Growth Opportunity: Transforming Studio-Based Education through Digital Tools during the Global SARS- CoV-2 Pandemic at the University of Florida

Abstract

In Learning from Our Mistakes, Henry J. Perkinson (1930-2012) suggested that there are three primary approaches to education: education as initiation, education as transmission, and education as growth (Perkinson, 4-5). In architectural education, we see all of these models well-represented. In some cases, initiation and the notion of “teaching through example” is primary. This educational model is structured around an idea that students learn to be architects by observing an architect, doing architectural work. In a classical atelier model, the architect, faculty member, or tutor is positioned as a master, with students working and learning below them as apprentices. It depends on a clear hierarchical structure, as well as the idea that learning takes places through a process of initiation. The idea of education as the transmission of information from one person to another is a persistent one. It is the idea at the heart of the lecture format, where those with knowledge (architects, faculty members, tutors, etc.) share that knowledge with others. Education as transmission is also about a fundamentally closed and limited body of knowledge that can be parsed, ordered, packaged, and relayed from person to person, or from generation to generation.