We plan to hold a special session with Oskar Lindwall and Gustav Lymer, from University of Gothenberg.
In the presentation, we analyze an episode of instructional work concerning the writing of academic texts. The episode is taken from a tutorial session where a supervisor meets a group of students who has conducted fieldwork and written a report. The presentation will focus on an episode where the supervisor provides a diagnosis of the students' "analysis". According to the supervisor, the analysis is too much like "description" and miss out on "expressing" interesting things – things that are formulated as being "between the lines". He also suggests, in so many words, how "taking it one round more", "abstracting" and "going deeper" can resolve these problems. As illustrated by this example, the assignment is not just about training in the performance of certain given activities, but of learning to produce recognizable disciplinary practices and objects in the first place.
This presentation is based on video recordings of the instructional practice of critique in architectural education. In this practice, consisting of presentations and assessments of students' architectural designs, one recurring feature is talk concerning the relation between intentions and the finished architectural proposal. Students present their projects, and details in the designs, in terms of ideas, intentions, and concepts. Critics discuss whether the design matches the students' formulations of what he or she wanted to achieve; they also ask students to articulate their intentions with specific details, and students respond by either clarifying their intentions, or downplaying the intentional character of the detail under scrutiny. The work conducted in and through these topicalizations of intentions is analyzed as instructional work, in which architectural reasoning is enacted and made visible.
If anybody is interested in bringing their own data, analyses, observations, arguments, or whatever, to a next meeting to discuss together, please contact Aug Nishizaka at augnish(a)soc.meijigakuin.ac.jp.