What the ARP has changed for me
When I started this Action Research Project, my focus was mainly on students: how they imagine users, how they talk about social and affordable housing, and whether a sequence of early studio activities could help them move beyond narrow or privileged assumptions. What I did not fully anticipate was how much the process would also reshape the way I understand my own teaching practice, particularly in relation to ethics.
One of the clearest moments of this shift came when reflecting on an exercise I have used for several years: asking students to draw their own homes at the start of the studio. Pedagogically, this exercise worked very well. It helped students understand domestic scale, spatial organisation, and construction precisely because the object of study was so close to them. Over time, however, I also noticed something else happening alongside this learning. Differences in living conditions became immediately visible, often before a sense of trust or shared language had been established in the group. Inequality appeared quickly, but framed through individual circumstances rather than as a structural condition.
Looking back, I do not see this earlier exercise as unethical. It was a common and accepted pedagogical practice, and it generated valuable learning. What this ARP has helped me recognise, however, is that pedagogical effectiveness and ethical implications are not the same thing, and that the latter often only become visible through repetition and reflection. The issue was not what students were asked to do, but when and how that task was positioned within the studio sequence.
This insight shaped the first intervention in a very direct way. By reframing the question as “What is the meaning of home for you?” and allowing students to respond through abstract, fictional, or indirect means, I was not avoiding discussions of inequality, but sequencing them more carefully. This created space for reflection before comparison, and for shared language before exposure. Students still engaged with difference and inequality, but through themes such as care, routine, safety, and belonging, rather than through immediate spatial comparison.
The second intervention made these issues more explicit. The speculative user workshop showed very clearly how confident students can be in their first assumptions, even after completing research, and how those assumptions are shaped by normative, disciplinary, representational, and temporal biases. Importantly, the shift did not come from correction, but from collective discussion. When questions around income, tenure, eligibility, and precarity were introduced publicly and revisited, students were able to recognise the limits of their initial user profiles themselves. Discomfort played a role here, but it was productive rather than punitive, and it helped reframe speculative users as something to be worked on, not defended.
Across the project, what has emerged most strongly for me is an understanding of ethics not as a checklist or constraint, but as something embedded in pedagogical design. Ethics, in this context, is about framing, pacing, and care: about how learning environments are structured, what is made visible, and when. It is also about recognising that bias is not a student failure, but a starting condition, something that needs to be surfaced, named, and worked through rather than denied.
This ARP represents one cycle of that process. It has allowed me to articulate things I had previously been doing intuitively, and to see more clearly how relatively small changes in sequencing can have a significant impact on student experience and learning. Importantly, it has not “closed” the enquiry. The reflections generated here are already informing a revised studio plan for next year, which will form the basis of the next iteration of this action research spiral.
Rather than providing definitive answers, this project has strengthened my confidence in approaching socially sensitive briefs with greater intentionality and care. It has also reinforced my belief that ethics in architectural education is not primarily about proximity to “real” users, but about how we prepare students to imagine, represent, and ultimately design for others responsibly.
I have to admit I would have loved to have more time to compare in a more rigorous way the work of the different cohorts during these years and the different patterns of Stage 2 and Stage 3 students. These questions remain open and they are what will shape the next cycle of this work.