Viewpoint: Teaching Buildings and Landscapes to Today’s Undergraduates: Beyond the Classroom

Architectural historians, preservationists, and cultural resource managers accomplish great work every day for the sake of our built environment and communities. But let’s face it: these are tough times. Out on the front lines of preservation and advocacy, practitioners struggle to do their important work with shrinking resources. Within the academy, scholars and teachers of architectural history face both economic and ideological challenges. Particularly in the sphere of undergraduate education, the humanities as a whole are waging a battle against the trending, widespread idea that higher education, now an unprecedented expense, should be almost exclusively for job preparation. The current intense focus on the STEM disciplines (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) crowds out other academic pursuits. Called to accountability, administrators attend to cost–benefit analyses and measurable student learning objectives. Students, understandably concerned about a difficult job market, shrewdly pursue marketable skills as opposed to broad, humanistic—less quantifiable—aspects of their education. Enrollments in humanities courses, even at elite liberal arts colleges, have fallen noticeably.¹

Our field of architecture and landscape history and preservation depends on good teaching to a broad audience. Not only do teachers train future professionals, but in an equally essential way, they introduce the next generation of citizens to the importance of the built environment. Teaching nonspecialist undergraduate students to look beyond their computer screens at buildings, landscapes, and objects with educated attention is a special opportunity and a vital aspect of our calling as architectural historians.² Our students will become the audience for the future work of historians and preservationists; here is an opportunity to open their eyes and lead them to care about the built environment. Might the current criticism of higher education, especially at the undergraduate level, productively challenge us to be more creative and effective teachers of our subject? How can we take our subject’s natural assets and teach in ways that engage even tentative and skeptical students while addressing the legitimate concerns of administrators and the wider culture? What, after all, are we hoping to accomplish with and for our students? We need not only to defend the importance of our particular corner of the humanities but also to think about what we teach undergraduates, how we teach it, and for what end.

My engagement with these questions began in earnest about a decade ago. In 2004 I left a position training graduate students in material culture and museum studies for a job at a small midwestern university. My new post required me to teach general interdisciplinary humanities to undergraduates in a comprehensive program grounded in the close reading of texts. When teaching graduate students, I had taken for granted that they were interested in material culture studies, perhaps even architectural history. My new students, however, were aspiring engineers, nurses, and teachers who took humanities courses because they enjoyed asking the “big” questions and, frankly, because they had general education requirements to fulfill. This was new territory for me. I began speaking to audiences I could not assume placed any value on the research and writing I so enjoy. The burden has since been on me to find ways to bring questions of the built environment into this setting.

One of the things I quickly learned was that these students needed conceptual ideas as much as—perhaps even more than—the delivery of information. They are inundated with information in their coursework and via the digital media they avidly consume. They come to the humanities classroom looking for a break from a certain type of data-centered instruction but also seeking frameworks for processing experience. They want to exercise their minds in different ways. My department’s intensive type of seminar teaching requires careful listening. As a consequence, I have come to understand my students better—what they value, what motivates them, and what questions compel their attention. Here and there, I sneak in objects and spaces to remind students that the material conditions of life matter. My chance to remain a bona fide architectural historian in the classroom, however, has been in occasional upper-division seminars...