Routes to better teaching in architecture: some signposts from CELA’s pedagogical scholarship

Since 2013, Landscape Research Record (LRR) has collected papers from each year’s Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture (CELA) annual conference. This body of literature includes a significant amount of reflective scholarship in design education, and here we consider the potential IMPACT of CELA’s pedagogical research beyond its membership. Specifically, the potential to help address a knowledge-gap in the PROCESS of training of British architect educators (who generally lie beyond CELA’s geographical and disciplinary scope). Our narrative literature review illustrates how British architecture-educator training has emerged as a key
recent concern. Bodies such as the Architects Registration Board (ARB, ) and the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA, ) have called for a "sharpened focus" on student-training yet, at the same time, literature and precedents for the effective preparation of architecture-educators is scant. We do, however, note an exception: a program of training that ran at the University of East London between 1996 and 2002 and which is noteworthy in two ways (see, Andrews, 2023). First, by drawing on approaches in health-practitioner training, it established that
architecture-educator training can pull from outside the discipline. Secondly, despite its innovative and increasingly prescient approach, the program was short-lived and remains an outlying example. Our review identifies key terms and themes from the literature describing
processes adopted by the University of East London program. Fundamentally, the program privileged reflection and observation among trainee architecture-educators; the twinning of new faculty with more experienced colleagues; and an engaged an informed yet playful atelier model. In this, the program also foreshadowed recently published appreciations of meaningful and resonant creative experiences and person-to-person engagement (Glăveanu & Beghetto,
2021). Furthermore, we demonstrate that this rare, exemplarily effective teaching of designeducators in the UK—though curtailed in 2002 and somewhat overlooked—resonates with the pedagogical processes and reflective case studies subsequently published by CELA through more than a decade of LRR. In short, as the British architecture community currently stands bereft of good examples of practice, the pages of LRR could well be an untapped resource for the training of architecture-educators: a resonance that, to date, has gone unremarked. This paper, then, while reminding us of the value of the corpus of pedagogical research conducted by the CELA membership in terms of landscape architecture, also speculates on broader potentials for informing PROCESS and driving IMPACT in new and unexplored areas.