Learning and Leadership

This project, the result of an open public bid, manages to show the difference between public services building and an actual public building. The volume's withdrawn and the open corridor at ground level extend the square towards the building's interior, leaving the 110-meter facade as the backdrop for a new urban scenery of public use.

Sin ser una heterotopía, pues no recluye la 'otredad' sino que reune a quienes se alejan de ella, el club es tal vez la manifestación urbana más conocida de un espacio de excepción. Explicando su surgimiento en la Inglaterra victoriana, y analizando uno de sus casos emblemáticos en Londres, este texto nos permite entender no sólo el espacio del club sino también sus políticas arquitectónicas de exclusión. Palabras clave · tipología, exclusión, caballeros, Club de la Reforma, Londres La vida del club es un gran misterio, y sus adeptos deben ser cautos para explicar el tabú del club a los bárbaros externos. (Sala, 1862:207)

This article explores the architectural history of the Soviet workers’ club by analysing one of its emblematic examples, the Zil workers’ club by the Vesnin brothers. The aim is to understand how clubs attempted to forge the new Soviet citizen and his relation to Soviet culture and politics.

This paper examines the radical ideas beneath the history of urban pedagogy in Britain. It studies two connected initiatives which used the city as a resource for learning: Patrick Geddes’s Outlook Tower in 1892 and Colin Ward’s proposal for Urban Studies Centres in 1973. For Geddes, the tower worked as a ‘civic observatory’ where people developed the skills for ‘the art of city-making’ (Geddes, 1913). Through an exhibition of the past, present and possible of the environment and a ‘civic-business room’ citizens engaged with their locality and developed proposals for their neighbourhood. The tower aimed to ‘arouse and educate citizenship’ encouraging collective action. (Geddes, 1915). Eighty years later, Ward continued Geddes’s work advocating for an Urban Studies Centres in every town in the country where people could learn and take part of the construction of the city (Ward, 1973).

Geddes and Ward have the particularity of sharing anarchist references. Geddes was friends with Peter Kropotkin, a Russian social anarchist, who founded the anarchist newspaper Freedom of which Ward was an editor. Both authors based their projects in Kropotkin’s idea of mutual-aid, which considers cooperation as the strongest principle in evolution (Ferreti, 2017). While Geddes did not openly declare himself anarchist, Ward is considered a gentle one. His proposal of the USCs promotes de-schooling ideas (Illich, 1970) aspiring to explode the school into the public realm (Ward, 1973).

This work seeks to expand current definitions of urban pedagogy linking them to active citizenship and civic engagement through the work of Geddes and Ward. Urban pedagogy is currently described as an educational method that prepares people for urban life (Severin, 2014), considering the urban experience as a resource for personal development (Dobson, 2006). This paper connects ‘urban pedagogy’ with previous iterations of the concept, exploring a radical history of this educational practice.

The ripples of the deschooling and environmental movement reached Britain and materialized in the work of anarchist writer Colin Ward. With a background in architecture, education, and anarchist publishing, Ward combined these ideas and initiating a network of people, places, and pedagogies that used the environment as a tool for learning. However, rather than concentrating on the natural environment, as most projects did at the time, Ward advocated for the study of urban areas as a path to active citizenship. One of the initiatives under Ward’s leadership, the Urban Studies Centres (USCs), triggered a grid of more than thirty self-organized urban learning centers across the UK to promote awareness of the built environment. Even though the USC’s main aim was to widen participation in the construction of cities and help people become “masters of their environment,” they also, as a side-effect, proposed a way to “deschool architecture” by making architectural and urban education publicly available.

https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/education/322673/deschooling-architecture/

Este artículo analiza los versos de la poeta popular Rosa Araneda entre 1860 y 1900 para rastrear su experiencia urbana como una mujer trabajadora a fines de siglo XiX en Chile, con el objetivo de expandir las fuentes utilizadas para escribir la historia urbana y arquitectónica de la ciudad de Santiago. Este texto responde al llamado de la socióloga chilena Julieta Kirkwood de hacer visible las experiencias de todas las mujeres que lucharon por tener un espacio en la esfera pública para inspirar a otras mujeres. Mientras Kirkwood define el año 1900 como los inicios del feminismo en Chile —ligándolo directamente a la creación de centros para mujeres— este artículo propone que las prácticas culturales y los textos de mujeres durante los 1800s “hicieron espacio” para la participación política y urbana de las mujeres en Chile. A través del análisis de 90 impresos con poemas escritos por Araneda, este texto explora cómo la poetisa creó un espacio para la voz de una mujer en los medios impresos de fin de siglo, compartiendo su perspectiva de la ciudad de Santiago y haciéndose parte de la construcción de la capital de la nueva República chilena.

The relationship between education practice and education research has a long history. In modern times, education practice and its relation to education research has been central to debates about the nature and quality of education as an academic discipline in universities. This article reports an empirical study that investigated a new instantiation of the practice–theory debate: ‘close‐to‐practice’ research in education. The research sought to (a) define and further articulate the concept of close‐to‐practice research and (b) provide reflections on the quality of close‐to‐practice research. The orientation of the work reported in this article is informed by theory on traditions of knowledge in the organisation of education that have contributed to the development of education as an academic discipline. The main section of the article reports the findings of the empirical study. The research design was a rapid evidence assessment (REA), and a series of interviews with education res...