Rather than advocating for the unrealistic wholesale reinvention of pedagogical practice, this paper argues for a more nuanced approach, exploring how pedagogies can be used to further disrupt the neo-liberal agenda, within Undergraduate spatial design education.
Drawing on the radical pedagogies of Colin Ward and Anthony Fyson (1973), Ivan Illich (2011), Paul Goodman (1971), Everett Reimer (1973), and Paulo Freire (2000), this inquiry explores the continued relevance of their ideas in shaping undergraduate spatial design curricula. It does so at a time when Higher Education (HE) faces systemic pressures, including underinvestment, commodification, and standardisation, amid the chaotic educational reforms led by Architects Registration Board (ARB) and the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA).
Ward’s advocacy for informal, learner-led spaces resonates with the critique of the design studio, while Illich’s ‘Deschooling’ (2011) urges a dismantling of hierarchical knowledge structures. Goodman (1971) and Reimer (1973) remind us to prioritise meaning over measurement, a challenge acutely felt in a data-driven Higher Education sector. Freire (2000) argues that we resist the passive consumption of knowledge, challenging the transmission model of learning, and that education can, could and should be used as a tool for empowerment and social action.
Alternate forms of articulation will be used to enable the disruption of the overly rigid, dominant and orthodox modes of formal academic writing, through the production of a critical discourse in the form of manifestoes, vignettes, and metalogues, playing with typography, and syntactical and linguistic subversion. Suggesting an approach that cultivates ‘small pockets of resistance’ (Schick & Timperley, 2022) where learners and educators are provided the opportunity to challenge the hegemonic gatekeepers, in the pursuit of the mischievous, subversive and sometimes absurd.
