The Crit

Assessment in architecture and creative arts schools has traditionally adopted a ‘one size fits all’ approach by using the ‘crit’, where students pin up their work, make a presentation and receive verbal feedback in front of peers and academic staff. In addition to increasing stress and inhibiting learning, which may impact more depending on gender and ethnicity, the adversarial structure of the ‘crit’ reinforces power imbalances and thereby ultimately contributes to the reproduction of dominant cultural paradigms. This book critically examines the pedagogical theory underlying this approach, discusses recent critiques of this approach and the reality of the ‘crit’ is examined through analysis of practice. The book explores the challenges for education and describes how changes to feedback in education can shape the future of architecture and the creative arts.

In this volume students defend their ideas, drawings and models in open forum before staff and fellow students. This book is by students, for students, to help them prepare for more creative relationships with future collaborators.

In E-Crit, Marcel O'Gorman takes an ambitious and provocative look at how university scholarship, pedagogy, and curricula might be transformed to suit a digital culture. Arguing that universities were founded on the logic of print culture, O'Gorman sets out to reinvent the academic apparatus, constructing a hybrid methodology that draws on avant-garde art, deconstructive theory, cognitive science, and the work of painter and poet William Blake. O'Gorman explores the ways in which digital media might help to restore the critical, intellectual purpose of higher education, which has been repressed by the technocratic structures that dominate the modern university. He argues that the revolutionary, socio-critical impetus that spurred deconstructive theory and transformed the humanities was lost in the initial attempts to digitize the literary canon and demonstrate the convergence of critical theory and hypertext. Humanities disciplines, he argues, must reposition themselves through the invention of humanities-based interdisciplinary programs capable of adapting to the post-print vicissitudes of a digital culture. E-Crit is thus essential reading for anyone concerned with the practice - and future - of the humanities in higher education.

Each number includes a classified "Monthly catalogue."

The architectural crit, review or jury is a cornerstone of architectural education around the world. Students defend their ideas, drawings, and models in open forum before staff and fellow students. What academic staff see as healthy creative debate, students see as hostile confrontation, an ego-trip for staff and humiliation for them. This accessible and readable book, written by students and illustrated by telling cartoons, guides them through this academic minefield with creative humour. It provides practical advice based on experience of many recent students and draws on recent experimentation at Sheffield University and De Montfort University Leicester. The aim is twofold: first to suggest how to get the most out of the traditional experience and second, to describe ways in which this is being developed into an experience that will be more constructive and prepare future students to build more creative relationships with clients and users, and across the industry. While much has been written about the crit, review, or jury, little has been done to prepare students for it or to develop it in the light of changing professional attitudes and relationships. This book is a timely guide to a timeless experience in a changing profession.