From Knowing to Interpreting: A Qualitative Case Study of Multidisciplinary and Experiential Pedagogy in Teaching Islamic Architecture

Uzma Kabir

doi:10.68024/wdggjb35

المؤلفون

Uzma Kabir Assistant Professor, Department of Architecture and Design ، COMSATS University Islamabad مؤلف

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.68024/wdggjb35

الكلمات المفتاحية:

architectural education، Islamic architecture، architectural history، experiential learning، learner-centred pedagogy

الملخص

This article presents a multidisciplinary and experiential approach to teaching Islamic art and architecture in an undergraduate architecture course. It elaborates a retrospective qualitative case study of ARC 371, History of Philosophy of Arts and Architecture, taught in Semester 5 at COMSATS University Islamabad. The course combined historical and architectural lectures with student research, presentations, debate, and hands-on engagement with pottery painting, illumination and miniature-making. The study uses the course's end-of-semester review, its documented pedagogical activities and learning outcomes, student-feedback summaries, and related course documentation as an archival qualitative corpus. A hybrid deductive-inductive thematic analysis was used to identify patterns across the documented evidence. Seven themes were developed: engagement through active participation; movement towards independent inquiry; critical thinking through argument and comparison; interdisciplinary learning; experiential learning through making; movement from historical description towards architectural interpretation; and pedagogical tensions and implementation constraints. The findings do not claim measured gains or causal superiority over conventional teaching. Rather, the case demonstrates how a sequence of learning activities can reposition architectural history from a largely transmissive subject towards a space for inquiry, dialogue, making and interpretation. The multidisciplinary teaching team expanded the range of learning modes available to students, while the course review also revealed the need for stronger curricular integration, better workload calibration, greater opportunities for site-based learning, and more explicit scaffolding for academic research and writing. The article proposes a pedagogical sequence comprising of knowledge acquisition, investigation, argumentation, crafting and interpretation, as a transferable framework for rethinking history and theory courses in architecture education.

التنزيلات

تنزيل البيانات ليس متاحًا بعد.

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