Editorial

Teaching and learning are basic human instincts and motivations. We have an innate disposition to learn, but do we have the accompanying disposition to teach, the corollary of learning?

How teachers teach and how teachers learn to teach are bound up with their own personality, philosophy, values and their own experience of school. Somewhere inside there is a set of personal standards - whether tacit or articulated, ill informed or carefully thought out - that determine what shocks, interests or angers teachers about schools, and that serve as the benchmarks which they can use to guide and evaluate their progress as a teacher.

Do teachers learn from their experiences of teaching or is it that over the years all they do is become more efficient at �running off� their routine behaviours? At a typical �crit�, what exactly is being assessed? Is it people or products? Are we assessing studentship and in a way that, in some senses, it mirrors teaching: a good student proves that good teaching is possible? Or are we measuring creativity and what students produce? Are architecture schools training good students or are they hoping to produce good architects? The two things are often not the same.

Unfortunately, certain practices, certain discourses and conversations that are current and available and part of the business of learning and thinking about making architecture are often absent, or even repressed, at school. These include the role of computers, issues of sustainability and accessibility, and the needs of the client and user. Teachers need to be skilled in these areas as a prerequisite to these issues being tackled in an effective and informed manner.

Teachers do not merely deliver a curriculum. They develop it, define it and reinterpret it too. It is what teachers think, what teachers believe and what teachers do at the level of the studio and the lecture theatre that ultimately shapes the kind of learning that architecture students experience. However the opening up of spaces available for learning must also be recognised and these are no longer totally bounded by educational institutions. Learning occurs, for example, through the Internet, competitions, shared interests, experience of other cultures and personal research.

This issue of �Building Material� attempts to explore the role of teacher and the possible �teaching� role of new spaces available for learning in architecture.