Pedagogy as Creative Practice in Architecture

Architectural education in the United Kingdom performs a difficult balancing act: meeting the requirements of professional accreditation bodies and preparing students for practice, while also offering a meaningful education for those who do not intend to become architects. Increasingly, professional pressures frame architectural education as training rather than as an exploratory, experimental process – one that equips students to face unpredictable future challenges in the profession and beyond.

In response, many educators develop a hidden curriculum: an implicit set of values, methods and priorities that sit alongside formal learning outcomes. This hidden curriculum tends to privilege curiosity, criticality and open-ended inquiry, often through interdisciplinary and art-based approaches. Working in the gaps between what can be specified and what must be discovered, they complicate the “university-to-practice conveyor belt” narrative and widen what architectural education can be.

This book shines a light on those creative pedagogical practices – working within, and often despite, systemic pressures – and shows why they matter for the vitality of architectural education at a time of deep uncertainty across higher education. It is organised into two parts: Discussions, which offer in-depth explorations of current challenges, and Insights, which present a selection of case studies. Together, they argue for architectural education as a space that cultivates imagination, agency and adaptive ways of thinking – qualities essential for shaping futures that are not yet known.

This book provides essential reading for educators and advanced students of architecture.

Kasia Nawratek is a Senior Lecturer at Manchester School of Architecture, a registered architect and a writer. Her research brings posthuman approaches to the climate crisis into dialogue with literary and narrative methods of architectural investigation. Grounded in Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of polyphony, her teaching nurtures inclusive, dialogic studio cultures and frames speculative design as a form of world-building. She edited Space and Language in Architectural Education: Catalysts and Tensions (Routledge, 2022). Her pedagogical work was recognised with the SCOSA Innovation in Architectural Education Award (2024). Alongside her academic practice, she writes fiction in Polish: her children’s book Kresek, Bartek i całkiem zwyczajny początek won the Kornel Makuszyński Award (2017), and her YA novel Ja, świnia was published in 2023.

Christopher Little is a Senior Lecturer in Academic Development in Manchester Metropolitan University’s central University Teaching Academy. Chris offers academic development consultancy at Manchester Metropolitan and co-leads the university Advance HE Recognition provision. His leadership in this area of staff development and recognition was crystallised in 2024 with the award of Principal Fellow from Advance HE. His research interests include academic literacies, undergraduate research cultures, assessment and feedback and inclusive teaching practices, and he remains research active in all of these areas.