Fragments of a conversation: exploring the educational potential of collage in dialogue with spatial design students

Using participatory, qualitative research methods, this article seeks to reveal the extent to which students value collage as a tactic in spatial design education.

The evolution of collage in art and its connections with spatial design is well established, and as educators and inheritors of collage as a pedagogic methodology, we encourage collaging (as a verb, to think, test, speculate) and collage (as a noun, to create artefacts that represent concepts and ideas). However, the extent to which students understand, utilise, and value collage is not well-documented and has not received the same attention in historic texts or research.

To begin to understand the students’ perspective, participants who studied undergraduate and postgraduate architecture and interior design were invited to a conversation - a narrative interview. Open-ended questions were used to understand how students experienced collage and their responses were collated and analysed to create a picture of their practices: a montage of students’ voices. Additionally, participants were invited to create an individual collage in response to the conversation – a meta-collage -  to serve as a synthesis and record of the discussion.

Informed by Freire’s critical pedagogies and an ethos of situated pedagogies of care, this paper reveals students’ experiences of collage and allows their formerly missing voice to inform educational practices. The paper also provides a dialogic model for critically reflecting upon and co-creating learning experiences with students.