Promoting Occupational Engagement in Design Education: Accounting for doing, being, becoming, and belonging

Conceptualizing education as a meaning-making process serves to reorient teaching, learning, and research activities around notions of personal and professional development in more holistic and humanistic ways than conventional approaches. Instead of “receiving an education,” students get recognized as enacting a form of agency by engaging in self-growth while they weave educational experiences into broader personal narratives. Such a perspective is genuinely student-centered in that it more accurately captures the ways that education gets experienced as a progression of embodied, social, and psychological encounters. By considering how learners experience education as a process of ontological change over time, these significant dimensions—often neglected or considered secondary by conventional pedagogical practices— become foregrounded. Only when, as educators and researchers, we elicit and attend to such narratives, do learners become true protagonists of education. Whereas this understanding of education is supported by decades of research across disciplines and learning contexts, it has so far not been operationalized widely in applied research on design education. The project reviewed in this paper, a recently completed case study of a graduate architecture program, imported and adapted the notion of “occupational engagement” from the field of occupational therapy as a way to capture the multidimensional nature of education as a holistic meaning-making process. Occupational engagement has been recognized as the interplay of doing, being, becoming, and belonging. Analysis of narrative content from in-depth interviews suggested that meaning-making occurred when all four dimensions of occupational engagement were expressed as an interrelated whole. Additionally, agency, autonomy, and psychological resilience were identified as themes centrally tied to narrative strategies these aspiring architects used to align their personal and occupational identities. Ultimately, reframing design education as falling within each participant’s broader life history elicited a considerably holistic perspective of becoming an- architect by including human facets rarely considered in scholarship on design education. The expectation is that these insights can begin to inform educators and researchers seeking to reframe and improve delivery modes and outcomes of design education starting at the beginning of the curriculum