Study Architecture 
ProPEL 
Author(s): Scott Gerald Shall & Stephen Mallory
In Experience and Education, John Dewey asks “[h]ow shall the young become acquainted with the past in such a way that the acquaintance is a potent agent in appreciation of the living present?“ (1938, 181). When the “living present” is fraught, this question becomes particularly vexing, demanding that educators simultaneously help students to understand and appreciate what has come before while also critically engaging these positions. Only then will they, and the discipline they will help to reframe, begin to repair the damage done and enable us all to move forward. To thread this needle requires trading the institutionalized processes and practices of education – approaches that often create what Dewey describes as “inert minds’’ – and embrace, without prejudice, the students’ pre-college lives (1910, p.29). This shift is especially important when teaching university-level coursework to first year students, whose learning has been colored by standardized testing scores and college entry requirements. These tendencies, gained and focused through prior schooling, family, and cultural experiences, create in the minds of the student a bias toward Friere’s “banking model” of education and the largely transactional, passive learning patterns such models privilege (2000, 105–117). To counter this, faculty must enlist students in the critical examination of their embodied experiences and biases and empower them to create new definitions of design practice that are culturally alive and interdisciplinary. Stated otherwise: faculty must help students draw meaning from media, memes, and mash-ups in order to formulate a more rigorous, inclusive, and dynamic perspective of themselves, the environments which shaped them, and the world they will help to create. Fortunately, first-year students bring to the classroom a remarkable creative effervescence, an eagerness to establish their distinct design voice, and an ardent desire for cultural engagement that is rooted in flexible personal expression. These students’ technological imagination, “a mindset that enables people to think with technology” (Balsamo, 2011), are primed. Although this excitement for creation and design has been in tension with the regimented, banking model of educational practice they have previously experienced – and all too often experience within the university as well – it is perfectly attuned to the goals of design education. Thus, transitioning from the regimented pattern of the students’ given experience to an active one, becomes a simple matter of faculty fearlessly engaging social media, memes, streaming, AI-based technologies and other creative expressions of their students’ experience so that they might meaningfully address the past, critically examine the present, and help to set new directions. Pulling from the perspectives of thinkers like Dewey, Schon, and Freire, this paper will critically examine one such experiment to this end. Specifically, this paper will analyze how a new model of education, rooted in memes, mash-ups, AI and other markers of the students’ pre-college lives helped to redefine a first-year, large-scale, active-learning lecture course. From this analysis, this paper will test these ideas in order to establish new, useful strategies through which all educators might thoughtfully engage their student’s pre-college lives, and encourage their pupils to do likewise.
https://doi.org/10.35483/ACSA.AM.113.50
Volume Editors
Sara Jensen Carr & Rubén García Rubio
ISBN
978-1-944214-48-7
