Assessment, Recognition and the “Contact Zone” in Landscape Architecture: How Much Is “Enough”?

Abstract

Extended Curriculum Programmes have a responsibility to validate the resources and experiences students bring to their learning environment. However, designing assessment practices that encourage diverse students to draw on their resources in order to both access and challenge disciplinary discourses can be complex. This article is framed in terms of how students balance their own experiential knowledge while engaging with the disciplinary discourse. It aims to interrogate students’ negotiation of the “contact zone” and how they negotiate their brought-along resources with assessment guidelines. A multimodal social semiotic approach is taken to explore ways of contributing to a socially just pedagogy by enabling recognition of a range of students’ resources, while at the same time acknowledging the need to access the conventions of the discipline. We argue for recognition as the positive side of assessment, which could enable more diverse students’ resources to be acknowledged. We interrogate the meaning-making trajectories of two students, Xola and Sonwabo, in a first-year landscape architecture course. While both students bring their own resources into a spatial model project, they each have varying “success” in mediating these in relation to the dominant conventions of landscape architectural design.