Preservation Education: Sharing Best Practices and Finding Common Ground

18. Conclusion: Common Problems and Potential Solutions

283 The “Preservation Education: Sharing Best Practices and Finding Common Ground” conference, on which this volume is based, offered a unique opportunity for educators from around the globe to concentrate on ways to assess and improve programs that focus on the historic environment and heritage. At the conclusion of the formal paper presentations, the participants assembled in a special session to discuss and refine concepts directly or tangentially raised in the presented papers, including some that were controversial. Through this process, the participants defined a common set of problems and potential solutions as well as a vision for the future of historic environment education. This chapter summarizes that discussion. A Summary of Historic Environment Education Participants presented on a wide variety of topics and issues, including the importance of the liberal arts, the relationship between undergraduate and graduate programs, job training, the failure and revival of crafts/ trades education, pedagogical techniques, curriculum design, international perspectives, performance evaluation, and ethics. At first glance, while these appear to be separate topics with little relation to each other, many of the papers contained significant overlapping themes and content , which can be grouped into the following six categories, which were used by the participants to help organize their discussion: defining the discipline employment and relationship to job skills communication, collaboration, and bridging across boundaries ethics and quality issues Jeremy C. Wells and Barry L. Stiefel 18Conclusion: Common Problems and Potential Solutions 284 P R E S E R V A T I O N E D U C A T I O N curriculum design outcomes and assessment methods Defining the Discipline A consistent thread throughout the conference, including the discussion session, was a lack of agreement on defining the “discipline” in which historic environment practitioners and researchers engage their work. Some participants even questioned if it was appropriate to frame the work of practitioners and researchers in a separate historic environment discipline at all, suggesting that a specific endeavor must first originate in a non-conservation, parent discipline with the work then occurring in the historic environment. An example of this scenario is a licensed architect conducting a rehabilitation project on an historic house: the discipline is architecture while the domain of attention is the historic environment. In other words, in this point of view, the historic environment is where the work occurs, but the environment cannot be used itself to define a unique ontological or epistemological approach. This definition becomes problematic, however, with practitioners and researchers who have been educated and trained in aspects primarily identified with the historic environment , but not found in other disciplines, and therefore do not selfidentify with any other discipline. A related issue was a lack of consensus on terminology to describe the domains and activities of educators and practitioners of the historic environment . As clear ontological and epistemological boundaries for historic environment work and research along with consistent terminology are necessary for effective teaching (and are currently lacking), the conference participants thought that these issues should be considered fundamental pedagogical problems that therefore deserve more attention. Moreover, without agreement on the ontological and epistemological nature of work and research in the historic environment, it becomes difficult to define what “it” is, where “it” has been, and where “it” should be heading in the future. Much like the multiple perspectives on the disciplinary nature of historic environment work, the participants acknowledged that there is confusion about what constitutes practice and research in the historic environment, given disparate national and cultural contexts—a troubling ambiguity that impacts teaching because it is not clear what students should be held accountable to learn. While acknowledging these national and cultural differences, participants believed that there was a potential for a shared, core set of principles, as well as an under- C O N C L U S I O N : P R O B L E M S A N D S O L U T I O N S 285 standing of just what the historic environment is and how professionals ought to engage with it. This is an important, continuing topic of discussion that has broad impact on both practice and teaching, yet there are few, if any forums, for this kind of discussion to date within an educational context. At a more specific level, descriptive terms for the activities of...