Transitioning into higher education in Australia involves multiple challenges and injustices for culturally and linguistically diverse students, one of which being that communication and language skills are still not a visible part of academic study in many disciplines (Goldsmith, Willey & Boud, 2018). As a result, communication practices may be "fragmented, ad hoc and not seen as developmental" (Goldsmith et al., 2018, p.72), which can impact negatively on many students, especially those from linguistically diverse backgrounds. In the discipline of Architecture, there has historically been very little explicit focus on the communication and language skills that university students need for their academic studies and professional life, despite the fact that the central teaching and learning approach used in most Architecture schools is a multimodal presentation (Olweny, 2020). Drawing on the concept of epistemic democracy (Hayes, 2019), our current research and teaching aims to increase the visibility of communication practices in Architecture in order to enable greater participation in these practices.
Our approach is framed by a participatory action research methodology, which has its roots in notions of social justice and democratic education. In this talk, we will demonstrate how our action research approach has assisted us in making Architecture communication practices more visible, but we also reflect critically on the barriers to epistemic democracy that remain in our context. We teach first-year undergraduate and postgraduate Architecture students who have been identified by a university-wide language program as needing additional language support; students then attend 1.5 hour weekly tutorials over 10 weeks that focus on discipline-specific communication skills. Our research has involved opening up a dialogue with our students through surveys, focus groups and interviews, to explore together our understandings of what it means to communicate as an Architect, how we can best support students through the development of new materials, and how we can increase the visibility of Architecture communication skills more broadly. Our discussions with them attempt to reverse colonial approaches which apply a deficit model to their language skills and instead move towards onto-epistemological approaches to language which enable plurality and promote inclusion (Escobar, 2020). So far, the research findings have informed the development of new presentation preparation materials as well as a series of educational blog posts at our university as part of our mission to make disciplinary language skills more visible. We continue to work alongside our students to support them to participate in but also challenge the status of Euro-centric Architectural frameworks and language.
References
Escobar, A. (2020). Pluriversal politics: The real and the possible. Duke University Press.
Goldsmith, R., Willey, K., & Boud, D. (2018). Investigating invisible writing practices in the engineering curriculum using practice architectures. European Journal of Engineering Education, 44 (1-2), 71-84.
Hayes, A. (2019). Inclusion, epistemic democracy and international students: The teaching excellence framework and education policy. Palgrave Macmillan.
Olweny, M. R. O. (2020). Students' views of the architectural design review: The design crit in East Africa. Arts & Humanities in Higher Education, 19(4), 377-396.
