Anna-Maria Meister
Professor of Architecture Theory and Science, Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany
Interviewed August 2020 by Sandra Abegglen
SA Anna-Maria Meister, I’m interested to hear what your role is, what your background is and what you’re currently doing.
AM I am an architect and a historian—I was trained as an architect at the Technical University of Munich (a Polytechnic School) and after working in the field I went to the United States for both a master’s degree (from Columbia University) and a PhD. I did my PhD at Princeton in history and theory, and my work centred around topics related to norms and regulations as social projections and ways of shaping society. Since September 2019, I have been a professor of architecture theory and science at the Technical University in Darmstadt, Germany. I go to design reviews, I’m involved in the studio culture, but at my chair I teach mostly through seminars and lectures.
SA Since COVID, how have you been teaching? Have your classes been moved online?
AM The German semesters run very late in the year. So, in a way, we had the US as a kind of sample study, which made it possible for me, with all of my friends in the US teaching, to get a lot of intel on what works, what doesn’t work, and what I might be more careful with. Our summer semester started in April, so by that time, it was clear that it needed to be online. We were still scrambling to get everybody on board and there was resistance in different parts of the faculty, as there often is. And to be fair, it might be easier for those of us teaching history and theory to teach online than it seems to be for those teaching studio drawing or sculpting, for example. But it was clear in the Summer semester of 2019 that everything was going to be online.
In our department, we put together a so-called digital task force, where a few of us who like to explore different formats, work in different structures and software, and are familiar with remote technologies, came together a few times and workshopped ideas and tried to develop solutions. At that time there was already a robust discourse going on in the US, so I was also reading a lot on Facebook from friends and on certain blogs about ideas regarding how to restructure teaching formats, especially in design and architecture. Of course, what happened everywhere else as well as in our department was that some people agreed to, or warmed up to, online teaching, but basically performed their regular teaching and streamed it through Zoom, without changing the format, content, or methods. What we tried to show was that it’s absolutely possible to teach studio and seminars online, but that if you want to provide a valuable learning experience, it also means rethinking structures and formats, and learning new tools. That’s how we approached it and I think we were, I would say, fairly successful, as the evaluations show now. But there have definitely been different paths of exploration and embracing the change.
SA What was the biggest challenge when you had to move your course online?
AM Last semester I wasn’t teaching my lecture course, but a seminar, which I think made it easier to restructure. Next semester I’ll teach my lecture course, Intro to Modern Architecture, so we’ll see how that goes. The biggest challenge was to find out how to have quality discussion time with the students. The seminar was large with over twenty-five students, and I had to figure out how to facilitate good discussions around the core texts. To minimize students’ online or screen time, I decided not to have a Zoom session every week because while I teach two seminars, they take every class online all day every day. Students have a different quantity of exposure to these online mediums.
To counter that I broke the seminar down into a bi-weekly meeting on Zoom with alternating weeks where I gave them writing assignments. I commented on them, as they would then be compiled into a final “paper” after some edits and changes. I think that worked very well as a format, but I had to learn that the number of classes suddenly shrinks to six, which means that there’s a long time between the introduction and when you really get into the content as well as between the discussion sessions. Of course, I knew that rationally, but hadn’t really thought about it in terms of pedagogical flow.
The build-up of discussion that you have in a seminar, where the weekly discussions start layering on top of each other, proved a bit difficult in terms of momentum because there were always two weeks in between classes. It was difficult in this way to pick up where we had left off. We used an online whiteboard to collect ideas, and the students could post questions on it, and we collected materials in between the weeks, so there was some engagement. I would say, on a technical or a methodological front, that would be the biggest change. For the first one or two sessions I didn’t use breakout rooms. I only had the students discuss with myself and one another in a big group. That was only semi-successful, so starting in the third week, I used breakout rooms for the discussions. I gave each room a question and then had them talk in groups of five. I would check in occasionally, and that really worked. So, I kept that model for every class thereafter.
But in all this there were really two kinds of challenge: One was technical and methodological, and the other was social. I think one challenge that I really tried to address up front in every class was that students should let me know if they were stressed by COVID, if they had any changing circumstances, if anything was not going well, or if they needed help with anything, regardless of whether it had to do with the seminar or not. When I couldn’t really meet the students, it was more difficult to know what was happening. When they didn’t log on to class, I couldn’t tell if they were just tired or if they had issues. Even when they were logged on it was hard to know what was happening, if they were super-stressed. It was challenging to make sure that they knew that we as instructors knew that it was not business as usual. I don’t think everybody was as open about whether they were struggling.
I and many of my colleagues tried to encourage the students to tell us if something was wrong. We tried our best to make it clear that we wanted to help in any way we could if they were stressed, if things weren’t working for them, if they were experiencing issues with their Internet connection, or if they are living at home or losing childcare for their children. It was also difficult to actually help the students who came to us. I had one student who really had issues and I found it difficult to keep them in the loop and keep them on board remotely. I don’t know if the US system is similar, but in the German system, you either take the course or you don’t take the course. There’s not much wiggle room in terms of exceptions, let’s say.
As an instructor we lost the opportunities to see a different range of social interactions, where you can feel whether things are off or okay. In person you get a better sense of the social dynamics, whereas online everybody’s looking at you and you’re looking at everybody. I think it’s always our job to make sure that students know that it’s not the end of the world if something happens to their seminar question of the week, or something along those lines. I feel it was much more challenging to maintain that online.
SA With the switch to online teaching, what were some of the things that went well for you? Was there anything that surprised you, or any new outcomes or new opportunities that emerged?
AM It was nice to work across platforms a little bit more. I thought that the diversity in the ways of engaging the students was helpful and interesting. I discovered that the chat function on Zoom was really helpful in the studio or design reviews and in larger discussions around work. The chat paralleled the online live discussions and allowed students to really develop certain arguments and exchange book references and things like that. We didn’t really do that in the seminar because it’s a different kind of engagement, and I can’t moderate the chat and discuss a text at the same time, but there are still more levels that we could have explored. I saw this method working well, but I don’t know if that would have been the case in all formats. I had bachelor students in the seminar and they were very, very engaged. Almost all of them logged on every time and were really present, which doesn’t always happen in a seminar of twenty-five or thirty people. In analog teaching, sometimes people just disappear into the second row. Because there is no second row on Zoom, there was a presence in a different way. I thought that it worked well.
SA In terms of the upcoming course you will be teaching, how are you going about planning for it?
AM This semester, some of my colleagues tested teaching in a studio setting where they would give their lectures and they would be streamed and recorded, but with professional lighting and a good camera—I will need to ask them how that went. I think that I may try this in combination with an online learning environment where we post readings, questions, and information for the class. Usually the lectures are ninety minutes every week. I’ll shorten that to, let’s say, fifty to sixty minutes maximum. The lectures will be online so that students can either watch them in the actual time slot for the course, or they can watch it before, depending on their preference. I will then reserve the half-hour that I saved by shortening the lecture for a Q&A with the students live on Zoom—like a standing invitation every week where they can log on and ask questions after watching the lecture. We’ll see how many take up that opportunity.
And of course, they can also ask written questions on the learning environment platform, so it’s not the only way to get feedback for them, but it could be one moment to actually talk to each other. Usually in the lecture room you don’t do your presentation and then walk out, there’s a certain level of communication. So that’s my plan for now, to not lose that level of communication entirely.
SA What would you say has been your most-used software or tool? Are there any resources that you often draw from when preparing your online teaching and learning?
AM I would say the most-used tool is definitely Zoom. It has totally taken over our lives. I use it for the seminar, for meetings with my students when I give them feedback, meetings with my colleagues, and when I have open office hours for students. Zoom is the interface; it’s how we meet and teach. We use Moodle as a learning platform from the university, which, from what I gather, a lot of people don’t seem to like. It may not be intuitive, but it does have a lot of components, and I find it very useful once you get the hang of it. I post all of my texts and briefs on there every week, so the students get the structure and see what’s coming in the following week. We use Conceptboard to exchange ideas; the platform is like an online board. For recording our lectures, we use a piece of software called Camtasia. That is very useful for recording and editing, not just for lecture courses but also short intro lectures to certain topics. And then good old PowerPoint still works its magic.
For resources in terms of teaching methods, I researched online and learned a lot from Facebook groups with my colleagues. It is really a shared community where we are were asking okay, so how do we do this? Any ideas? How can we make this work? How do we teach design online? How do we take care of students’ needs online? So that community, I think, is the biggest resource. I have amazing colleagues all over the world, I have to say. They’re amazing and brilliant and have so many ideas and paths to follow and things that I’ve tried, and that has been immensely helpful.
And then there’s a lot of information-compiling websites by universities. At our own university we have a study and learning department for didactics and methods. They put together a lot of introductions to different software, lots of examples to work off, and online courses. You could call them or e-mail them and ask them questions if you needed to. They would organize the licensing for, let’s say, the new software we needed. They did a really great job in making this possible and organizing it. When we created our guide in the digital taskforce, we drew from all of that. In short, the resources on teaching methods, I would say, came mostly from my networks, other design schools and colleagues. And for the skills in technology we drew a lot of those resources from in-house and then from other universities as well. But that didactic preparation, that really worked well.
SA Where do you think or where do you expect higher education to go on as we shift away from COVID in the future?
AM I would say there are two answers. One is what I hope to happen, and the other is what I expect to happen. I expect that there will be a certain online component that remains, because I think a lot of people have now gone over the threshold of not wanting to do anything online and have realized that, for certain formats that are repetitive or that present certain basic skills that you teach in every class every year, the online format really is a big step forward. Whether you use the same PowerPoint every year or whether you make a video explaining it, that there’s actually something useful in creating an online component for things that don’t depend on your ability to critically frame content acutely or teach certain things live. Using these different layers of learning tools like Conceptboard, collective Google Maps, class Wikis that everybody works on—I think those are approaches that could be utilized much more in, let’s say, conventional learning settings. Because it really creates a sense of a shared project that’s accessible in a different way. I think those things should stay and I expect them to at least get a stronger foothold.
At least in Germany, there is a very strong resistance to online studio teaching. Definitely not within the next ten years do I see any shift toward online studio teaching or online teaching as the norm at universities. In Canada and the US there’s a market model: you need the tuition fees of the people who attend, and they have to be willing to pay in return for a certain experience. Here, because we are teaching in publicly-funded, federally-funded, and state-funded institutions, there is less market pressure on schools, but a very strong political belief that presence and exchange in-person is a political necessity for higher education and the formation of critical thinking. So at least for the near future, I don’t see a shift toward online-only in any way.
Now to what I hope for. I do think one thing that COVID has shown us so far in several areas, not just higher education, is that all of the problems we already had, especially in architecture—a lack of diversity, a lack of accessibility, a lack of social stratification, and the exclusion of certain classes and races and abilities, let’s say—that just gets heightened. And I think the technology and the tools have shown us how easy it would be to broaden that frame more than we were willing or able to do before. But while I have seen many examples or more accessible formats, I have not yet seen that actually being the case on a large scale; we still need to do much better in those areas. Because we still have issues of infrastructural access, and the social and political problems of teaching in higher education and who can get that education—these are still very present issues. Even if in Germany we have public education that’s free, there are still, of course, discriminating structures and systemic exclusion. So those, I think, are the tasks that need to be addressed. I think there are tools available with remote teaching, but the problem is not the tool or not having the tool, but the actual will to change. That is what I hope we will see.
Reflection
Since the interview I have taught a lecture course online and more seminars; we have also developed an event series on Instagram Live called Tuesday Night Live where we talk to a diverse group of scholars, architects, and critics in an intimate interview setting. One thing I have become more adamant about is the protection of both students and my team: the pandemic has put enormous pressure on many of us, and the culture in academia is not exactly driven by empathy. Hence, I have really tried to encourage everyone in each format and class and meeting to be open about issues, to encourage flexible solutions, and to help, regardless of whether the problem has to do with the university as such. We have also set up a COVID fund in our department to help financially. Because what I said in the interview has only become further exacerbated: the existing inequalities have become even more cruel, and those who take on caretaking responsibilities, who have medical issues or financial ones have taken on more and more of the burden during the crisis. So while much of the debate around teaching focuses on financial or academic topics, the real task is more than ever to further equal access and equal opportunity. From whichever position you can, that is everyone’s responsibility, starting with the small things; because that is, as the crisis has shown, still lacking in academic culture on all levels. I have been lucky to have been part of supportive networks and fantastic events, and have seen and heard many formats, where colleagues have taken on this responsibility and really worked toward a more diverse and just life in academia, and they have done outstanding work (for example Esther Chois’ initiative, Office Hours, or the many professional societies who have opened their conferences to a broader audience). But it needs structural change from above as well. The deeper issues of inequality cannot be solved by grassroots initiatives; they require dedication, funding, and policy changes.
About
Anna-Maria Meister is a professor for architecture theory and science at the Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany, and works at the intersection of architecture’s histories and the histories of science and technology. Her work focuses on the production and dissemination of norms and normed objects as social desires in German modern architecture. Anna-Maria received a joint PhD degree in the history and theory of architecture and the Council of the Humanities from Princeton University, and holds degrees in architecture from Columbia University, New York, and the Technical University of Munich, Germany. She was a fellow at the Max Planck Institute for History of Science, Berlin, and a postdoctoral fellow at the Technische Universität Munich. Her writing has been published in Harvard Design Magazine, Volume, Uncube, Baumeister, Arch+ and as a book chapter in Architecture and the Paradox of Dissidence (Routledge, 2013) and Dust and Data (2019). She is co-curator and co-editor of the international collaborative project Radical Pedagogies; the eponymous book was published by MIT Press in 2022.