Maxine Goon

Social Dreaming: A Collaborative Pedagogy narrates the ongoing experiment of the Social Dreamers, an emerging network of people who use collaboration and ‘flax-roots’ methods to practice and advocate for an architectural education system driven by social and community values.

With educational resources, services and spaces constantly being stripped and or under threat of removal, the current neoliberal architectural education system is outdated. No longer does it value the quality of education but instead is dedicated to the rates of return on invested capital. In a globalised world, the Creative Arts, their spaces and resources, are increasingly neglected with their quality and survival in peril. These business-driven systems fail at providing students with an adequate education. Diminishing university experiences have given rise to student protest through acts of resistance and defiance. This is an education emergency.

Social Dreaming critiques the current education system and theorises, experiments and puts into practice alternative ways of learning under real-life circumstances. Working with stealth and subversion from within neoliberal institutions across Aotearoa, the Social Dreamers practice a re-imagination of the state of architectural education, offering alternative pedagogies and spatialities for teaching staff and students. We aim to advocate, recognise, support and legitimise tikanga and mātauranga Māori values through embodied practice at a tertiary education level. We exercise collaboration, whanaungatanga and manaakitanga through social organisation, use 1:1 scaled making and implement other alternative, multi-disciplinary methodologies to advocate for unconventional processes outside of those declared in marking rubrics set up by normative neoliberal education systems.

This thesis formed a yearlong project that employed and embodied the above principles and tactics to shape a developing manifesto through a series of participatory workshops – for students and professionals – and a public installation during Auckland’s Art Week. It concluded with a final review-as-event in which core outcomes were presented and performed through spatial organisation and dynamic actions, thereby completing
a process to be taken beyond the university environment.

Born out of necessity, the Social Dreamers are radical, urgent, and necessary; an expression of the radical, urgent and necessary stand we must take on the course of architectural education now.

Social Dreaming: A Collaborative Pedagogy narrates the ongoing experiment of the Social Dreamers, an emerging network of people who use collaboration and ‘flax-roots’ methods to practice and advocate for an architectural education system driven by social and community values.

With educational resources, services and spaces constantly being stripped and or under threat of removal, the current neoliberal architectural education system is outdated. No longer does it value the quality of education but instead is dedicated to the rates of return on invested capital. In a globalised world, the Creative Arts, their spaces and resources, are increasingly neglected with their quality and survival in peril. These business-driven systems fail at providing students with an adequate education. Diminishing university experiences have given rise to student protest through acts of resistance and defiance. This is an education emergency.

Social Dreaming critiques the current education system and theorises, experiments and puts into practice alternative ways of learning under real-life circumstances. Working with stealth and subversion from within neoliberal institutions across Aotearoa, the Social Dreamers practice a re-imagination of the state of architectural education, offering alternative pedagogies and spatialities for teaching staff and students. We aim to advocate, recognise, support and legitimise tikanga and mātauranga Māori values through embodied practice at a tertiary education level. We exercise collaboration, whanaungatanga and manaakitanga through social organisation, use 1:1 scaled making and implement other alternative, multi-disciplinary methodologies to advocate for unconventional processes outside of those declared in marking rubrics set up by normative neoliberal education systems.

This thesis formed a yearlong project that employed and embodied the above principles and tactics to shape a developing manifesto through a series of participatory workshops – for students and professionals – and a public installation during Auckland’s Art Week. It concluded with a final review-as-event in which core outcomes were presented and performed through spatial organisation and dynamic actions, thereby completing
a process to be taken beyond the university environment.

Born out of necessity, the Social Dreamers are radical, urgent, and necessary; an expression of the radical, urgent and necessary stand we must take on the course of architectural education now.