Field Notes on Pandemic Teaching

IN THE SPRING, Places Journal invited faculty from leading architecture schools around the world to submit essays on the transition to online teaching in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition to Dean Massey — whose essay served as the basis for his Message from the Dean in the spring issue of Portico — four faculty members published essays, which are excerpted below.

“Maybe it’s time to form digital salons, virtual open houses that will encourage debate, sociability, conversation, celebration — that will be positive alternatives to discrete containers of education and intellectual interrogation. Maybe dozens of online Gertrude Steins will find their voices in this new normal, and maybe — just maybe — we will get used to this new method of conducting education.”

— From Maybe, just maybe by Associate Professor

Matias del Campo

“[For the] opening for this year’s fellowship exhibition, I sit down for a Zoom via YouTube stream with a cocktail in hand at the appointed hour along with more students, faculty, and visitors than I know I would have seen in person. ... The event now lives online and has had over 700 viewers to date, which accomplishes something necessary: the promotion of the work beyond the gallery walls. But I missed the social event, the social space of the opening, the intermingling, the casual conversation that becomes a political debate about the merits of the work, the jockeying and the joking.”

— From The ‘pivot’ by Professor Sharon Haar “The playing field has never been so uneven. The students’ formatted presence on my screen conceals more than ever their disparate material conditions of production. They are especially polarized in their capacity to manage the resource that is time; between those who are able to harness every minute of it towards their own becoming, those who need to dedicate it to survival, and those who simply dissipate it into the unknown, because nothing has trained them for this. … Two weeks after the shift online, it is this absence of common ambient studio time that is most reflected in the students’ diverging rates of progress.”

— From ZOOMONTOLOGY by Associate Professor

Mireille Roddier

“This semester, I’m teaching a doctoral seminar, Education as Co-liberation, that began in January with bell hooks’s Teaching to Transgress. “The classroom,” we read, “remains the most radical space of possibility in the academy.” What makes the classroom precious ... is that our need for sense-making has turned us from syllabus towards crisis and we’ve been able to think together about that crisis even as it has moved us online.”

— From an untitled essay by Associate Professor

Andrew Herscher

(From top) Discussion map, “Education as Co-liberation,” February 6, 2020. Zoom chat thread, “Education as Co-liberation,” March 26, 2020.