Mary-Ellen Tyler

Professor and Associate Dean, Landscape and Planning, School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape, University of Calgary, Canada

Interviewed December 2020 by Mac McGinn

MM Mary-Ellen, let’s start off by you introducing yourself and telling us a little bit about what you do.

MT I have a varied background, but I came to Calgary in 1988 as the dean of the Faculty of Environmental Design. I am now a full professor and, for the last three years, I’ve been acting as the interim associate dean for the master of planning and landscape architecture programs at the University of Calgary. I teach in both landscape architecture and planning. I generally do studios, regional planning, design studio, professional practice studio, and climate change adaptation courses.

MM How has your teaching changed since the start of the COVID pandemic?

MT I started off being very concerned. We had to switch online in literally less than thirty-eight hours. It was pretty dramatic, but we did it. The courses were over halfway through the term at this point, and so we had already built up a lot of background, some trust, some communication, and our projects. Nothing was starting from scratch. This year, everything is starting from scratch remotely. When you’re at square one, it takes longer to build a rapport with the students and between students around what’s happening in the class, the intention, and the communication, because there’s a whole conceptual and cognitive development that comes when you’re thinking abstractly about problem solving.

It’s a very different kind of learning engagement and it’s taken a little bit longer than in person for the students to adapt. In my check-ins with them every couple of weeks, it seemed to me that it didn’t start off great. Now it seems to be growing nicely. We’re almost six weeks into it, and I think most students are getting comfortable as they start to go through the assignments, having had opportunity to talk to each other outside of class in multiple ways, both through their workspaces as well as online. Now we are having discussions on Zoom that I think I would have fully anticipated having in person. So I think we’re seeing some good signs.

I have seen real difficulties with my Landscape Ecology courses. It’s not possible to really give students the conceptual framework they need to undertake some of the work if they are never able to understand the regional landscape, and there’s only so much you can do for someone who’s never been in it before. If people are familiar with it, then, yes, representations like Google Earth give them enough to be able to make that leap. But if they’re from a different country and they’ve never been here, it’s really difficult to try to communicate or visually explain the dynamic processes at the landscape level. I’m certainly going to have to re-evaluate it all at the end of one entire term remotely, to see if anything changes. I believe that learning should be hugely experiential at the professional graduate level. This is really restricting the experiential opportunity for some students who just aren’t from here. I’ve worked on a number of major consulting projects, twenty years ago, that were in China and trying to figure that site out before I actually went there was really difficult, so I can certainly appreciate the experience that those folks are having trying to make head or tail of a place you’ve never been.

MM What opportunities do you think are created through this remote or digital education that we’re in now?

MT Well, clearly, I think it’s the fact that it opens up this portal, essentially, for international or distance communication both in terms of connecting with expert resources, as well as for having students being able to dial in. A few weeks ago now we had a course in which a number of international speakers met with us on Zoom to talk about new ideas for downtown Calgary and what we might be able to implement from their perspectives, from where they are in the world, that might have some traction in terms of being customized to Calgary. We would never have been able to do that before. That really enriches not just student learning, but also thinking. Being exposed to new ideas, new concepts, different cultural perspectives, that really makes a difference.

MM What types of challenges do you find, in terms of pedagogy, have been created through this?

MT Like they say in real estate: location, location, location. When it comes to this, I say: time, time, time. The time constraint was huge in trying to think through alternative ways of presenting and trying to understand it from a student perspective. It’s not simply figuring out how do I now present, but also where are the students coming from in terms of what their perspectives are, and what are the steps that have to happen in order to make it accessible to them. So the preparation this summer took a huge amount of time.

Once the term started, another challenge was the response time. Because of remote learning, students need more individual tutorial time with you. And then there’s the class time in addition to the scheduling of all of the individual meeting times, to supplement that. A one-on-one component is really needed, particularly in both of my courses, as they work through a series of exercises. For me, I really need to maintain a very high level of engagement with each student in terms of their individual perspectives around the exercises, as well as the collective view of things in classes. Then there is the time for feedback.

They’re changing the format of the assignments, so that you’re able to give them feedback on what you need from them. Marking, evaluation and review always take time, but it isn’t so much the comments. What takes extra time now is putting the comments into the work in a format that they can understand. Again, everything is spatial in landscape architecture, so it’s like, okay, here’s what you did; here’s another view of it. You’re showing them a different image or a different drawing. I think it’s helpful. But again, it’s a huge amount of time for an instructor. At the moment, as the associate dean, my primary job is not as an instructor, so it’s really added on to the workload for me in terms of trying to carry other duties. And I’m sure it’s increased the workload of the instructors without administrative duties, but who are still trying to do research and publication.

MM That must be quite the challenge to you to balance those two different workloads together with being associate dean.

MT That’s right, and I don’t think we’re the only victims. I think that the students are feeling a huge overload too. I gather from those who I’ve talked to that this seems to be a large source of the stress that they are dealing with right now. They feel absolutely overwhelmed by all of this time commitment. It’s especially so when they’re used to doing school alongside some part time work. So I think the workload comes on both sides. That’s something we’re all going to have to figure out and manage more effectively, even if we move back into the classrooms. We may have to start thinking about maintaining the hybrid models to alleviate some of this. Our sense of time is going to have to be adjusted.

MM In light of discussing the new challenges of time in remote teaching and learning, are there certain resources or software tools that you would use to help you manage time or teaching more effectively?

MT One thing I’ve learned is that the old-fashioned stuff isn’t bad. At the beginning, everyone, including me, thought that we could handle the regional landscape courses using 360-degree cameras and the new, sexy technologies that are available along with those tools. In reality, the video footage would go too fast, and although as the instructor I understood what we were looking at, that didn’t mean the students could understand, especially at that pace. After wasting some time doing this camera work, I realized that I had students who weren’t familiar with this landscape and many who really didn’t have any background, so then I went outside and simply started taking photographs. In a very old-fashioned way, I put them into my PowerPoints. I put graphics on top of them and I laid them all out in the format that I wanted: the arrow goes here; the trees are going to grow there; in ten years this is going to look like this. I can implement graphics and animate them so that what I’m showing the students can be slowed down. They can run it all through if they want to. It was important for me to put this content in a format that students could access at their own speed. So I found that just going back to plain old photographs and PowerPoints with graphic annotation was a better method that enabled the students to access it as fast or as quickly as they needed. I was actually imprinting the information on top of the image, rather than assuming that everybody could see what I saw. This is the gist of what field work is. As an instructor, a lot of it is teaching people to see. When you are learning this type of content, it all sounds crazy until you’re out in the field and someone is actually explaining it to you.

As for other technologies, I haven’t leaped into anything really new yet, and it’s just because I haven’t had to. But, certainly, I’ve heard from others that they’re trying some new things and I think that’s great. It’s as though the technology gives us an artist’s palette. You’re going to have more than one colour and use it as you think best.

MM What do you expect higher education to look like in ten years’ time?

MT Ten years is a big leap, and I think we will see some significant changes. One change we’re already experiencing is that students are needing to work more and more as time goes on, and as the cost of education is increasing. Given the pandemic and the impact it’s going to have on the economy, it’s hard to tell whether that’s going to be any different in the next ten years, but I don’t see that changing. I do see education becoming more customized so that students will be picking more specific modular types of packages of education or knowledge, which they will then combine in ways that suit them for whatever changing ideas that they have. Students are going to be very entrepreneurial in terms of creating an education that they want that can be individualized or customized to their interest. I think there’ll be a lot more choices. I think people also want that four-year degree timeline to change so that you have more flexibility to work and have time for education, and technology will absolutely help with that.

I think that one of the most significant changes going forward will be a hybridization of education. We may actually move to what I call more of a “conference style” delivery of courses, where students do their work and then come together for three, maybe six weeks of the term. They’ll give their presentations, get to know each other personally and then go back to wherever they are. I think there’s going to be a huge role not just for instructional design in the sense of content delivery, but also design in the sense of restructuring these courses. Perhaps we will see something along the lines of learning modules or learning pods, so that people are getting their technical skills, then applying those skills, and then moving on to put them into practice. I see higher education having a lot more choice, a lot more variability and being a lot more lifestyle-driven. It’s going to be more like a buffet. How are you going to put it all together? I can’t envision the exact product, but I think it is going to be hybridized in terms of in-person and online. I think it is going to be highly customized and a bit deconstructed and it’s going to be a lot more entrepreneurial on the part of the learner.

It’s quite exciting. I come from an era where we didn’t have job expectations. I mean, we really did believe in the Seventies that we’d make it happen. We’d just do it. I came from a generation that didn’t feel the job pressures that people seem to be feeling now. The assumption was, well, we’ll just go out there and make our own jobs. I think they call it naivety—call it genius, call it whatever you want, it is coming back. I think people are realizing that they’re going to make it. Whatever happens, they’re going to make it happen and I think that’s exciting for everyone. We have to support them and offer the opportunity to do that.

Reflection

What I teach is not text based. Unlike some academic disciplines, particularly in the social sciences, where text-based reading and writing are primary, regional planning, landscape architecture, and environmental design require spatial literacy. Spatial literacy is primarily visual and has a physical landscape or geographic context involving spatial pattern, form, and dimension. As such, abstract thinking involves abstractions based on physical analogs, which have a variety of spatial scales and dimensions. Everything students need to think about will eventually have to find a physical form and spatial location on the ground. Information in a spatial context has meaning based on where it is, as much as what is in the spatial context. Visual information is different from text and “reading” an image is not a text-based process.

In addition to spatial literacy, my courses also focus on design literacy. Specifically, regional planning, landscape architecture, and environmental design are “normative” because they deal with what “should be” in some future timeframe rather than analyzing what currently exists. This is a distinctly different perspective. Design thinking is a highly interactive and iterative process in which new information and learning occur through constant engagement with and reframing of the phenomenon or problem domain of interest. In this process, drawing and diagramming, rather than text, are used to represent both the conceptual and physical understanding of dynamic functional and structural relationships in time and space.

Digital and visual software are well suited to this type of visual information representation and provide synoptic overviews, as well as cross-scalar perspectives, spatial pattern recognition and pattern generation. These digital tools also enable the manipulation of thematic spatial information in multiple ways to meet multiple objectives. As such, students can use these tools to visually explore, illustrate, draw, construct diagrams, generate, and simulate information and processes over time and space.

In reflecting on the COVID-driven remote teaching and learning experience of last year in the context of what I teach, it has started to become clear that learning in the context of professional design education at the graduate level in planning and landscape architecture is very different from the old “three Rs” of education. There is no reading, writing, or arithmetic. I don’t think I had really appreciated just how different what I am teaching is in a professional education context until I had to think about how to deliver it remotely at short notice and without the benefit of the design studio format, which has been the traditional pedagogical approach.

By deconstructing the courses down to what learners need to grasp, I was initially able to use a minimal technology approach to teaching the basics. While this seems to have worked in the short term to solve the immediate problem in a time effective manner, it didn’t explore the potential for digital technologies and software to enhance teaching and learning. Specifically, visual technologies can dramatically enhance teaching and learning opportunities in regional planning, landscape architecture, and environmental design and inform a rethinking of the traditional studio pedagogy.

A return to an on-campus studio delivery format may be possible this year or next. This may be appealing in some ways as a return to “normal.” However, this would be massively short-sighted in my opinion. I believe that in retrospect what I have learned from remote teaching will enable me to redesign a traditional professional “signature” pedagogy to realize the potential of visual technologies for fostering visual information and design literacy skills in future regional planning and landscape architecture practitioners. This is not at all what I was originally thinking at the time of my TALON interview over a year ago. I am now thinking that pedagogical innovation is possible by rethinking the role for visual technologies in creating spatial design literacy.

About

Dr. Mary-Ellen Tyler was dean of the Faculty of Environmental Design at the University of Calgary from 1 September 1998 until 30 June 2003. She holds interdisciplinary graduate degrees at the master’s and PhD levels in environmental science and natural resource management. Dr. Tyler has worked in both the private and public sectors as an environmental planner and ecologist and spent ten years with the federal government in British Columbia working with Indian and Northern Affairs on resource development, impacts assessment, local government development and intergovernmental resource management issues related to comprehensive land claims negotiations. During her academic career, she has held tenured academic appointments at both the University of Waterloo and the University of Manitoba, and has taught in the areas of urban and regional planning, landscape architecture and environmental design. Prior to moving to Calgary in 1998, Dr. Tyler was associate dean of architecture at the University of Manitoba and acted as head of the Department of Environmental Design and Interior Design. She is currently a professor and associate dean of Landscape and Planning at the University of Calgary. Her current areas of research, scholarship and professional practice are urban ecology, sustainable urban design, urban watershed management, ecological restoration, and urban environmental management.