Involvement Strategies of Design Instructors: Opportunities to Learn Through Imagination

• In Event: The Pursuit for Responsible Educators Creating Equitable Learning Opportunities: A Cross-Institutional Conversation

Abstract

This case study considers architectural desk crit or one-to-one instructional conversations in design fields as a site for novice students’ learning and socialization into professional and disciplinary discourses. In architecture, most students are expected to learn culturally appropriate ways of being, speaking, and acting in the field as they interact with experts or instructors. In desk crit, students present work-in-progress designs, and instructors give feedback and individual instruction. This traditional apprenticeship model has been a powerful pedagogy to enable newcomers to understand culturally appropriate ways of speaking, doing, and being in the field. In this context, it is teacher’s discourse strategies that involve students in communicative processes and opens learning opportunities in which students “are positioned to adopt and adapt (take up) a set of social and cultural practices associated with academic domains” (Bloome et al. 2009, p. 314).
Although research on feedback in higher education that compares desk crit with feedback offered in language arts classrooms has partially revealed why this type of experience is unique and meaningful (Shute, 2008; Winstone et al., 2017), none of these studies provided a fine-grained analysis of teacher discourse and its strategies in conversational interactions with students that allow for negotiating what counts as knowledge and identity construction, except for some works by conversational analysts (Kitzinger, 2012). Therefore, the present study examines how instructors use involvement strategies (Tannen, 2007), or ways of “creat[ing] and sustain[ing] conversational involvement” (Gumperz, 1982, p. 1), to create opportunities to learn academic, professional discourse (Rex, 2006).
Building on Gumperz, Tannen, and Kitzinger, this study is part of a large semester-long project that draws on an ethnographic and discourse analytic approach to studying teacher-student talk-in-interaction in a college landscape architecture program’s sophomore studio. In this study, I focus on a series of one-to-one desk crit conversations between a student (Ryan) and an instructor (Mr. J) occurring over approximately one month. The data include fieldnotes, video recordings, interviews with instructors and students, video playback, class materials, and grades with written feedback.
Close analyses of talk in interaction across time show that Mr. J used narrative, constructed dialogue, and imagination, often related to imagery and details in his speech. His questions about the narrative details of imagined others in the designed world engaged Ryan in thinking about what design decisions to consider. In suggesting Ryan’s design narrative, Mr. J embedded the constructed dialogue or direct reported speech, making Ryan the first-person subject of the utterance. This practice held Ryan accountable for taking up, or at least responding to, the stance Mr. J proposed. Therefore, Mr. J’s spoken use of narrative and constructed dialogue with imagination involved Ryan in seeing what needs to be considered, thus building his design narrative. This study illustrates how instructors’ involvement strategies create opportunities to learn and build professional identity.

Author

• Minseok Choi, The Ohio State University - Columbus