Into Practice, a biweekly communication distributed from the Office of the Vice Provost for Advances in Learning to active instructors during the academic year was inspired by a successful 2012 HILT grant project. The e-letter highlights the pedagogical practices of individual faculty members from across Schools and delivers timely, evidence-based teaching advice, contributing to and strengthening a University-wide community of practice around teaching.

Below is a catalog of all the Into Practice issues sorted by the publication date. To subscribe to Into Practice, please sign-up via our Mailing List page.

• Using the classroom to challenge the boundaries of a discipline

  Sawako Kaijima, Assistant Professor of Architecture and Shutzer Assistant Professor at the Radcliffe Institute, challenges students’ preconceptions towards material often defined by their disciplinary norms though the use of visual programing to foster an “intuitive understanding of structural engineering in architectural design.” Structural design and architectural design often live separately in teaching and practice but are fundamentally linked. So her Interface Design: Integrating Material Perceptions course seeks to fuse these two disciplines. The use of a software tool developed specifically for this course, which is accessible even to students with no programming experience, “defamiliarizes architecture students from the common way of looking at materials” and introduces them to an engineering perspective right from the start.

• Mosaic

  Mosaic Awardees: Erick Diaz (GSD), Sascha Pellerin (HGSE), and Joshua Baltodano (HKS) Summary: Mosaic supports first-generation college students applying to graduate school through a comprehensive and individualized coaching model. Our coaches, who are first-gen themselves, walk applicants through the key aspects of an application (e.g., resumes, personal statements, and selecting recommendors) and provide detailed feedback […]

• Lowering the barriers to becoming a practitioner

  Lily Song, Lecturer and Research Associate, divides her course, Community Development: History, Theory, and Imaginative Practice, into three sections. In “Unraveling,” students read theoretical texts about community development and interrogate dominant approaches that uphold race, class, and gender-based supremacies. “Revisiting” immerses students in alternative histories of community development, drawing on various liberation struggles and movements. Finally, “praxis” brings community development practitioners to present and discuss their work. The course seeks to create a peer-learning community that pushes past remedial and reformist approaches to community development in order to intervene on prevailing economic, political, social, and spatial structures and processes that lock communities in denigrating and dehumanizing terms. By showcasing and interrogating work being done in the field, it breaks down students’ barriers to entry.

• Syllabus Explorer

  Harvard Syllabus Explorer is a web application developed by the Office of the Vice Provost for Advances in Learning - Research Group. Syllabus Explorer combines registrarial data and syllabi from Canvas to give users the ability to search for and download syllabi across Harvard.

• Pushing students to confront limits by transforming the abstract to physical form

  In her Transformations course, Assistant Professor of Architecture Megan Panzano uses architectural design methods and concepts, and a workshop approach for giving feedback, to engage undergraduates from a wide range of concentrations. When students translate abstract ideas into physical form through a variety of materials and fabrication techniques (see photos below), they confront limits, question assumptions, and expand their problem-solving capacity.

• Meet

  Meet is a crowdsourced platform for job-seekers to share and access trusted and relevant information about employers in their local area.

• Giving students practice with constructive criticism

  Mark Mulligan, Associate Professor in Practice of Architecture, requires students in Tectonics Lab to work collaboratively on design-build projects of increasing complexity over the course of the semester that are subject to critique by peers, guest experts, and Mulligan himself.

• ‘Real-world’ projects: Balancing student learning and community need

  Ann Forsyth, Professor of Urban Planning, incorporates projects with clients into many of her Graduate School of Design courses, from semester-long endeavors to optional assignments.

• Defining learning objectives: Pre-semester, all semester

  José A. (Tony) Gómez-Ibáñez, Derek C. Bok Professor of Urban Planning and Public Policy, who holds appointments at the GSD and HKS, defines the learning objectives of his course prior to the start of the semester and references them to frame each individual class session: “I use the first five minutes to place each class in the course – ‘The last class we talked about X and today we want to see how those ideas might apply to Y.’”

• “Making space” for interdisciplinary critical thinking

  Awardees will offer a series of interdisciplinary workshops that develop critical thinking through making.

• Understanding how hackathon methodology drives participatory design pedagogy

  Awardees will explore the “hackathon” as a participatory learning and engagement strategy to bring together members of the Harvard community and beyond.

• The Videographic essay: Innovating a multimedia pedagogical tool for 21st Century scholarship

  Awardee will articulate the scholarly development of the use of the “videographic essay” as a method for communicating knowledge, compiling research, and synthesizing arguments, and organize a 2015 special workshop on multimedia methods.

• Teaching creativity: Landscape, architecture, originality, and autobiography

  Awardee will develop a new interdisciplinary course, involving leaders in landscape architecture and other fields paired with faculty at Harvard to examine originality, authenticity, and invention, and develop a model for courses that spark students to develop their own creative voice.

• Innovative studio space

  Awardees plan to design and teach a studio class in a technology-enhanced, active-learning classroom.

• Asia Real Estate Association

  Asia Real Estate Association (AREA), is a student organization registered at Harvard University that provides all members with resources to further their knowledge and careers in the Asia Real Estate Industry. The organization fosters a strong community of students, who are interested in real estate business in Asia, not only from Harvard University, but also from various graduate-level programs at MIT, Columbia, Cornell, and other Ivy League institutions. The organization also endeavors in bringing a career development platform in collaboration with other partnering student clubs and professional organizations. AREA accomplishes its mission of connecting students and the industry by bringing a variety of social events to campus, namely lecture series, symposiums, mentoring roundtable, site visits, headhunters interviews, and the annual Asia Business Conference at Harvard University. Since 2009, AREA hosts annual ASIA REAL ESTATE CAREER TREK.

• Spain GSD

  Spain GSD is a student group based at the GSD, who aims to promote the work of Spanish scholars, architects, planners, and institutions, within the Harvard Community and beyond. The group organizes lectures by Spanish emergent and consolidated architects and scholars, site visits to Spanish-designed architecture in the area, and social gatherings in order to give visibility and bring to forth the challenges and successes of the country in the architecture and planning fields, but also in the social and economical arena addressing contemporary debates. The group also functions as a platform for new discourses and possibilities within the Spanish context to be heard by a diverse international community. The objective is to create an enriching dialogue and exchange, that could lead to innovation and a better understanding of the Spanish culture in North America.

• Discovery YA

  DISCOVERY YA is a student-run organization at the Harvard Graduate School of Design whose goals are to expand awareness and interest in design by offering introductory workshops and lessons in design to Boston Area youth. The program strives to foster the development of a broad range of design skills and to put students on track for exploring their creative ideas at the collegiate level. The goal of the program is to cultivate greater diversity in the next generation of designers in order to expand the scope and influence of the profession itself.

• openMDE

  openMDE bridges disciplines, pedagogies, and labels to create a collaborative force for understanding complex topics and convoluted problems that exist within contemporary society through the lens of design, engineering, and business. We seek to foster a community across the various graduate schools at Harvard with co-hosted events with SEAS, HKS, HBS, and more.

• Open Letters

  Open Letters is a bi-weekly experimental literary journal whose fundamental purpose is to stimulate earnest, personal and thoughtful conversation about architecture through the publication of first-person correspondence. Each print issue will present one open letter (i.e. addressed to a particular party, but intended for publication)—or a response to a previous issue—that focuses on a specific topic related to the built environment. OL editorial staff will accept submissions from GSD students, faculty and staff, but also from correspondents outside the Design School. We enthusiastically encourage liberal interpretations of the submission framework and welcome a variety of media—so long as it can be placed in a No. 10 envelope.

• Harvard Student Chapter of the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA)

  The purpose of the Society is the advancement of knowledge, education, and skill in the art and science of landscape architecture as an instrument of service in the public welfare. To this end the Society promotes the profession of landscape architecture and advances the practice through advocacy, education, communication, and fellowship. The purpose of the Chapter shall be to bring students together through organized activities that: 1) are consistent with the purpose and policies of the Society; 2) enhance understanding of the Society, the profession, and related disciplines; 3) improve skills and knowledge and complement the educational curriculum; and 4) encourage participation in the programs and activities of the Society, its professional chapters, and other student and student affiliate chapters.