The CELT Teaching Partners program was an opportunity to develop a successful teaching approach for a new class: ARCH 558 Sustainable and Green Architecture, which I offered for the first time in Fall 2014. I adopted team-based and collaborative learning as a method especially appropriate for sustainable designers. This required team activities on research problems to solve, but the final research essay assignment remained an individual activity. The problem the class presented was one of evaluating the benefit of teamwork within the course objectives. In Fall Semester 2014 I inherited a course that had not been offered for more than five years but had remained in the course catalogue. The description was concise, as is typical of the University catalogue, and there was no syllabus recorded to guide on either content or approach to teaching. I took it upon myself in the semester prior to develop the syllabus, objectives, content, and methods of delivery, with only minor changes to the description (see Figure 1) carried out in the Spring semester. The course develops around the position that the challenge of sustainability in design is a matter of situationally specific interpretation rather than the setting of universal goals [1].
- sustainable architecture,
- syllabus,
- pedagogy
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/andrea_wheeler/9/