ENHANCING CRITICAL THINKING THROUGH " INDEPENDENT DESIGN DECISION MAKING " IN THE STUDIO 1

As is traditional in many programs, studio teaching at Penn State's department of Landscape Architecture is characterized by the Beaux Arts/Bauhaus-inspired master/apprentice model of education. In this model, described eloquently by Schön (1985, 1987), individual faculty members work one-on-one with students for the duration of a studio project, leading to the student's solution of the design problem. However, a group of faculty at Penn State's department of Landscape Architecture observed that the Beaux Arts/Bauhaus-inspired teaching/learning model employed in their department led to student design solutions exhibiting more design influence from the professor than may be desirable. Too often, students simply wait for the professor's visit, expecting the professor either to provide design ideas or to sanctify their work on paper. The unfortunate resulting dynamic is that the student believes s/he will succeed by "doing what the professor wants." The final design, typically filled with ideas generated by the professor, often "belongs" as much to the teacher as to the student. Not only is the work difficult for the professor to assess, but also the central pedagogical question remains unanswered: what did the student actually learn? Design problems represent ill-structured problems (SIMON, 1984: 152) and, in the case of architecture/landscape architecture, a special type of ill-structured problem termed "wicked problems" (ROWE, 1987: 41). As the name suggests, illstructured problems lack well-structured goals, and

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