By Professor of Sustainable Architecture, Henrik Schoenefeldt
On 31 December, the last day of this rather difficult and sad year of 2020, a parcel arrived. It contained six printed copies of my new book, written during a sabbatical in the first half of this year, coinciding with the first lockdown. I submitted the final manuscript to publisher in July and now it is finally published. I previously discussed my experience of writing the book under lockdown in November 2020, titled, ‘Being an author under lockdown‘.
In this article, I will be exploring my experience of the impact of COVID-19 on my work as an academic. Indeed, it had been a challenging year for universities. Starting in March 2020, the pandemic forced academic institutions to adopt new working practices, which were shaped by the merits and limitations of technology. Universities were suddenly confronted with the reality that they could no longer teach students in person but had to go fully virtual. Unlike staff in the hospitality sector or performing arts, academia was fortunate in its ability to keep up their business by adapting to the new reality through the use of new technologies. Over the last 9 months we experienced something that could be described as creative disruption to academic practice, which affected all spheres of academic life, ranging from an administration, teaching, academic research to public engagement. It forced staff and students to adopt new ways of teaching and learning, conducting research, delivering public lecture or participate in conferences.
Delivering a fully virtually-taught course
Over the summer there were great uncertainties about how the teaching is going to be delivered, if students are going to be on campus or taught completely remotely online. Up to this point, we had very limited experience with remote teaching, let alone delivering entire degree programmes online. Prior to the pandemic, I have given remote supervisions for MSc and PhD students whilst undertaking their fieldwork abroad, but never before had I been asked to deliver a whole module remotely. By September 2020, it had been decided that most of the teaching, including the BA and MArch programmes, were to be taught in a hybrid mode. It combined face-to-face supervisions and small-group teaching, with virtual lectures and seminars. The objective was to enable architecture students to have a normal student experience as far as it could be achieved without compromising the health of students or staff.
An exception, however, was the MSc in Architecture and Sustainable Environment (MASE). In the summer, we decided that the course should be taught completely virtually. During the Autumn Term, I was teaching the module ‘AR828 Rediscovery – Understanding Historic Buildings and past environmental technologies’ and also supervised MASE dissertations. Although it was the first time that I have taught this module remotely, it worked surprisingly well. In order to achieve good and meaningful interactions with and amongst the students, the seminars had to be more structured.
Teaching online also required a lot more preparation than for face-to-face teaching. The lectures were pre-recorded, and every week I met the students for a 3-hour live seminar online. These were held in the evening to account for varying time zones. The seminars included interactive workshops, review of the individual lectures, and each week the students also gave online presentations on the progress of their research, which was followed by feedback and discussions. The module ended in mid-December, but before the Christmas break, the students had the opportunity to present their research to the Heritage Group of the Chartered Institute of Building Services Engineers (CIBSE), a group within a specialist interest in the study of historic buildings services and the history of building services engineering as a profession. They received feedback from members of the group, which had informed their essay. In previous years we had taken the students to the CIBSE HQ in Balham to present their work in person, but this year it was conducted online using Zoom.
Students engaging in original research remotely
A major challenge for students engaging in historical research was the difficulty of accessing historic records held in physical archives or libraries. Since March 2020, many had been closed or only offered limited access. Although repositories of digitised historic documents have existed for some years, the pandemic gave students the impetus to make more extensive use of them in their research. Indeed for large parts of year these digital repositories became the only means to accessing primary source material.
This year has shown that it was feasible to undertake original historic research remotely, but it was necessary to accept that the topic and scope of the research would be bound by the limited content of these digital repositories. Students had to adapt their topic in response to the pandemic, as they had originally proposed projects that required access to material only available in physical archives. This was particular challenging for students writing their MSc dissertations as they were required to undertake a more substantial piece of original archival research. One of the MSc students I was supervising wrote his dissertation on the environmental design of Law Courts in Westminster, designed by the architect John Soane in the 1920s. As this building was demolished in the 1880s, the student relied on archival records to reconstruct its original design, including its environmental features. As the relevant archives were closed he had limit himself to the use of digital repositories, such as databases with digitised historic newspapers and parliamentary papers, and he also made use of the digital library of architectural drawings at the John Soane Museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields.
Ironically last year I was faced with the opposite problem; some students had never visited a physical archive in their life, and being so used to the internet providing everything they needed for their studies previously, some struggled to understand or accept that there is still a substantial body of knowledge that cannot be found on the web and that this knowledge can only be retrieved by studying physical documents in a physical archive. I have regularly sent students to the British Library, London Metropolitan Archives and National Archives and asked them to study original manuscripts or drawings relating to the buildings or historic policies they were studying.
An unfinished experiment of bridging the local and global perspectives
Whilst the pressure to go virtual restricted the scope of the original research, it also offered the opportunity to internationalise research within the MASE programme. This year I had engaged with students based in the UK, Canada, Norway and Scotland, and this enabled them to undertake research in different locations around the world. Since the introduction of the MASE Programme in 2012, we have had students from all continents coming to the Kent School of Architecture and Planning. In terms of researching the environmental heritage of other cultures, however, their physical presence in the UK could become a barrier. Some students, who were keen to study the environmental history of architecture in their home countries, were disappointed that it was not feasible because they could not access the relevant physical archives remotely from the UK. As a result they were bound to focus mostly on buildings in the Europe. This time round, students abroad were faced with similar lockdowns to the UK and as a direct result it was not possible to fully harness the advantage of having students in different locations. One of students who came from Norway had to utilise the digital repository of the National Library of Norway. This held a large volume of journals and newspapers articles, which he used to study 1960s modernism in northern Norway from a climatic perspective. As such it could be argued 2020 was an unfinished experiment in enabling research in different localities, yet it is opportunities for the future.
For most of this year, academia will be operating in a hybrid mode, and I believe that teaching, even after Covid-19, will continue to be shaped by the new ways of working adapted during the pandemic. The big question is if these changes are going to be temporary and or have a lasting impact on the way we teach, or conduct postgraduate research. The task for the post-pandemic era is to find a new balance between the physical and virtual modes of teaching as well as finding new ways of enabling future cohorts if MASE students to engage with local concerns at an international level.