Inclusive Practice Intervention Proposal
Reflecting on my learning from the Inclusive Practice unit, I’ve come to recognise the importance of intersectionality, and how lived experience conditions how we access, perceive and participate in everyday life. Respecting and understanding these perspectives, especially when they are different from our own, is essential to inclusive learning.
As a BA Architecture design tutor at CSM, I teach first-year students who are just beginning to form their architectural thinking. Many are not yet exposed to the complexity of lived experience, particularly concerning disability, neurodivergence, race, or class. Just as my awareness has grown through this module, I want to support students in building that same understanding early in their education. If we want to design inclusive spaces, we must begin by recognising how inclusion and exclusion are felt.
To do this, I propose a workshop titled ‘Mapping Belonging: A Sensory and Spatial Reflection’. The workshop draws on Arao and Clemens’ (2021) concept of brave spaces, encouraging students to move beyond politeness and comfort into critical and emotionally engaged dialogue. It also reflects Bozalek and Zembylas’ (2017) idea of pedagogies of discomfort, by inviting students to interrogate assumptions and encounter perspectives beyond their own.
Students will be asked to recall spaces where they have felt particularly included and excluded and reflect on what contributed to that, especially sensory elements such as sound, light, temperature, smell, crowding, or atmosphere. They will create a ‘map’ of that experience using drawing, diagramming, collage, or writing. This opens space for neurodiverse and multilingual expression, allowing students to process and communicate ideas in more accessible ways.
A reflective group discussion will follow, surfacing shared and contrasting themes and encouraging students to consider whose experiences may not be represented in the room. We will reflect on how certain design features might affect blind, deaf or physically disabled users, and where our assumptions about access may fall short. Spatial case studies may also be introduced to support collective analysis.
The aim is to develop empathy as a design tool, helping students think more critically about how space is experienced by others and how exclusion can be unconsciously designed in. This reflective, embodied approach links directly to spatial practice and can be delivered within existing studio time using minimal resources. It also models inclusive teaching by validating diverse ways of experiencing and interpreting space, laying the groundwork for more socially attuned, inclusive architectural thinking.
References
Arao, B. and Clemens, K. (2021) From safe spaces to brave spaces: A new way to frame dialogue around diversity and social justice. In: Landreman, L. (ed.) The Art of Effective Facilitation: Reflections from Social Justice Educators. 2nd ed. Sterling, VA: Stylus Publishing, pp. 135–150.
Bozalek, V. and Zembylas, M. (2017) ‘Discomfort as a pedagogical tool for transformative learning in higher education’, Teaching in Higher Education, 22(6), pp. 654–668.