How will my work be reviewed, supported and assessed?

Fundamentally in five manners, through:

o Mid-semester Seminar (review, advise, 20% of final mark);
o Scenarios Seminar (review, advise, 10% of final result);
o End of Semester Seminar (critique, assessment, 70% of final result);
o Cyclical Crit-Discussions (support, review and reflection); and
o Community blog (support, documentation and reflection).

All Seminars are open door reviews – a rich opportunity for our community to learn on a peer-to-peer basis and to generate potential learning from participation in seminar’s conversations. During these seminars a panel will review and discuss your work. The panel will include your studio lecturers and at least two of the following: a staff member of the School of Architecture & Design (or equivalent); an external invited critic (including zoo staff); and a student undertaking the studio course. The composition of the panel will be discussed in class so that you can recommend people.

Mid Semester Seminar - This will occur in week 7 (on April 11) and is intended to ensure a moment of clear communication regarding the progress of your learning through the studio. Students who are at risk of gaining an unsatisfactory result in the studio will be clearly advised at this point.

Scenarios Seminar - This will occur in week 9 (on May 2) and is intended to ensure you have generated a clear vision of your context and related action plans.
End of Semester Seminar - This will occur in week 14 (June 6) and is intended to share the work resulting from the studio with a larger community of interest and generate further understanding of the studio work’s significance, relevance, achievement, shortcomings and its further potential. A final assessment and related feedback and recommendations are developed after this presentation.

Cyclical Crit-Discussions - In these face-to-face meetings we will:
o discuss your project to provide overall feedback about how you are engaging with it;
o provide key comments on strengths and weakness of your work with the intention of highlighting how the key strengths and weaknesses can be used to inform future projects;
o solicit your feedback and experiences (as any resulting input is reflected in future project outlines);
o discuss and collaboratively evaluate how effectively the course is tracking with respect to your expectations, projects and expected outcomes; and
o engage in reflections around projects, implications, the broader issues.

Community blog
This will depend on our goodwill and engagement as blogs are effective if a critical mass participates in its discussion. Assuming we will enjoy and see the benefits of this tool during the semester, the blog will enable us to have one extra resource and space where to weekly discuss issues and fundamentally share ideas and materials we will collect on the way.
The blog will also act as a documentation tool (enabling us to ‘depict’ the story of the semester as we go), a reflective tool (so we can re-discuss and unfold issues we started in class and during visits), and a community support tool.