Twenty-eighth International Conference on Learning

Abstract

Design education programmes have a responsibility to validate the resources and experiences students bring to their learning environment. However, designing assessment practices that encourage diverse students to draw on their resources in order to both access and challenge disciplinary discourses can be complex. This paper is framed in terms of how students balance their own experiential knowledge whilst engaging with the disciplinary discourse. It aims to interrogate students’ negotiation of the ‘contact zone’ (Pratt 1999); how they negotiate their brought-along resources with assessment guidelines. A multimodal social semiotic approach is taken to explore ways of contributing to a socially just pedagogy by enabling recognition of a range of students’ resources, whilst at the same time acknowledging the need to access the conventions of the discipline. We argue for recognition as the positive side of assessment which could enable more diverse students’ resources to be acknowledged. We interrogate the meaning-making trajectories of two students, Xola and Sonwabo, in a first-year landscape architecture course. While both students bring their own resources into a spatial model project, they each have varying ‘success’ in mediating these in relation to the dominant conventions of landscape architectural design.