A Phenomenographic Study in Understanding Architecture Students’ Approaches to Learning the Coursework of Architectural Design

Abstract

This article looks at architecture students' changes in approach to design learning between the first and fourth years of the architecture programme; charting the variation in the said approaches and exploring the reasons for the differences. The study, which aimed to use phenomenography to understand such approaches with the objective of exploring the variation from a qualitative perspective, was undertaken using a sample of 39 students in two colleges of architecture in India.

The semi-structured interviews were carried out using phenomenography and focused on the students' approaches to learning the coursework of architectural design from the first year and fourth year using an architectural design project as the learning context. The study was conducted to chart the learning approaches that emerged and relate them to deep and surface approaches to learning.

The study was carried out on the lines of earlier phenomenographic studies that aimed to understand the variation in the approaches to learning of fashion design students based in various institutions in the United Kingdom.

Keywords:

• phenomenography
• approaches to learning
• architectural design

Acknowledgement

This study was made possible due to the cooperation of both the Directors of the Rizvi College of Architecture (RCA), Bandra, Mumbai, India and the Faculty of Architecture (FoA), Manipal University, Manipal, India; with reference to the required permissions and facilitating the necessary time frame (March 2012) for the said research. The 39 first and fourth year architecture students of both institutions played an important role in bringing the study to fruition, being generous in the time they provided for conducting the semi-structured interviews.