Pratt Academic Senate: Academic Initiatives Committee
A Faculty Roundtable Discussion
February 22, 2010
6:00-8:00 PM
Alumni Reading Room
Mapping as a critical practice is the topic of this roundtable discussion. Through mapping, students come to acquire a language by which the mapping process both sets up and puts into effect complex sets of relationships that remain to be more fully actualized. The tools of traditional cartography that are employed to represent landscapes are relevant to art and design practices. Parallels can be drawn between the process of writing, which plays with and structures ideas; and the process of making, which also plays with and structure ideas.
Regardless of whether words or materials are in question, there are shared phenomena that speak to the logics of representation and the processes of mediation, which apply equally to writing and making. Art and design education can be more effective by approaching the nature of design itself through parallels learned by analogy from other media. Mapping enables the analogue to become more potent than a simple metaphoric relationship between parallel modes of representation. Students respond with greater attention to academic instruction when it directly correlates to their studio projects; studio projects are more fully realized and socially responsible when there is a direct link to larger ideas that are continually being refined in academics. The play between ideas and projects can become more flexible when a mapping process has been established in the studio and seminar.
The aim of the roundtable discussion is to address the role of mapping as an essential practice in both the academic course and the studio for an engaged, critical studio practice and rigorous, robust academic education. Each faculty presenter will introduce their practice and pedagogy from the perspective of their respective disciplines and display examples of student projects.
Faculty Presenters
Jeffrey Hogrefe, Adjunct Associate Professor, Architecture, Humanities and Media Studies, Coordinator: The Architecture Writing Program: Language/Making
Peter Nekola, Adjunct Instructor, History
Mark Parsons, Adjunct Associate Professor, Architecture
Sheila Pepe, Assistant Chair, Fine Art
Filip Tejchman, Visiting Assistant Professor, Architecture
David Walczyk, Assistant Professor, School of Information and Library Science
Moderator: Laena McCarthy, Assistant Professor, Library