How I Found the Courage to Decolonize my Syllabus
In July of last summer, the architecture department at the California College of the Arts organized an online retreat in response to the recent George Floyd protests. As part of this event, our dean asked faculty members to prepare new syllabi for our fall classes that addressed issues of race, social inequality, and ongoing calls to decolonize the school’s curriculum.
I was quite happy to take on this challenge—not only because I felt it was important to explore these issues with my students, but I also wanted to get my two syllabi finished early rather than frantically rewriting them in the two weeks before the semester began.
This summer’s efforts to remake the content of my history of architecture and history of interiors courses were part of my slow and ongoing effort to shift away from a primary focus on major styles and “great” architects to a course that was more diverse, global, and incorporated both high-style and ordinary buildings. Now, with the blessing of my department, I further reduced the use of canonical monuments and increased the use of case studies as a way to teach students how to decipher and interpret a range of landscapes, buildings, and interiors.
Thus, this fall, the courses looked at the removal of Confederate monuments as well as those celebrating Junípero Serra in California. We examined the space of hair salons and barbershops in the African-American community, as well as hair cutting spaces from around the world (Figures 1, 2, and 3). We looked at the entire landscape of Monticello in full, particularly comparing and analyzing enslaved and elite domestic space at the site. We also examined landscapes associated with the current pandemic, particularly quarantine hotels and emergency or Fangcang hospitals in China as well as architectural responses to pandemics in the medieval and the modern eras.
Figure 1. Image from student presentation by Scarlett Zhang on the Red Rose Beauty Salon in Shanghai, photograph by Scarlett Zhang, for the fall 2019 History of Interiors course at the California College of the Arts. Used with permission.
Did my effort amount to any sort of pedagogical triumph? Probably not. It might have been a bad idea to remake the syllabus at the same time as we adjusted to a full semester online. Yet, in what Time Magazine called the “worst year ever,” I felt that the fall was one of the most rewarding and energizing semesters I’ve had in almost two decades of teaching—even if my attempts to improve the survey paled in comparison to more sophisticated attempts by other academics.
Figure 2. Image from student presentation by Scarlett Zhang showing the interior of the Red Rose Beauty Salon in Shanghai, photograph by Scarlett Zhang. This presentation was made for the fall 2019 History of Interiors course at the California College of the Arts. Used with permission.
It seems to me that courage—rather than a deep knowledge of decolonial theory—is the key to finding a better way to teach architectural history. We need to be brave enough to move from an idealized view of a decolonized curriculum breathlessly described in academic meetings to the hard work of making real lesson plans, class activities, and assignments.
My hunch is that the path toward a more inclusive history survey involves moving away from a model in which the instructor has comforting “mastery” and control over course material to one in which we join students in the imperfect act of interpreting historic landscapes, buildings, and interiors. This process will be full of trial and error, mistimed lectures, and poorly phrased essay questions, but our primary goal should be, in the words of Samuel Beckett (in his 1983 work, Worstward Ho!), to “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”[1]
Figure 3. Image from student presentation by Scarlett Zhang showing the floor plan of part of the Red Rose Beauty Salon in Shanghai, drawing by Scarlett Zhang. This presentation was made for the fall 2019 History of Interiors course at the California College of the Arts. Used with permission.
“It seems to me that courage—rather than a deep knowledge of decolonial theory—is the key to finding a better way to teach architectural history.”
I came into the summer with an incomplete understanding of what it meant to decolonize a curriculum. But as I started to read broadly on the topic, I slowly began to fashion a set of lofty—and perhaps unrealizable—goals that might guide my efforts to reconstruct the syllabus. While many writers focused on why decolonization was necessary, only a few offered concrete details about making real changes in the classroom.[2] I also looked at the syllabi of colleagues who already have made great strides in teaching a more diverse architectural history and gained great inspiration from the several online discussions organized by my college and the Society of Architectural Historians.[3] In addition, I drew inspiration from Dell Upton’s innovative lectures in the 1990s that he delivered in the undergraduate architectural history survey at the University of California, Berkeley. The eight goals listed below were particularly helpful for my attempt to remake the history survey.
1. Decrease the focus on canonical architects and monuments largely built by and for elite white individuals from Europe and the United States and attempt to introduce a broad set of designers and makers from around the world and from a range of social classes, genders, and ethnicities.
2. Have the courage to drop certain styles or architects to make room for a more diverse set of buildings. The architectural history survey is, at its heart, a zero-sum game and, for example, if you want to spend time looking at ordinary restaurants built in China during the Song Dynasty, you may have to say farewell to the Etruscans, or Mannerism, or the Art Nouveau.[4]
3. Examine with students the process of canon formation and how it is shaped by long-held views concerning race, ethnicity, gender, economic class, and power.
4. Rely less on defining architectural styles or movements through a nationalist lens—i.e., Italian Gothic and French Neoclassicism—and move toward an approach that examines how architectural ideas flow from one region, nation, or empire to another.
5. Develop assignments and in-class activities that allow students to explore multiple and contradictory readings of the built landscape and allow interpretations that could be shaped by the student’s individual identity or life experience.
6. Noting that much of the literature on decolonization addresses the power relations of the classroom, examine and improve the demonstration of authority in the classroom, and communications with students. Admit mistakes concerning class content or in the management of the course.
7. Vow to take time to ask students about what they would like to cover in class and be open to change course content if appropriate.
8. Explain in lectures and seminars that decolonizing architectural history is an ongoing, collaborative project, and acknowledge by name the historians who are leading the effort—many of whom are of color, women, or nongender conforming.
Towards a New Architectural History
An unexpected benefit of the pandemic and the shift to virtual teaching was that it triggered an increase in the amount of nonwestern buildings addressed in class. Before the semester began, many of my students left San Francisco and moved in with families and friends in cities such as Beijing, Ho Chi Minh City, Jakarta, and Seoul. As a result, presentations by students often discussed the architecture closest to them, in particular, International Style office buildings on the outskirts of Beijing, the layout of high schools in Vietnam, and open streets and outdoor markets in Indonesia and Korea. As I listened to these presentations, I found that the balance of power shifted in the class and students now led the way in terms of content and the kinds of questions they asked about the built environment (Figures 4, 5, and 6). I also was more than a little chagrined that I knew so little about the built landscape of Jakarta or Ho Chi Minh City and vowed to come back next fall with more material on these cities.
Figure 4. Diagram of campus of the Zhejiang Normal University Affiliated Middle School, Jinhua, China, from a presentation by Violet Fu for the fall 2020 History of Interiors course at the California College of the Arts. Used with permission.
The California College of the Arts has one of the most diverse student populations in the United States.[5] As a result, I have always felt uncomfortable focusing on canonical buildings located in the U.S. and Europe—including a large number of buildings that are conveniently just a short taxi ride away from stations on the Amtrak Northeast Corridor line. Taking in account the diversity of students in front of me in class, it seemed necessary to include more buildings outside the western tradition. In a lecture on the history of the bedroom and its furnishings, there are now examples from Africa and China as well as those in England and the Americas. In the last year, I have attempted, with some success, to focus more on global connections, including the flow of architectural or design ideas between regions connected by the Columbian Exchange or how patrons of canonical British country houses participated in the transatlantic slave trade.
“If the answer can, and will, be easily found using online sources, why are we asking these kinds of questions in the first place?”
We might need to reconceptualize the teaching of architectural history as more than just a “knowledge dump” from instructor to student. We should focus less on making students memorize lists of buildings and architects and instead teach them the methodological tools to help students read and interpret buildings. If we shift to allowing students how to see past lives in historic buildings as well as how architecture performs an integral role in communicating and reinforcing ideas about gender, power, and status, I think we might reassert again our value to studio culture and architecture departments.
Figure 5. Diagram of a typical classroom at the Zhejiang Normal University Affiliated Middle School, Jinhua, China, from presentation by Violet Fu for the fall 2020 History of Interiors course at the California College of the Arts. Used with permission.
My particular approach to the survey is a kind of lumpy and imperfect hybrid of chronological sequence and in-depth explorations of case studies. The course starts, as most do, from Lascaux and Çatalhöyük, but when we reach ancient Greece, we slow down and shift to a thematic approach, using the Greek house as a springboard to discuss gender and space, looking at other examples such as the Mongol yurt or perhaps the Willow Tea Rooms by Margaret and Charles Mackintosh. We also schedule student presentations about how gender and power shapes spaces they encounter in their own lives. We have found it helpful to look at a single room type. Thus, a look at ancient Roman bathrooms might lead to a discussion of bathrooms in general, particularly exploring these spaces in terms of technology, beliefs about hygiene, privacy, gender, spread of disease, race, and sexuality. Complementary student presentations might look at bathrooms around the world, or new toilet technology, or the debate over transgender access to rest rooms.
At a time when many of us have discovered that online teaching has led to increased plagiarism, perhaps it is time to rethink the kind of questions traditionally used in architectural history exams. If the answer can, and will, be easily found using online sources, why are we asking these kinds of questions in the first place? We should create exams that focus less on rote memorization and allow room to display the analytical skills and the personal expression of each student. If I have seen the future of architectural history, I believe it probably doesn’t involve forcing students to remember that the Greene brothers were named Charles and Henry. Might we give students images and a fact pattern about a historic building unknown to them and ask them to discuss the kinds of questions they would ask about the example and the step by step method they would use to interpret the building?
Figure 6. Computer rendering of an example of one type of classroom arrangement at the Bishop Montgomery High School in Torrance, California, from presentation by Zhiyu Li for the fall 2020 History of Interiors course at the California College of the Arts. Used with permission.
Is a Perfect Decolonized Approach Possible?
In an effort to allow students to have more say in the content of the course, I asked them at the end of September if they were happy with the more inclusive approach and to name any specific buildings or architects that they wanted me to cover in class. In my heart I hoped they would just respond with praise—perhaps something like: “Thank you professor for taking the time to revolutionize the syllabus and giving us the tools to decipher monumental and ordinary buildings around the world.”
Fat chance. While the students were very supportive of the changes to the course, they also offered lists of the names of canonical designers and monuments they wanted to see in class. “More Gropius, Mies, Corbusier, Saarinen, please,” one student wrote.[6] As one might expect, the buildings and architects named by students were almost all from Europe and the United States and largely associated with elite patrons.
“If I have seen the future of architectural history, I believe it probably doesn’t involve forcing students to remember that the Greene brothers were named Charles and Henry.”
Finding myself with a conflict between items one and seven in my aforementioned guidelines, I sided with my remarkable and patient students and thus reorganized the course yet again. Out went the planned lectures on the suburbs and redlining as well as an in-depth look at the development of Oakland, California, that I had planned for November and inserted several lectures that offered a far more detailed examination of the major styles of late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Perhaps another historian would have predicted such a response and come up with a more balanced syllabus from the beginning. Perhaps others would have held their ground and left the course unchanged. My hope is that by changing parts of the course on the fly, my students learned that the survey is not a fixed phenomenon, but one that can evolve and adapt to current circumstances and student interests. The real path to a diverse and progressive architectural history will not come without such mid-course corrections—but I feel that only by feeling a little unsure and a bit lost we will know we are on the right track.
A note from the author: This article is developed from my comments at the “What is a Historic Interior?” roundtable for the Society of Architectural Historians, “SAH Connects,” series on October 21, 2020. I would like to thank the roundtable organizer Paula Lupkin for our discussions in preparation for this session. A recording of this roundtable can be found on the SAH website.
[1] Worstward Ho! can be found in Nohow On: Three Novels (New York: Grove Press, 2014) and is reproduced online.
[2] The list of articles on decolonizing the curricula is long, but the articles that were particularly helpful were Chanelle Wilson, “Revolutionizing my Syllabus: The Process,” Bryn Mawr College, Creating and Rethinking Syllabi to Open Learning; Heather E. McGregor, “Decolonizing Pedagogies Teacher Reference Booklet, Service Project for: Aboriginal Focus School, Vancouver School Board,” March 2012; Keele University, “Decolonising The Curriculum Network, Why is My Curriculum So White?,” May 23, 2018; and the National History Center, “Teaching Decolonization Resource Collection.”
[3] In particular, I gained much from the SAH’s discussion on July 31, 2020 with Irene Cheng, Charles L. Davis II, and Mabel O. Wilson about their new edited book, Race and Modern Architecture: A Critical History from the Enlightenment to the Present. A recording of this session can be found on the SAH website. Also helpful in rethinking the course were Dianne Harris, “That's Not Architectural History!: Or What's a Discipline For?,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 70, no. 2 (June 2011): 149-52; Harris, “Architectural History’s Futures,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 74, no. 2 (June 2015): 147-51; Mary Anne Beecher, “Toward a Critical Approach to the History of Interiors,” Journal of Interior Design 24, no. 2 (September 1998): 4-11; as well as a recorded interview with Marta Gutman and Hongyan Yang.
[4] For those interested in the history of restaurants, including early examples in China, see Katie Elliott Shore, Dining Out: A Global History of Restaurants (London: Reaktion Books, 2019).
[5] The California College of the Arts ranks fourteenth on the “Most Diverse Colleges in America” list according to the Niche Best Colleges website, and CCA’s own website describes the school as one of the ten most diverse colleges in the United States.
[6] My students are a very polite group, and I appreciated how this student used “please” so as not to hurt my feelings.
