told this, but it’s more something that’s implied. Like you just sit there. Yeah. We don’t want to hear you. Your opinion doesn’t matter as much as anyone else. So it’s something that you have to kind of learn

(Black woman student; Student Focus Group 1; 2024)

Black students spoke about learning to defend their own ideas, in university spaces where they didn’t feel like they belonged, “As a young woman, especially in spaces that are not for young black (women) … so coming to university, being in a prestigious degree like architecture, your job is to listen and learn” (Black woman student; Student Focus Group 1; 2024).

The pedagogy engaged students on their own ideas, validating them. Unlike some students’ experiences in earlier years, design ideas were never labelled bad. The student’s core idea was identified and “even if it had a very weak starting point, you could somehow either find the kernel and then through constant iterations make that alive in some way” (Design Tutor Focus Group 1; 2024). This careful engaged pedagogy slowly built confidence in students. As one black male student explained, in first year he felt like he couldn’t “relate to these people” meaning his classmates and educators; in second year he felt deeply insecure “working in the CAD lab with mostly black students”, but in third year whilst he initially struggled alone, the early manifesto, and personal spatial memory exercises significantly built his confidence in design and he became able through the engaged pedagogy “to back himself up” in terms of his design choices (Black male student, Student Focus Group 4, 2024). His experience was echoed by many students of all races and genders, that finding their own design voices and exploring them, built confidence.

However, for black students, it is also a practice of epistemological freedom corroborating research that “pedagogical justice for disadvantaged students lies in providing a pedagogical scaffold between their life world knowledge’s and accessing school knowledge codes” (Fataar, 2012, p. 52). Thereby developing “compensatory (cultural) capital” (Cross and Atinde, 2015, p. 309) which assists marginalised students in confronting an at times alien institutional culture through conscious self-awareness and critical positionality.

In the South African context, an evolving parallel-engaged pedagogy of care has supported students’ conscious “becoming” journey. This pedagogy explicitly supports epistemic diversity in a “pluriversity” (Mbembe, 2016), through validating multiple and diverse ways of seeing and being as generative for design practice and paying attention to changing circumstances and the context both inside the institution and outside of it. In a postcolonial setting, this validation of local, diverse, often pre-colonial spatial sensibilities, as seen in the student example is an act of decoloniality.

In contrast with Lokko’s GSA program, it breaks with historical architectural education precedents from Europe and looks to other sites of decoloniality, and marginalisation for theoretical grounding. The pedagogy develops and adapts precedents from the global south (De Sousa Santos, 2014; Freire, 2017), and from transformative pedagogies (hooks, 1994), for a local South African architectural pedagogy. However, similarly to the GSA the parallel-engaged pedagogy of care creates a space “for both educators and students to find their voice” (Matsipa, 2021, p. 4).

Even though this pedagogical case study is situated at a South African university, it hopes to contribute to a larger decolonial and transformative imperative in architectural education. The dichotomy of seeing the world as developed or developing, as global north versus global south in many ways belies the complexity of the educational system and migratory patterns of students across the world. The student cohort facing architectural educators the world over is more diverse racially, culturally and linguistically than has ever been seen before as noted by some researchers (Salama and Maclean, 2017, p. 172). Engaging with Therefore, educators need to examine their own and their institution’s culture, ensuring that the architectural pedagogy is not an act of “epistemic violence,…dressed down as a remnant of colonial and apartheid epistemologies” (Jansen and Walters, 2022, p. 53).

Constantly evolving the pedagogy through care and parallel engagement educators thus facilitated and scaffolded all students’ conscious, critical and careful becoming alongside their own becoming. However, for black students, the pedagogy was about much more than becoming, it was liberatory, “making space” (Smith, 2012, p. 195) in the institution for their voices, their histories, their particular ways of seeing and being. This is as important in universities sited in postcolonial contexts, as it is at universities with high numbers of culturally, racially and economically diverse students in the global north. The colonial abyssal line (De Sousa Santos, 2014) might be physically eroding due to student migratory patterns, but its epistemological erosion requires intentional transformative work both in curriculum and pedagogy. Transforming how you learn, is after all, as important as what you learn.

Figures

Figure 1

Drawings showing the parallel-engaged architectural design pedagogy in action with students and educators sitting together in studio on left and walking alongside each other on the right

Figure 2

Pie-graph showing weighted Social Media survey results of a search “qualities of an architect”: inner most tier shows the categories of skills/qualities; the middle tier lists the skills associated with the categories; the outer tier lists the qualities of an architect

Figure 3

Menti-meter app word cloud of third-year student survey of “qualities of an architect in South Africa” – the most often a quality is repeated the bigger the font in the word cloud

Figure 4

Drawing showing the loop of reflection between pairs of students in the practice-based design research – reflecting on/into/about past practice through the personal design archive moves to a reflective dialogue in the present, culminating in reflecting for future practice

Figure 5

Drawing of the expanded social dialogue where educators and students reflect on their personal design archives in studio with colleagues and the whole class

Figure 6

Drawing over photograph of the parallel pedagogy in studio. Me drawing my personal design archive in the foreground alongside students drawing their archives in the background

Figure 7

Drawings and photographs from the author's design archive - showing a fascination with colour, texture, pattern and materiality, the roots of which lie in memories of playing with fabric as a child – drawing on right

Figure 8

Drawings by a student exploring the experience of light living in a Zulu hut. On the left the plan, and the right a sectional drawing showing the limited light penetration from the single opening, and the low opening

Notes

1. “Transformation” in the South African context is rooted in the political discourse following the end of Apartheid in 1994. It encompasses various aspects of societal change including economic, social and political transformation to address historical injustices, redress inequalities and empower previously disadvantaged groups.

2. Aziz Tayob was the first black student to study architecture at the University of the Witwatersrand in 1964 having obtained ministerial permission to do so (In Plain Sight: 5 Decades of Aziz Tayob, 2023; Tayob, 2024).

3. “9 Qualities a Professional Architect Needs to Have to Become Successful”, n.d., “9 Qualities a Professional Architect Needs to Have to Become Successful”, n.d., “15 Personality Traits Of An Architect–Critical Qualities”, n.d., “15 Personality Traits Of An Architect - Critical Qualities”, n.d., “Qualities of an Architect Perspectives on Strategy & Architecture”, n.d., “Qualities of an Architect Perspectives on Strategy & Architecture”, n.d., “What are important qualities of an architect? Forum Archinect”, n.d., “What are the essential skills and qualities of a successful architect?”, n.d., “What are the Qualities of a Skilled Architect? - Tesla OS”, n.d., Bullet-Core, 2023, Ennis, 2019, Nelson, 2023.

4. Discussions and implementations of pedagogical care in the third-year undergraduate studio at SoAP, Wits were rooted in some of Ariane Janse Van Rensburg’s pedagogical research (2016) and continued through the care of Melinda Silverman; Tunde Oluwa; Gustavo Triana; Gerald Chungu; Alexia Cocolas; Patricia Theron; Avish Mistry; Deborah Kirkman; Kevin Goncalves.