The State of Critique and Feedback at UWSA: A Report

BRIDGE is proud to play host to a report prepared by two graduate students, Mona Dai and Allegra Friesen, on the subject of critical feedback at our school.

We created the Effective Feedback* Initiative in 2016, as members of the Peer Support Group, to see if we can improve the ways we communicate and criticize at UWSA.

Our original ambition was to create a “handbook” for critiquing that could be useful for incoming first years and visiting critics. This idea was inspired by the Sheffield School of Architecture’s feedback handbook (Appendix A), as well as the observation that we are thrown into 1A with little instruction on how to go about a desk crit or review, or how to look at our peers’ work, or our own, critically.

Over the past few months, we expanded the initiative to take into account the frequently, but privately-voiced concerns of many UWSA students: frustration surrounding reviews, feedback, and marking, particularly in relationship to Design Studio. These frustrations exist even though there is an ambition, shared by both faculty and students, to make the feedback process a rich and rewarding one.

In response, we launched the Effective Feedback Survey, and also conducted an extensive review of literature on architectural pedagogy, to better understand this discrepancy between best intentions and the reality of student experience.

Our findings from these preliminary phases of the Effective Feedback Initiative have been summarized in the report below. We have also presented this report to faculty, and it was generally well received.

Let us know your thoughts on this. We are currently focused on putting together a feedback handbook to be distributed to incoming first years and visiting critics (we’d love to hear if you have any words of advice for them). Moving forward, we aim to work together with students, faculty, and staff to address the themes raised in the report and improve the feedback process at UWSA.

*“feedback” was chosen deliberately as a broad term to include the various types of comments, questioning, advice and criticism students engage in, not only in a desk critique situation but in reviews, presentations, written responses, and informal conversations.