Pedagogy Behind City Lab Research Workshop
Research is the production of knowledge. It rests at the core of the academic project. It is the method for the production of knowledge, which is the number one function of higher education in society. As a community of learners, it is what we do. Conducting research is the most engaged and substantive way of learning material. Through research we take ownership of ideas and make them part of how we understand the world we live in. Research is too frequently misunderstood as something that only advanced level undergraduate students, graduate students, or professors can undertake. City Lab pedagogy, however, flips this thinking by making research core to the learning process at all levels of instruction.
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The workshop pedagogy invites each of us to be collaborators. It requires that we understand that learning is a collective, communal undertaking. We learn best when we learn from each other. Everyone is a teacher and everyone is a learner. The workshop invites each of us to be engaged, imaginative, full of inquiry, and driven by a thirst for knowledge. The City Lab workshop is explorative, experimental, open-ended, because we are looking at the challenges of the 21st century, which means there are no set answers. We are creating the knowledge of the 21st century, which is the new meaning of liberal education. City Lab is different because we are on a collaborative journey of exploration and pushing the boundaries. We are the paradigm shift. To Paraphrase The Big Lebowski, City Lab is the Rug that Pulls the Room Together.
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The Big Lebowski, Discussing Research at the Bowling Alley
The City Lab pedagogy focuses on five core steps: [1] selecting an appropriate topic to investigate; [2] framing a substantive and meaningful line of inquiry; [3] identifying core themes for developing a line of analysis about the central research question; [4] advancing a line of analysis that offers an answer, solution, argument, and/or interpretation about the line of inquiry; [5] placement of the question, themes, and argument within a larger context of importance or significance.
City Lab also engages in research that explores three key areas of knowledge production. These were proposed by DePauw alum, Kartik Amarnath (Class 2013), at a lecture he gave on planetary urbanism fall semester, 2016. [1] Descriptive. Research aims to establish the factual foundations of "what is" within a given topic. While an important element of knowledge, description has significant limitations as it pertains to understanding the hows and why laying within the "what is." But, we need the descriptive in order to reach the next two areas of knowledge production. [2] Critical. This area of knowledge brings social science theory into analysis of the descriptive. It seeks to understand how and why social realities become constituted, how they transform, and how they give meaning to human experience. The critical invites the big, often unanswerable questions. It is the area of knowledge production driven by social theory. The critical often explores power/knowledge relationships, and takes the position that the descriptive is socially and culturally constructed as against being an objective reality. [3] Normative. This part of research attempts to establish "what out to be." While the critical opens up spaces of analysis, the normative brings closure by proposing what emerges from the openings created by the critical. City Lab seeks to engage all three, while recognizing one of the three may carry more weight in any given project. For an example of the research pedagogy prepared by Farukh Sarkulov (DePauw class 2020) click here.
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