This document discusses using design studio methods to teach academic writing. It argues that the process of scholarly writing, like designing, involves creatively engaging with questions and shaping claims based on research. The material and collaborative aspects of design studios can thus support learning academic argumentation. Specifically, mapping, sketching, and iterative engagement with ideas both intellectually and visually can help students explore and communicate spatial and verbal arguments. The document examines how this approach was implemented in a critical reading and research course at the Boston Architectural College to make learning more inclusive and cross-curricular.

1. “DESIGNING” A CRITICAL ARGUMENT
“Designing” a Critical Argument: Studio Methods for
Teaching Academic Writing
Diana Ramirez-Jasso, PhD, Claudette Lavoie L’Huillier, AIA, LEED® AP
The Boston Architectural College
Introduction
A search for the origins of the word “design,” as
we know, takes us to the Latin verb designare,
which is commonly linked to future-oriented
activities such as planning or conceiving, as well
as to haptic processes such as the fashioning or
shaping of materials into concrete objects, works
of art, machines, or buildings. Furthermore, the
Latin root’s connection to notions of “marking” or
“tracing” reminds us that these mental and
physical practices are usually mediated by acts of
denotation such as drawing and sketching. It is
often through these intervening representations, in
other words, that mental and physical acts of
creation find a way to coincide. 1
For many design students, the process of
conceiving, drawing, and shaping materials into
imagined objects first occurs in the fertile
environment of the studio. By providing the
material and immaterial support for investigation,
this environment turns into a medium in its own
right. It is here that instructors encounter one of the
reasons for the broad appeal of the studio’s
particular pedagogy: that it enables an open-
ended and polysemous exploration of the very
concept of ‘medium’ and of the possibilities that
it affords for the creative act.
Given its similarity as a reflective and generative
activity, the process of scholarly writing—the
creative engagement with questions through the
fashioning of claims based on existing
knowledge—can be construed as a process of
design. We argue, therefore, that the material
emphasis of the design studio, as well as the
prolific collaborative processes and environments
it generates, have distinct advantages in
supporting the learning of academic
argumentation. This paper posits, then, that
drawing and sketching are helpful tools in the
exploration and communication of both spatial
ideas and verbal arguments outside the
boundaries of the design studio. This is not to say,
however, that to ‘design’ a critical argument in a
liberal arts class means simply to ‘draw’ it. As a
nuanced understanding of designare suggests,
using design methods in an academic writing
context involves a multisensory and iterative
engagement that includes both the intellectual
and visual mapping of ideas, as well as the
planning and shaping of original claims. Thus,
beyond merely recommending the use of
graphics in argumentation courses, this essay
addresses the more productive question of how
ideas and materials—or how processes of thinking
and of making—inform and shape one another,
whether in the context of the design studio or in
the freshman writing class.
Figure 1: Student Research and Writing Pin-Up
In the exploratory pedagogy described below, a
basic premise is that blurring the boundaries
between design and the liberal arts through the

2. use of studio methods enables the mapping and
privileging of a common territory of “research.”
Using the teaching tools of the studio to advance
critical inquiry in various learning areas, including
college-level writing has, from this perspective,
three major advantages: one, it helps promote
active cross-curricular learning; two, it helps
diversify the professional design fields by
supporting a more inclusive learning environment
that caters to visual learners, and three, it
increases the visibility and relevance of the design
disciplines by producing professionals with
transferable critical thinking and research skills.
Design, Communication, and the Public Sphere
The need to bring together the specific skills of the
professional world and the competencies
typically instilled by the liberal arts has been an
explicit concern in architecture schools for
decades. In the early nineties, the Carnegie
Foundation undertook an important study that
tried to understand and improve the education of
undergraduate architecture students at research
universities. The results of this investigation were
published in 1996 under the title Building
Community: A New Future for Architecture
Education and Practice. 2
Widely known today as
the “Boyer Report,” the study crafted a
pedagogical agenda that responded to the new
historical challenges facing the discipline. Positing
the importance of multi-disciplinary inquiry and
the need for public advocacy for design, it
argued for research-based learning at the
baccalaureate level and called for an integrated
curriculum bringing architectural knowledge in
touch with general social concerns. Importantly,
the report foregrounded the value of
communication skills in advancing the
increasingly urgent agendas of architects in the
world at large. As the authors put it, “the ability to
speak and write with clarity is essential if architects
are to assume leadership in the social, political,
and economic arenas where key decisions about
the built environment are being made.”3
Thus,
“schools … must place far greater priority on
preparing graduates to be effective and
empathetic communicators, able to advocate
with clarity for the beauty, utility, and ecological
soundness of the built environment.”4
In order to achieve this ambitious goal, the Boyer
Commission called for architecture schools to
ensure the seamless integration of technical and
communication skills in comprehensive capstone
projects: “All graduates should be required to pull
together, in a single piece of design work, what
they have learned in the professional degree
program and express their design concepts
clearly—orally, in writing, and in two- and three-
dimensional representations.”5
While degree
projects of this kind are a common requirement in
architecture programs today, it is not clear that
the specific ambitions of the design professions
have made an impact on the teaching of
academic writing, whether in architecture schools
or elsewhere. This is remarkable, given that the
effective development of students’ writing skills
figure prominently as one of the most important
challenges facing higher education today.
According to a recent study by the American
Association of Colleges and Universities, 89% of
employers think that colleges should place
greater emphasis on the attainment of adequate
oral and written communication abilities,
something they privilege over every other “core”
competency.6
The lackluster performance of
higher education in this area has been
compounded, moreover, by the varying level of
skills students possess when they arrive on campus.
According to the ACT College Readiness
Benchmark report for 2014, only 64% of tested high
school graduates have achieved college
readiness in writing and only 44% have adequate
skills in analytical reading.7
Making Learning Inclusive
Architecture schools have a particularly important
reason to experiment with ways to narrow this
achievement gap. Given that the representation
of minority groups in the professional sphere
continues to be inadequate, schools must actively
seek a more diverse student body which, in turn,
requires them to combine inclusive admission
processes with innovative forms of academic
remediation and support. For institutions like the

3. “DESIGNING” A CRITICAL ARGUMENT
Boston Architectural College, whose mission is
centered on offering historically
underrepresented groups wider access to the
design professions, finding effective methods to
empower all students is a important responsibility.
Founded in 1889 as an architectural “club,” the
BAC came into being as an informal venue where
Beaux-Arts-trained architects volunteered their
time to educate local draftsmen in the artistic and
technical aspects of architecture.8
Today, as an
accredited institution of higher learning, the BAC
continues to be committed to providing
“excellence in design education emerging from
practice and accessible to diverse communities,”
a commitment that it sustains through a policy of
open admissions.9
It is in this context that the
experiments described here have taken shape. In
an environment where inclusive pedagogical
strategies are so critical to the achievement of the
institutional mission, exploring methods for
academic achievement beyond those
traditionally used in the liberal arts is a pressing
task. In addition to their concrete capacity to
support the writing process, studio methods have
proven to have the benefit of leveling the playing
field for a broad variety of students by catering to
the typical strengths of visual and haptic learners,
which constitute a large portion of the student
body not only at the BAC, but across many design
programs.
Studio Methods and Cross-curricular Learning
In the spring of 2013, the BAC piloted its new
academic argumentation courses, which are
now required in the “foundation” year of all
undergraduate programs. Part of the redesigned
curriculum formally rolled out the following fall,
these courses now exist within an ecology of new
formats for the learning of graphic representation,
spatial design, and professional practice in
Architecture, Interior Architecture, Landscape
Architecture, and Design Studies. When two
semesters of “Critical Reading and Research,” or
“CRR,” supplanted the previously existing “writing”
courses, the change signaled a move away from
writing as an isolated technical skill toward an
emphasis on academic inquiry as a process that is
facilitated by a wide range of tools and
competencies, including critical reading and
writing. Among the most important changes
introduced with these new courses was a greater
emphasis on the development of strong analytical
reading skills as a way to foster nuanced
understanding of existing bodies of work. Through
regular use of the “rhetorical précis,” a four-
sentence format that identifies a text’s main
claim, argumentation method, audience, and
intentions, students in CRR come to better
understand the assigned texts, and slowly, their
own positions as writers. Significantly, unlike
techniques that aim to improve writing in isolation,
this capacity to critically assess a variety of
sources in their own historical and theoretical
contexts is an eminently transferable skill, one that
is likely to impact the way students approach, for
example, architectural precedents in a design
studio.
In addition to this emphasis on reading skills, CRR
courses are now thematic, following the principle
that students are more likely to succeed in
learning when they understand writing and
research not as ends in themselves but as tools
that can help them probe into interesting topics.
Similarly, in order to connect the writing process to
skills that students acquire in foundation design
and representation courses, the CRR sequence
now uses an iterative process of multisensory
crafting and revision that closely follows the
design studio model, where graphic analysis and
diagramming, “desk crits”, “pin-ups” and peer
review are regular contributors to individual and
group learning. By the same token, students are
explicitly encouraged to apply analysis, reading,
research and writing competencies in the design
studio and across learning environments, a goal
that is supported by a comprehensive foundation
portfolio requirement at the end of the first year of
study. Thus, beyond teaching students how to
“write” college papers, the new course sequence
introduces them to research as a tool for learning
across curricular areas. This is achieved by
mentoring them along its entire process: from
critical reading and the crafting of hypotheses,
through literature analysis and the identification of
audiences, and finally, to the effective,
expressive, and persuasive use of oral, written and

4. graphic media that, in this case, are analogous to
the tools used in their design studio investigations.
1 Exploring Medium: Materials
We might ask, however, what educators mean
when they refer to “studio methods.” The
pedagogy commonly applied today in teaching
spatial design inherited the tradition of “learning
by doing” that first emerged out of medieval
guilds in Europe and whose most influential version
took form in the19th century ateliers of the École
des Beaux-Arts.10
Already in the 18th century,
however, the system had taken a distinctly
progressive and experimental character in the
German-speaking world. It was here that early
pedagogues, informed by the Enlightenment’s
emphasis in the education of the modern citizen,
produced the first autonomous environments
where young children were educated through
play and with the help of didactic objects.11
This
new emphasis on space, material manipulation,
and autonomous learning later inspired such
influential educational models as Friedrich
Froebel’s kindergartens and John Dewey’s
Laboratory School; and in the twentieth century, it
came to inform such architectural explorations as
Walter Gropius’ Bauhaus pedagogy and the
radical studios of John Hejduk, among others.
While the experiments of each of these educators
had their own specificity, a common thread was
the privileging of self-directed discovery and the
use of multiple modalities or “media” for the
investigation of a common problem by a
community of learners.
In her paper “Learning from the Architecture
Studio: Implications for Project-Based Pedagogy,”
Sarah Kuhn offers a look at the central features of
today’s architecture design studio, all of which
she acknowledges may be “portable” to
education in other technically-based fields.12
In
her view, the essential studio is marked by:
 Complex and open-ended assignments
 Rapid iteration that allows multiple revisions
and a constant feedback loop
 Frequent formal and informal critique from
faculty, peers, and visiting experts, in an
individual or group setting
 Consideration of a range of heterogeneous
issues in a single assignment or problem
 Study of precedents and consideration of
existing knowledge
 Creative use of design constraints to help
focus or open up possible solutions
 Central importance of design media—
whether electronic, paper, modeling clay or
other materials—that encourage certain
kinds of use and prohibit or discourage others.
Among the elements that Kuhn examines, the use
of a variety of media in exploring complex
problems holds perhaps the most promise when
engaging students in a humanities-based
research class. One of the interesting features of
today’s discussions of academic writing is that the
problem is rarely framed as one of medium or
materiality. While many innovative models have
challenged traditional methods, in the typical
freshman composition course, words, paragraphs,
and the formal conventions of the academic
essay continue to be generally treated as
materially transparent vehicles for content. The
techniques implemented in the Critical Reading
and Research courses deploy instead several
ways to foreground the way in which material
supports such as graphic work in various sizes and
formats, colored pens, image slides, news
clippings, posters, and at times even three-
dimensional models, contribute to creative
thinking. Kuhn refers to the unique forms of
facilitation and resistance provided by these
media as the productive “backtalk” generated
by the panoply of materials with which the
iterative process of design necessarily engages.13
In the case of the liberal studies writing class,
students are introduced to words themselves—as
well as sentences and paragraphs—as part of the
sensory substance out of which persuasive essays
are built. We therefore incorporate into the
pedagogy of CRR the work of Verlyn Klinkerborg
who, in Several Short Sentences about Writing,
encourages writers to “value every one of a
sentence’s attributes and not merely its

5. “DESIGNING” A CRITICAL ARGUMENT
meaning.”14
Confronted with the impact of word
choice and sentence structure not only in the texts
they read but also in their own scholarly craft,
students begin to internalize the idea that “words
in a sentence have a degree of specificity or
concreteness.”15
These vehicles of meaning, after
all, have histories and contexts, they produce
rhythms, and address the reader in particular
ways, characteristics that make them ideal raw
materials for “design.”
The multisensory engagement with the elements
of writing in Critical Reading and Research 1 leads
to the critically important exercise of the rhetorical
précis, the results of which are reviewed in a pin-
up environment. Printed in large format or
projected on a whiteboard for all participants to
see, the précis that students compose in response
to a common assigned reading become
evidence not only of particular understandings of
texts and contexts, but also of the students’
individual approaches to sentence crafting. Thus,
as students diagram their peers’ work on the
board or suggest different word choices by
inserting hand-written comments on their print-
outs, their haptic engagement with words registers
as a process of material and collective creation.
During the semester, this hands-on engagement
with the tangible elements of thought is supported
by similar assignments through which students not
only compose, but graphically diagram, present
and critique, other forms of content such as
literature reviews or incipient essay structures.
2 Exploring Medium: Process
Alongside helping students understand how
material and immaterial substances help each
other take form, studio methods afford a unique
opportunity to explore how various processes or
techniques of thinking and making inform and
affect each other more broadly and in continuous
and complex feedback loops. The learning that
gets consolidated through continuous practice in
a studio environment—regardless of the curricular
area—is therefore very different from that
achieved in a traditional classroom where the
emphasis is placed on the transmission of
knowledge from teacher to student. While, in the
latter, contents have the opportunity to be fully
assimilated, bringing the learning process to a
close, in the former, what is explicitly pursued and
gained is ever-evolving patterns of design
behavior and a cultivation of increasingly
complex skills that are transferable not only across
courses but across entire curricula and into
professional life.
In essence, the studio teaches that knowledge is
not an ultimate end but rather a transient and
constantly evolving product of the application of
critical skills and creative tactics, and that only
consistent practice supports the development of
mastery. In this way, the studio trains students to
test various materials and media and teaches
them how to capitalize on the variety of
“backtalk” they elicit. This ultimately encourages
active learning that enables participants to draw
from their own experience, making them
comfortable with the challenge of producing
original thinking rather than merely repeating or
applying content.
How might we engage with this formative
potential of studio in ensuring that designers
acquire strong research and expository abilities?
One way to do this is to frame the academic
writing courses, like we do studio, as a continuous
engagement with work in progress. In Critical
Reading and Research, regular pin-ups that elicit
feedback from peers engender a culture of
constant revision and group support toward the
crafting of increasingly sophisticated work. The
courses also encourage students to assume
explicit and diverse subject positions, in the same
way a student in an architecture studio, for
example, is prompted to assume the role of a
design professional responding to the needs of a
client whose particular situation they are asked to
interpret. CRR courses initially place emphasis on
developing the student’s understanding of the
determining contextual parameters of existing
written sources. Subsequently, they are asked to
write rhetorical précis about their own work, an
exercise that helps them situate their budding
arguments in relation to the work of others and, in
this way, pushes them to refine their voice.

6. In later exercises, the materiality that précis
achieve in large-scale print-outs takes a more
complex form when students begin to map their
understanding of entire bodies of literature by
graphically representing texts in relational
networks of influence. The students then mark their
own position in this system as they begin to
develop original arguments.
Figure 3: Student graphic literature review
After a cyclical engagement with exercises of this
kind, the student comes to the comprehensive
end-of-semester assignment which, in the case of
CRR1, is still not a fully developed research
paper—a project reserved for the second
semester of the series—but a mock “letter to an
editor,” accompanied by an oral presentation.
The reason for this focused assessment is that, at
the end of the first semester, the primary learning
goal for Critical Reading and Research is for the
student to understand existing ideas in their own
contexts and to be able to situate him or herself
as a strong voice in conversation with authors of
the past. We believe this is a skill that takes at least
one semester to develop and one that needs to
be in place before students are able to produce
nuanced and intelligently argued research
papers. The “letter to an editor” allows them to
concentrate on this goal without having to
engage with the amplified complexities of style,
grammatical correctness, detailed content, and
academic conventions demanded by a full-
blown essay. The exercise prompts the student to
articulate an argument they have crafted on the
basis of existing work by describing how their ideas
contribute to an interesting and ongoing
academic exchange. In the letter, the student
assumes the role of an author who is offering an
article for the consideration of an actual journal
board, which the student is given the responsibility
to choose on the basis of the topic addressed. By
describing a detailed paper that in reality does

7. “DESIGNING” A CRITICAL ARGUMENT
not yet exist, students are required to make a
claim for the originality and relevance of their
ideas in the public domain of the printed word.
They are put in a position to demonstrate, in a
persuasive way, the expertise they have gained
on a given area of knowledge, and to showcase
their ability to understand the conventions,
practices, and motives of professional academic
writing. The hope is not only that this medium will
explicitly materialize and make evident for a
student the most significant learning goals of the
first semester, but that the exercise will also
demystify the process of publishing, an activity
that they will ideally be in a position to pursue
shortly thereafter or at some point in their career.
This letter, alongside other documents, becomes
the center of a final oral presentation and pin-up
where students are given an opportunity to exhibit
and explain not only their findings and arguments
on the topic they selected, but also the self-
directed process that led to these new claims. The
goal of addressing process and product
simultaneously, a feature of the design studio that
writing courses rarely get to deploy, is facilitated
by both the graphic material produced expressly
for the final discussion as well as through reflection
on the concrete evidence of work a student has
been accumulating during the previous 16 weeks.
Importantly, the processes learned in Critical
Reading and Research will not be consolidated
into recurring habits of mind in a single semester.
The entire curriculum must explicitly reinforce the
cultivation of research as a “medium” for critical
thinking all the way to the student’s degree
project, ensuring in this way the transferability of
these skills to the professional setting. In the case
of the BAC’s revised curriculum, the initial year-
long encounter with Critical Reading and
Research arms students with foundational skills in
context analysis, information literacy,
argumentation, and writing conventions, an
experience that is followed by opportunities to
reinforce and mobilize this substrate of abilities in,
for example, the design history courses, which
require similar processes of contextualization and
research. More directly, the remaining elements of
the general education curriculum continue to
explicitly develop research skills with ever more
rigorous techniques while increasingly
emphasizing the privileging of student interests
over prescribed content. For example, the
“Independent Study Seminar,” required in all
undergraduate programs at the BAC, reinforces
research techniques while requiring students to
freely define their own research topics. This course
is followed by a “Design Study Research Seminar”
for students in Design Studies, or the course
“Advanced Research Strategies” for those in the
professional programs, immediately after which all
students begin to work on their capstone, or
“degree” project.
3 Exploring Medium: Environment
Finally, if the process-oriented learning that the
studio model achieves is important, so is the
sphere it promotes in order to make these
processes possible and productive. We refer here
to the environment—the milieu—that typically
acts as yet another medium for collaborative
learning. At the BAC, the exploration of materials
and processes that runs from Critical Reading and
Research to the capstone project has so far been
deployed in its most systematic form in the
Bachelor of Design Studies program. As a liberal
arts- based design degree, the BDS has been
uniquely positioned to continue the emphasis on
making provided in CRR as a way to produce
capstone research projects that “encourage
integration, application, and discovery of
knowledge within and outside” the design
disciplines.16
If the ultimate goal of a rigorous
research education in a self-directed environment
is that of empowering design students to
participate fully and in relevant ways in public
discourse and debate, the BDS capstone
sequence explicitly sets out to bring to fruition the
merging of technical, aesthetic, and
communication skills that the Boyer report
demanded back in the 1990s.
While they do not receive dedicated studio
space—something the institution is currently trying
to make possible—throughout their final semester,
degree project students meet in a typical design
studio classroom while engaging in activities
analogous to those present in CRR and the rest of
the research curriculum. Thus the didactic sphere
of the Degree Project course becomes an actual
materialization of the methodological overlap

8. established from the first semester between design
studio and Critical Reading and Research. In a
studio that actively pursues the investigation of
design on equal footing and in concert with
research in the humanities or the natural or social
sciences, the learning experience turns into a
concrete spatialization of the ambitious project of
methodological and content overlap that CRR set
out to achieve. Here, we see students making
bold claims about specific design concerns that
also reach out explicitly into the general questions,
anxieties, ambitions, and responsibilities of society
as a whole.
In this sphere where research into design and into
culture at large become one and the same, the
student is reminded of the rich collaborative
space that the physical studio provides. In its
materiality we see, again, powerful media: a room
furnished with movable tables and chairs and
surrounded by tack-board surfaces signals a
demand for its occupants to open up to others
and to be willing to make their work in progress
visible to all; it asks them to learn from peers and
to assume responsibility for a portion of their
learning; it requires them to commit to the
continuous creative practice that most designers
will engage in in their professional lives. The studio
space thus emerges as the enabler of that kind of
community that makes both learning and the
public exchange of ideas that awaits them
outside its walls possible. Watching students
collaborating in these classrooms, one thinks of
John Hejduk’s words as he described the
groundbreaking idea that he learned from his
kindergarten teacher: that “individual creativity
within a willing community of students is a
profound social act.” 17
1 Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, 5th ed., s.v. “design”
and “medium.”
2 Ernst L. Boyer and Lee D. Mitgang, Building Community:
A New Future for Architecture Education and Practice
(Princeton: the Carnegie Foundation for the
Advancement of Teaching, 1996).
3 Ibid., 80.
4 Ibid., 136. The broad cultural application of the
Vitruvian triad—utilitas, firmitas, venustas—that is
suggested by this formulation is, of course, not lost on
architects.
5 Ibid., 89.
6 ACT, The Condition of College & Career Readiness:
National (Iowa City, IA: ACT, 2014).
7 Association of American Colleges and Universities, The
Leap Vision for Learning: Outcomes, Practices, Impact
and Employer’s Views (Washington, D.C., AAC&U, 2011).
8 For a history of the BAC, see Don R. Brown, Designed in
Boston: A Personal Journal-History of the Boston
Architectural College, 1889-2011 (Boston: Boston
Architectural College, 2013).
9 “Diversity Statement” The Boston Architectural College,
accessed January 5, 2015, http://www.the-
bac.edu/about-the-bac.
10 For a history of studio methods in architecture see Joan
Ockman, Architecture School: Three Centuries of
Educating Architects in North America (Washington,
D.C.: Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture,
2012), Mary N. Woods, From Craft to Profession: The
Practice of Architecture in Nineteenth-Century America
(Oakland: University of California Press, 1999) and Dana
Cuff, Architecture: The Story of Practice (Cambridge: MIT
Press, 1992).
11 For more on the spaces of Enlightenment pedagogy
see Diana Ramirez Jasso, “Imagining the Garden:
Childhood, Landscape and Architecture in Early
Pedagogy, 1761-1850” (Ph.D diss., Harvard University,
2012).
12 Sarah Kuhn, “Learning from the Architecture Studio:
Implications for Project-Based Pedagogy,” International
Journal of Engineering Education, Vol. 17, Nos. 4 and 5
(2001): 340-352.
13 Ibid., 351.
14 Verlyn Klinkenborg, Several Short Sentences About
Writing (New York: Vintage, 2012), 20.
15 Ibid., 21
16 Boyer, Building Community, 27.
17 John Hejduk, introduction to Schools of Architecture,
ed. Bart Goldhoorn (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 1997), 9.
*The authors wish to thank Jessica Cole, Ph.D., Zenovia
Toloudi, D.Des., and Victoria Hallinan, Ph.D. for their
invaluable contributions to the design of the Critical
Reading and Research courses, and Tyler Scott and
Allison Casazza for permission to reproduce their work.