“Self-efficacy” as a Value in Architectural Pedagogy

Abstract

The latest research we conducted involved designing a tool to support the pin-up format, which is used to increase the effectiveness of the presenting/commenting activity as the main activity of project-expositions in architectural education. This research provided clues about the roles that students prefer to have as architects. Being a “Master” who has an extraordinary level of proficiency, skills, or performance in the information age can be stressful for students. We questioned the relationship between self-efficacy and the pin-up format, considering the students’ experiences with project-expositions. To understand the relationship between students’ social intentions, feelings, and the spatial organization during pin-up events, we monitored their emotions and thoughts about presenting their projects through a survey and some random interviews conducted over time. As the stress factor in project-expositions is directly related to the well-being of students, we focused on the emotional aspect of well-being. We were excited to learn that students expect peer-learning from pin-up activities, and that self-efficacy is an outcome of this. The survey was conducted in the Danish context during the Spring semester of 2023. The data collected can be considered informative because the 2nd year students represented a variety of nationalities and genders. This research establishes a strong foundation for asking the question, through the lens of well-being, of how pedagogical approaches in architectural education should be designed to support students in becoming either “Masters” or “self-efficacious architects.”

1 Introduction

Master architects as celebrities exist since 1500s [1]. They built up the agenda of architecture through years. Master architects become hierarchically visible through competition.

Today, visibility is possible for everyone through information technologies. Although there are still celebrities, who is visible on the media having the “wow factor” [2], but today, collaborative initiatives bring diversity in the agenda of architecture instead of one genius move to be followed.

Well-known collaborative initiatives like Rotor [3]; Rural Urban Framework (HK) [4]; Riwaq (PS) [5] are accessible through internet, so that they can grow, develop and increase the quality and content of their work. This openness also allows the young architects to be a part of an initiative at the early stages of their professional career. They are equally visible through collaboration. Architectural production engages with the society and architects become more powerful through collaboration.

Attention on the Masters as the figures of power on the big companies might be fostered by the capitalist world. Though, the young generations see the ecological facts and focus on the individual topics, which have urgency in their context. Is the role of architectural education to teach how to follow/become a Master, or foster the students to become self-efficant architects? What is the students’ intention about becoming a Master?

This research aims to understand the intentions of the students as the future professionals, if the pin-up events can support the performance of the presenting/commenting activity in a definite direction in architectural education.

2 Architectural Education

Almost all over the world, architectural education is built upon project-based learning. “Learning by doing, was introduced into art and architectural education at the Ecole Nationale et Speciale des Beaux-Arts in Paris in the 1890s” [6]. Senior students were tutoring the junior students. There were “Charrette, French for “cart,” refers to the carts in which the finished drawings were placed at the deadline hour for transport to the “Master” for critique [7].

An ongoing tradition of sharing/exposing the project is the pin-up event. Due to the general intentions of being approved, this very important moment of opening a project to discussion is stressful. The moment of encounter with the audience as the Master of their own projects is the pin-up event.

2.1 Pin-Up

The term pin-up may refer to drawings, paintings, and other illustrations as well as photographs. “The term was first attested to in English in 1941 even though the practice is documented at least back to the 1890s. Pin-up images could be cut out of magazines or newspapers, or they could be on a postcard or lithograph. Such pictures often appear on walls, desks, or calendars. Posters of these types of images were mass-produced and became popular starting from the mid-20th century.” [8].

Pin-up events are the indispensable component of architectural education as the sharing/exposing moment for the project. A student positioned as the Master, becomes hierarchically visible, which triggers the fear of failure, causing stress, which affects the performance in a negative direction. (Fig. 1) Is this the only way of exposing the project to an audience as a goal/tasks/challenge?

The topic of pin-up, or crit (criticism in architectural education) has been studied for breaking the conventional power relations in the context of communication by Kathryn Anthony and Thomas Dutton. Crits might become an event of motivation and a tool of exploration through the opinion exchange. Learning about others’ perspectives might open another related topic to develop the research about design [9, 10].

Fig. 1.

The red dot is at the center of all attention to a mass of audience, Aarhus School of Architecture, 2023. (Teacher’s Training Workshop Project, drawing by Naime Esra Akin)

Lately, Patrick Flynn, Miriam Dunn, Maureen O’Connor, and Mark Price organized an environment to study on changing the dynamic of the crit into a dialogue through experimenting new feedback methods over a full academic year with third year architecture students. Crits named as Round Table Review, Submission: Closed Juries & Open Feedback, Online Learning, and ‘Red Dot’ Review was made. The main benefits of these different crit events which were held at different phases of the semester was defined in the context of “clarity of feedback, stress reduction and productivity, peer learning, changing the power imbalance” towards reducing the stress of assessments and having a positive impact on design progress. The conclusion is “a reform of the crit can make educators and students engage in an open dialogue, centered on mutually engaged learning and can thereby develop a new pedagogy in architectural education.” [11].

These researches and experiments are encouraging to have an experimental approach to pin-up. This paper is about providing data for re-thinking about the impact of spatial organization and format of the pin-up event on the students’ self-efficacy in the context of being critical to the image of “master”.

2.2 Self-efficacy in Architectural Education

Self-efficacy is an individual's belief in their capacity to act in the ways necessary to reach specific goals. According to Albert Bandura, one's sense of self-efficacy can play a major role in how one approaches goals, tasks, and challenges [12].

Fig. 2.

The red dot is one of the other colored dots that sharing the attention by being an element of the non-hierarchical space. Tutor(s) is also involved in the circle, Aarhus School of Architecture, 2023. (Teacher’s Training Workshop Project, drawing by Naime Esra Akin)

Instead of targeting to be perfect as a Master by taking the hierarchically leading position in the pin up event, all the students can be equally positioned to focus on their research and share their approaches in a clear and open way to learn from their peers, who are focusing on the same topic from other perspectives. The pressure of “presenting the genius idea” can be shifted to “sharing the idea”, to be developed through an equally visible process of discussion (Fig. 2). In other words, instead of positioning as the Master, having self-efficacy as one of the members of the architectural design studio will decrease the stress and increase performance of the student.

3 The Research

The main aim of the research is creating a tool which acknowledges the emotional and social effect of pin-ups on students and creates a motivation for the students to consider self-efficacy as a matter of spatial organization of the pin-ups, which may be designed in collaboration with the students.

3.1 The Architectural Design Studio Environment as the Context of the Research

Our pedagogical approach is structured upon developing the research topics and creative skills of the students for empowering them to realise their thoughts through their intentions. The goal is to create a place for bringing out their own capabilities in the world. The students are encouraged to feel free to concentrate on their own knowledge and experiences, to find out their own interest, and be confident with their own insight to search and design. the pin-up events serve as peer-learning workshops with an added value of exchanging the ideas/information/reflection on the common assignment.

Studio culture is considered as an ecology of education where the bottom-up activities are carried out as a local ecosystem. Ultimately, these actions have an impact on the long-term social structure. Students are considered as responsible for their own choices of learning in a framework of sustainable architecture. The tutor is a mentor, guide, and provocateur asking the questions to support each and every student’s individual and open-ended process of design. Experiential methods are introduced for triggering the self-awareness, cohesion, respect, inspiration and collaboration. Rights and responsibilities are formed together through weekly architectural design studio meetings to change/add things in the studio process. Starting from the 2023 spring semester, all students take roles in studio organization by the teams of pin-up, exhibition, social meeting, studio care, and studio meeting.

3.2 Well-Being as the Frame of the Research

“Self-efficacy” is a component of “well-being”. The World Health Organization describes “well-being” as a situation enabling to function psychologically, physically, emotionally and socially well. According to the Foresight Mental Capital and Wellbeing Project 2008 [13] wellbeing is “enabling people to develop their potential, work productively and creatively, form positive relationships with others and meaningfully contribute to the community”. In other words, well-being, is a key for a sustainable society. Individuals with high levels of well-being are more productive at work and are more likely to contribute to their communities.

As the children and young people spend a considerable amount of time at the school during a critical period for the development of their personality and socio-emotional competences, the schools have a key position for developing well-being in the society. “The link between academic and socio-emotional learning has been clearly underlined by empirical evidence, including neuroscientific research, demonstrating that learning is a relational and emotional process.” [14] Addressing learners’ well-being is therefore the key not only to raising educational outcomes, but also building a society, where the value of well-being is promoted through inclusive, collaborative, creative and self-efficant individuals.

According to European Commission European Education Area, Well-being is about students’: Feeling safe, valued and respected; Being actively and meaningfully engaged in academic and social activities; Having positive self-esteem, self-efficacy and a sense of autonomy; Having positive and supportive relationships with teachers and peers; Feeling a sense of belonging to their classroom and school; Feeling happy and satisfied with their lives at school. Specifically, architectural education—like other art and design educations—depends on creativity of the students, adds an extra layer of personal development process although it is higher education. Therefore, well-being needs to have priority in accordance with the performance of the students.

3.3 The Survey as a Tool of the Research

The research depends on a survey documenting the well-being experience of the 2nd year (4th semester) students, in spring semester 2023. Student body consisted of a mixture of worldwide nationalities (Nationality—9/Denmark, 4/Australia, 4 Germany, 2/Belgium, 1/Israel), gender (8/Female, 12/Male), and status (9/Local, 11/Exchange). There are almost an equal number of students from both genders. In other words, the collected data can be considered as a representation of the regular stage of architectural education through the diversity of backgrounds and the level of the studio.

The targeted pin-up events are those that took place in the first half of the semester. Questions of the survey were grouped based on the feelings, actions, self-efficacy, relationship with peers and tutors, and belongingness they felt during the pin-up events they joined. They were inspired by PISA program of OECD [15] (Fig. 3) and revised (with the support of the student counselling psychologist) to challenge the students to think on their own reactions to pin-up events.

The research was introduced openly to the students and requested their support to find out the types of spatial organization through monitoring the semester in the context of the students’ well-being through the survey. The results of the survey are achieved through questioning causation, correlation, cross-tabulation of the data.

Fig. 3.

OECD’s Program for International Student Assessment’s (PISA). Aarhus School of Architecture, 2023. (Teacher’s Training Workshop Project, Naime Esra Akin)

Design of the survey depends on its graphical effect. (Fig. 4, 5) Color is the connection in-between the abstraction of the choice and the real situation.

Indirectness of the numerical expression of grading a specific emotion according to a specific piece of life might be more direct through the psychological effect of the colors. Yellow and orange as warm colours, evoke emotions, such as happiness, energy, optimism or enthusiasm; light yellow and green as slightly cool colours are linked to calmness, sadness and indifference. The colors were used as the indicators of the choices from strongly agree to strongly disagree.

Main topics of the survey were joy, cooperation, competition, belonging, feelings, self-efficacy and feeling of failure which reveal the relevant data with emotional, social and intellectual well-being. The questions were ordered randomly for not to impose a definite intention to answer the questions. Instead, randomness was expected to bring out the real thoughts of the students. It was delivered and received as an e-mail individually (March 20–April 21, 2023) and the names/responses were kept hidden for activating the experiential approach instead of rational choices.

The survey as a tool to think and communicate on self-efficacy is a component of consisting well-being in architectural education. Color-coded data is organized according to the positive/negative statue of the questions and translated into numerical data, as a second step of detailed reading. Some calculations can trigger the curiosity to find more relevant patterns. Survey is designed as a database, which is open to question. You can find out a variety of answers due to the correlations you make. In other words, the results might be read in different ways regarding the questions/correlations made by the reader.

Therefore, through a meta-rationale reading, one can notice relevant factors that others overlooked, asks the key question that no one had thought of, changes the description of the problem so that different solution approaches appear, rethinks the purpose of the work, and combines the multiple contradictory views, not as a synthesis, but as a productive patchwork. In other words, this survey/database is open to be questioned, re-organized and invented for a variety of reading opportunities to inspire the reader through reading. It might be more important to process continuously, instead of taking a decision.

Fig. 4.

The delivered un-organized survey that filled out by only one student, Aarhus School of Architecture, 2023. (Teacher’s Training Workshop Project, Naime Esra Akin)

Fig. 5.

The organized survey that filled out by all of the students, Aarhus School of Architecture, 2023. (Teacher’s Training Workshop Project, Naime Esra Akin)

3.4 Result of the Research

Color coding helps reading the database/survey at one glance. Positively worded questions were mostly agreed with (shown in orange), while negatively worded questions were mostly disagreed with (shown in green).

In the context of the numerical data, the cumulative percentage for negative questions is in correlation with the cumulative percentage for positive questions. %72 of the students feels positive about the positive questions, and %72 of the students feels negative about the negative questions. In other words, %72 of the students feels positive about the pin-up context regarding the variety of pin-up formats.

In the perspective of causation, values of some variables are affected by the change of other variables: (%) (A-agree, B-intermediate, C-disagree) (Fig. 6).

Fig. 6.

Correlation and confounding factor. Correlation and confounding factor, Aarhus School of Architecture, 2023. (Teacher’s Training Workshop Project, scheme by Naime Esra Akin)

Through cross tabulation, seven main categories involved in the survey opens a variety of perspectives. These variables are; intention of questions, gender of students, status of students, number of students, level of agreement, specific pin-up spaces, suggested pin-up spaces. Some samples for cross tabulation are as follows:

• What are the topics, which have the maximum number of agreements?

  Cooperation, positive feelings, self-efficacy, joy, and belongingness.

• What are the topics, which have the maximum number of disagreements?

  Competition, negative feelings, fear of failure, non-belonging, obligement.

• What is the effect of the gender and the status of the students on the topics?

  More agreement for male students; competition and cooperation.

  More agreement for female students; belongingness and fear of failure.

  More agreement for local students; obligement, competition, non-belonging, fear of failure

  More agreement for exchange students; joy, cooperation, belonging, self-efficacy.

The correlation in-between the feelings and the spaces show that the students agree with having the positive feelings and disagree with having the negative feelings during the pin-up events they have experienced during the first part of the semester. Majority of the students find joy of pin-up in exchanging ideas on projects with peers; strongly agree with cooperation and disagree with competition; agree with the feeling of belongingness; agree with self-efficacy during the pin-up events.

The students’ response in overall to the spatial organization of the pin-up event have the characteristics of rounded, small scale, enclosed, and non-hierarchical (Fig. 7). The infographic is the overall visualization of the database without any comments. It has the same color code with the database to establish a connection for further readings through a variety of correlations (Fig. 8).

Fig. 7.

The pin-up/presentation events experienced by the students, Aarhus School of Architecture, 2023. (Teacher’s Training Workshop Project, photos by Naime Esra Akin).

Fig. 8.

Infographic explanation of the overall data, Aarhus School of Architecture, 2023. (Teacher’s Training Workshop Project, collage by Naime Esra Akin)

Regarding the random discussions and interviews with the students, the pin-up evens are preferred to be closed to big audiences. The students appreciate the value of discussing to learn about each other’s skills and share specific issues like drawing techniques, network, experiences with the other students, who are under the same circumstances with themselves, though they don’t want to be the focus of the discussion. The discussion is considered useful in case there is an equal and sincere atmosphere. To see each other’s faces in a close distance, showing the materials of their projects and being able to take notes/draw sketches on these printed materials make a big sense to them for a fruitful meeting. This kind of a close contact with a small group of students, and a tutor, who chairs the pin-up is the most relaxing and joyful way of developing not only the individual projects but also the social relations at the same time, so that, the communication between the students continues after the pin-up through discussions on individual projects and social matters.

Both survey and the verbal communication indicates that the intention of the students is not positioning themselves as the hierarchically visible Master in a competitive manner, instead, they prefer to be equally visible through collaboration during the pin-up events.

3.5 Side Effects of the Research

Through a close observation during the survey process, it is noticed that the survey itself was considered positive by the students as a tool of communication, because of the direct and open effect of the evaluative discussions on the pin-up formats designed with the pin-up team. Attendance to the pin-up events raised comparing with the Fall semester, due to the discussion on the spatial organization for a better learning environment. The survey was motivating for the pin-up team to think on a variety of spatial organization and reserve time to organize the space. It raised a spatial awareness through experimenting the relationship in-between the user and the space/spatial elements. Students started to observe themselves during not only the pin-up events, but also in the architectural design studio space.

4 Conclusion

Presenting a project is a stressful process in architectural education. The hierarchical spatial organization creates a negative feeling of self-exposure like a Master who is supposed to know all about design. In this research, the moment of exposure/pin-up was unfolded through a frame of well-being for learning more about the students’ feelings. Both survey and the verbal communication indicated that the intention of the students is not positioning themselves as the hierarchically visible Master in a competitive manner, instead, they prefer to be equally visible through collaboration during the pin-up events. Specifically, the peer-learning and equality were pointed as the most important dimension of exchanging the ideas/information/reflection on the common assignment. They preferred to position themselves as a part of a collaborative design process; although all projects were individual, the students felt self-efficant by exposing their projects in the friendly and project-oriented atmosphere of small groups to be developed together. By leaving the judging role, the position of the tutor was opened to discussion as an observer and/or a group member, for enabling the students to create a new understanding of Master in architecture.

Referring to Kate Raworth’s idea of sustainable economy, architectural production, education and profession needs to create an ecology enabling others to create value [16]. In other words, cooperating and collaborating is the raising value that is already appreciated by the young generation. Architectural education needs to develop new research methodologies, learning pedagogies for cooperative/collaborative ecologies.

5 Aftermath

5.1 Experimental Pin-Up

After the survey was completed and analyzed, an experimental pin-up was organized with collaboration of the students, which might be called as “science fair”. It was designed considering the self-efficacy of the students. The schedule and the spatial organization were designed for a dense, synchronic and repetitive presentation of the project with four instantaneous and quick peer-review of all students in small groups. The aim was shifting the stress of the unique moment of the presentation ritual, towards a normalized communicative activity (Figs. 9 and 10).

The students got it as an opportunity to progress and gain strength in communicating the project and coming over the stress of the moment of encounter at the finals. They also liked the idea of taking detailed feedback from all their peers. As a result of the experiment, all of the students agreed that this was the best pin-up experience they have ever had.

Fig. 9.

The “project market” pin-up, Aarhus School of Architecture, 2023. (Teacher’s Training Workshop Project, plan drawing by Naime Esra Akin).

Fig. 10.

The “project market” pin-up, Aarhus School of Architecture, 2023. (Teacher’s Training Workshop Project, photo by Naime Esra Akin)

5.2 Feedback from the Students

Feedback from the students about the pin-up was taken just after the event. The students’ response to a few questions referring to the well-being is as follows:

• After a few presentations, presentation process got better.

• The feedback from the peers was satisfying in both quality and quantity. Both the written notes and verbal discussions were detailed enough to develop the design.

• There was the feeling of stress because of the time shortage, but not nervous due to the small groups of audience and friendly dialogue during the presentation.

• Giving feedback was not stressful, instead there was that feeling of giving support through a friendly dialogue.

• There was no feeling of self-exposition, as there were 4 simultaneous presentations sessions.

• The continuous sound in the room was like a background which was not distracting the students.

• There was an energetic feeling during and at the end of the pin-up, comparing with the previous pin-up events.

5.3 Future Projection

Collaborating with the students for designing the pin-up events/spaces may develop the learning environment. A short and clear survey can be used as a tool of communication through open discussion on the process of exposing the projects. “Positioning as a Master” might be used metaphorically or practically for introducing another perspective to ongoing discussion of “the role of architect”.