Crompton, E., Vinall, R., 2024.

Welcome to the Family: Challenging The Indoctrination of Architecture School By Finding Community During Foundation Year.

Architecture and design are subject areas with endless possibilities and multiple answers to the same starting questions. At a pre-University level, the UK education system is based on student targets, results, and the notion of 'right and wrong'. When new architecture and design students arrive in their first year of study, this inbuilt sense of right and wrong can be a frustrating and sometimes overwhelming barrier when given the freedom to explore. This in turn can lead to difficulties in ensuring a sense of belonging as individuals within a wider student community, impacting on their first-year experience.

Focussing on the 'how', we will consider two student projects that have enquired into how first year students can become responsible design citizens; understand their role in society; foster a sense of community; learn to 'play' and have a positive learning experience. The first project 'Strap On' explores individual identities with the goal to understand the body in relation to function, space, and establishes students within a community of practice. The second project 'Outside' asks students to visit a series of places beyond the university campus, including construction sites and a placement in an architect's office, which locates students within a community of discipline and of profession. Overarching both approaches is a recognition of student's individuality in relation to previous spatial expertise / experiences, cultural identities / heritage, and a desire to support all students in reaching their full potential as professional designers. Most of all, Foundation should be about making students feel like they are part of the family - that they belong here.

"Like any tribe, architects assume particular rituals and certain codes, both visual and linguistic... the undertaking of socialization into the tribe starts in the school studio." Garry Stevens identifies a self-instigated distinction by architecture students from other peers studying history or maths and goes on to describe the studio as a place of "internment [that] produces a socially and mentally homogeneous set of individuals." In an attempt to confront the indoctrination of students into "architects" as a distinct mono-culture, we want to welcome our students into exciting, potential-filled degrees and enable them to challenge and question those tropes.

It is our responsibility as educators to support them to not only understand the studio environment's practices and be able to speak "architect", but to enable them to question those rituals and use them to, as all architecture students desire, make the world a better place. So how can we, through teaching and learning, support a feeling that not only do they belong here, but have the agency to change it for the better?