Stories of Situated Pedagogies in Architecture and … aims to gather educators and learners who are enthusiastic about sharing their stories of situated pedagogies in architecture and other fields with an interest in critical spatial practices. We invite all to apply to this workshop call with critical responses to their personal experiences in education. We envision a playful and productive platform for communication through pre-workshop peer-to-peer reviews, round-table sessions and field trips in Istanbul, and post-workshop collaborations for publication.
The concept of situated pedagogies is rooted in Donna Haraway’s claim for 'situated knowledges' (1988), which suggests that knowledge is produced through partial, subjective, embodied, and multiple perspectives. Through the conceptualization of knowledge as being produced rather than being transmitted, situated pedagogies question the static positions of educator and learner, and instead suggest a transformative-relational agency for both. Situated pedagogies may be approached as part of everyday life similar to bell hooks’ ‘engaged pedagogy’ (1994), in which educators and learners connect their personal experiences to their academic practices for building their individual and situated voices and nurture a freeing, pluralistic, democratic, inclusive and most precisely a hopeful educational environment. In contemporary times of disasters, wars, and displacements, it is especially an urgent need to perpetually search for ways of situating education and oneself as educators and learners.
In this workshop, we are interested in situated pedagogies that may be conceptualized both around the notion of education that is specific to its socio-spatial context and simultaneously transformative for educators, learners, and that context. Regarding the articulation of situated pedagogies critical spatial practices, as in Jane Rendell’s conceptualisation (2003; 2006; 2011), we call for experiences that question and transform the social conditions of the place in scrutiny for spatial speculation. From educators, we welcome those pedagogical experiments focused on critical spatial practices in curricular and extra-curricular circumstances in the fields as varied as, but not limited to, architecture, art, anthropology, urbanism, sociology, and literature. From learners, we expect those who have experiences with such pedagogical experiments. And from educators who are also administrators, we are eager to hear about their experiences of developing experimental and critical curriculums in support of such situated pedagogies.
