Strategies of care in architectural education for future practice

Abstract

This paper considers pedagogical strategies of care across the undergraduate curriculum, within the School of Architecture and Planning (SoAP) at the University of the Witwatersrand. Developed in response to South Africa’s colonial and Apartheid legacies, as well as the more recent calls for a more decolonised education within the #FeesMustFall Movement.  The paper presents three case studies that propose strategies to counter colonialism within the South African architectural system, which has historically privileged Western epistemologies and marginalised indigenous knowledge and embodied ways of knowing. This has led to the training of students to be industry-ready rather than practice-ready professionals, thereby reinforcing extractive modes of practice. In contrast, this paper foregrounds care as a critical and decolonial practice in architectural education that fosters practice readiness. This paper explores pedagogical strategies of care across the undergraduate degree. In the first year, Character-Led Design cultivates empathy and social consciousness through narrative and storytelling, by reflecting on Johannesburg’s mining history and colonial settler beginnings. Through embodied making in the second year, students enter into correspondence with material agency and atmospheric qualities, generating tacit knowledge that deepens their awareness of human and more-than-human interrelations In the third year, personal spatial narratives unearth tacit design knowledge from lived experience, enabling students to situate themselves critically within institutional and professional frameworks. These approaches scaffold students’ development of self-awareness, empathy, and critical agency, equipping them to challenge extractive norms as they go into practice. We argue that care in architectural pedagogy is not merely pastoral but an epistemic and ontological stance that validates relational, embodied, and affective knowledge. Such strategies of micro-resistance counter entrenched colonial paradigms, foster inclusivity, and prepare graduates to practice architecture in ways attentive to social justice, ecological interdependence, and pluriversal worldviews transforming both the profession and its pedagogies from within.