Assessing academic contributions in landscape architecture

Abstract

There is an increasing demand for research in landscape architecture to inform design decision making. The role of the faculty in departments of landscape architecture has changed from one of educating professionals to one that includes contributing to research and to the development of the discipline. This paper develops a framework for assessing the contribution of faculty in landscape architecture. It proposes a reconsideration of Boyer's [Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate, The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Princeton, NJ, 1990; Building Community: A New Future for Architecture Education and Practice, The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Princeton, NJ, 1996] scholarship framework by clarifying the definition of scholarship as research, and identifies research, teaching and service as contributions to academe. Furthermore, it proposes that design, teaching and service can be either topics of research or products of research, but are not, by definition, research. This framework clarifies the issue of how design fits into the academic environment, and provides concrete guidelines for the assessment of both traditional research activities and non-traditional activities such as design.Boyer [Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate, The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Princeton, NJ, 1990; Building Community: A New Future for Architecture Education and Practice, The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Princeton, NJ, 1996] identifies six main criteria that should be considered in the review of scholarship: clear goals; adequate preparation; appropriate methods; significant results; effective communication; and reflective critique. These criteria have been adapted in light of the argument developed by this paper for peer review, new or substantially improved insight, and universal accessibility as the overarching criteria for contributions to academe. The result is a set of detailed checklists for the assessment of published research and of other contributions to academe (such as teaching and design), which are communicated through other vehicles.

Mapping Research in Landscape Architecture: Balancing Supply of Academic Knowledge and Demand of Professional Practice

“…This need is responded, at least partially, by increasing research activities found in landscape architecture educators (Chen et al, 2011;Chenoweth & Chidister, 1983;Milburn, Brown, Mulley, & Hilts, 2003). As observed (2010) in this study, the accumulation of academic knowledge had resulted in the following impacts on landscape architecture practice and its knowledge-bases.…”

Economic Benefits: Metrics and Methods for Landscape Performance Assessment

“…Compared with other allied disciplines, scholarly productivity in United States within the field of landscape architecture remains low, although with steady improvements in the past decades [31][32][33][34]. In this sense, landscape performance assessment would be an actionable agenda item that contributes to landscape research and practice.…”

Teaching urbanism: the Delft approach

“…Next to the analytical approach related to the use of rubrics, peer-based evaluation remains a crucial mechanism and a constituent element of the education set-up in urbanism to ensure the quality of the process and output (Bowring, 1997;Milburn et al, 2003). In particular, the assessment of the studio work (projects) is necessarily a peer-based evaluation process especially because the output is highly differentiated and interdisciplinary and therefore often hard to judge using rubrics alone.…”