A pedagogy of anachronism: learning through a misfit between theory and practice

Kah-Wee Lee

City, 2023, vol. 27, issue 5-6, 740-758

Abstract: This paper presents a pedagogy of anachronism where learning occurs through a misfit between theory and practice. It was developed and tested in a class taught from 2016 to 2019, where students repeated Kevin Lynch’s original 1960 experiment on cognitive mapping in a location much smaller in scale and with a very different social composition from the cities that Lynch analyzed. The deliberate misfit transformed a method designed to understand user perception into the very problem itself, provoking students to ask important epistemological questions and recognize the situatedness of theory. A pedagogy of anachronism resists the uncritical instrumentalization of canonical ideas and trains students to think deeply about the normative and epistemological basis of design/planning practice. The paper ends by suggesting different types of misfits that can extend this pedagogy for other learning objectives.

Date: 2023
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DOI: 10.1080/13604813.2023.2272077

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