THE QAA STUDENT SUBMISSION 2016 Excerpt
by AA 5th Year and QAA Student Submission Chair Sabrina Morreale and Projective Cities student Valerio Massaro- Under the dome Stephen King
QAA:
We are the Quality Assurance Agency. Who are you? Show yourself to us.
(The Quality Assurance Agency or QAA checks and approves standards for higher education institutions in the UK).
AA Students:
We are students and teachers, thinkers and designers. What we do is talk about architecture and continue to redefine what it is through our research and projects. This is our domain, our realm. We need you in order to recognise ourselves. This is why we recorded our daily life, showing how we self-direct, how we interact with different types of conversations, and how we become a community. We communicate through doing things. Thus we recorded ourselves.
(The AA School community is defined as all full-time registered students, contracted members of staff and members of Council – but this submission was from the perspective of AA Students).
QAA:
How do you do this? We are interested to understand how the students interact and live in this domain. We do not want to change you, but we need to understand you. Otherwise, your world would not be real. Your world can exist because there are other worlds out there. That is our job.
(The QAA is asking for a student submission to understand how the students describe their own learning experience)
AA students:
We want to show you how we learn. We do that by making things, by being surrounded by: students from different nationalities, exhibitions, events and conversations. This is the real platform of possibilities for learning. Here, you can be your own project, and the way you are going to approach it is your choice. Within this fragmented set of individual projects, we only start to make sense as a whole.
(The AA students submitted a video and a document to construct a window into the AA school and AA life)
AA students:
Are we real?
(Throughout the submission, the AA students evaluated themselves, as a self-directing group of students)
QAA:
We understand.
(The QAA final feedback will be issued in August 2016)
AA students:
..are typing
(The AA students need to ask themselves, what's next now for them, what they want to achieve and how they want to experiment.)
“If realism called it like it saw it, metafiction simply called it as it saw itself seeing itself see it.”
-David Foster Wallace
For more information: (both links require Membership login) The AA Student Submission for the 2016 QAA Review The 2016 QAA Higher Education Review