Abstract:

Time, budget, and quality are the three tenets of a project scope that are indispensable in professional practice. Yet in academia, these factors often are taught as discrete curricular components, if at all. As greater case-based pedagogical methods are increasingly adopted outside of conventional business school curricula and into a broader range of disciplines ranging from science to math, students are able to better understand the applications of project management to their field of study. While this is a beneficial step in current pedagogical practice, this methodology lacks two criteria: accommodation for contingency and greater student engagement. Though case-based methods pose “what would you do?” scenarios to students, the responses provided typically do not account for contingency on an ongoing project; rather they merely propose a concise course of action based upon decisions made by synthesizing provided facts. This method does not emphasize the need for contingency considerations on ongoing projects. Similarly, the case-based model is detached and while the authors assert the value of objectivity, student engagement to cases are perfunctory and do not provide a truly experiential learning experience. In both criteria, the pedagogy fails to inculcate contingency for real-world conditions. This paper provides a summary of how these two criteria were implemented in an architecture design-build studio course in order to extend beyond current case-based pedagogy.

Keywords:

Contingency, project management, experiential learning, case model.