The Architecture of Knowing: Space as a Form of Rhetoric
What Our Campuses Say About Us
For those who look closely, the architecture of a university embodies its cultural ethos. New structures rise to support business, health sciences, and the arts; to welcome students into community; and to honour Indigenous ways of knowing through cultural and ceremonial spaces. The spaces we inhabit influence how we come to know, what kinds of inquiry we undertake, and which forms of knowledge are legitimized. The spaces we design and dedicate reveal what we value most. Each is a visible expression of our collective priorities — a reminder that space is not only a resource but also a form of rhetoric.
Discovery in Different Registers
For research-intensive universities, the shared priority is discovery — producing new knowledge, advancing disciplinary expertise, and sustaining inquiry through external research funding. Laboratories and research centres embody that commitment, standing as both the infrastructure and the symbols of research culture.
Inquiry in a Teaching-Focused University
Teaching universities also conduct research — not in molecular form, but in the daily experiments of the classroom. What, then, are the spaces of inquiry and discovery in a teaching-focused university — the places where educators observe the effects of pedagogical design, learn the methods of educational research, and reflect together on the impact of their teaching? When those forms of inquiry have a visible home, they signal the university’s belief that teaching and learning are themselves sites of discovery.
Beyond the Laboratory
Of course, not all inquiry takes place in a laboratory. In teaching-focused universities, knowledge is created in many places: in classrooms where educators experiment with design and assessment, in Indigenous gathering places where teaching is shared through story, ceremony, and community, and in spaces intended for inquiry, discourse, and reflection. Together, these remind us that discovery in a teaching university is not confined to research labs but unfolds wherever curiosity and community meet.
A Space for Teaching Inquiry
A Centre for Teaching and Learning is one of these spaces of discovery. But teaching inquiry — the deliberate study of teaching and learning — requires a different kind of setting for reflection, dialogue, and scholarly exchange. Creating and sustaining such space signals something profound about institutional identity. A dedicated place for scholarly teaching expresses a university’s belief that inquiry into learning is central to its mission. It acknowledges that a teaching-focused university depends on experimentation in pedagogy just as a research university depends on experimentation in the lab, the studio, or the field. It would affirm that faculty development, scholarship and educational leadership are central expressions of academic life.
Designing for Reflection and Permanence
Such spaces need not be elaborate. What matters is their permanence and purpose — places where we meet at the frontiers of teaching and learning to discover, together, responses to the most urgent and evolving questions in higher education.
The Physical Shapes the Epistemic
Physical environments shape epistemic ones. When we design spaces for inquiry, discourse, and reflection, we shape not only where learning happens, but how we come to understand it.
