Professor Pam Harwood

Aims and expectations

Framing community engagement through project-based learning, teaching, and scholarship is paramount to my work as an architectural design faculty member at Ball State University. I believe community engagement is the integration of faculty research and student teaching into the life of the community, in our case, Muncie Indiana, a dying rust belt town that once reigned as the Silicon Valley of the industrial era. With a rich history of making, innovation grew from the fertile imaginations of our agrarian past as companies sprang from garage tinkerers to global corporations. The foundation behind my teaching in design studio and the social and cultural issues courses that I teach is that the seeds of this mighty innovation are implanted in each of us and that the creativity crisis of our time needs our collective action more than ever before.
I firmly believe that “we are all teachers and we are all learners,” and I add we are all doers. I love the interaction of this trilogy of teaching, learning, and doing. It is this ultimate interdependence of and simultaneous commitment to my research and pedagogy that empowers my students and ennobles my scholarship. Together, as older and younger scholars, I strive to engender the benefits of being a part of a community and a continuum of learning that pushes human knowledge and productivity to the very edge through my design build work. Putting research into action through immersive learning experiences is a hallmark of education.

Short CV

Professor Harwood has enriched the teaching mission and design studio in architecture at Ball State University through her creative interests and research expertise, most notably in design-build, service outreach, the study of cultural landscapes of the Midwest, and the design of educational environments. Professor Harwood has guided a number of immersive learning design-build projects ranging from the Tot Spot in the Muncie Children’s Museum, to the Outdoor Learning Environment for the Child Study Center, to the Putting for Partners miniature golf course for Partners in Housing set up in the Indianapolis Fair Grounds, to the Nature Play Learning Environment for Head Start. The Nature Playscape’s Habitat Hub is a mortise and tenon outdoor learning classroom built from re-harvested, diseased ash trees that were locally milled and hand and digitally fabricated to create the timber frame structure. Garnering a National Collaborative Practice Award through the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture, Professor Harwood’s immersive teaching and learning student work was recognized as a Virginia Ball Fellow. In the work entitled Finding Indiana: Our Search for Place, Professor Harwood conducted research focusing on the social and material culture of the everyday life in Indiana. Through the Building Better Communities program she has worked with students in an interdisciplinary project to develop strategies, guidelines, and well illustrated “design patterns” for the design and planning of innovative and responsive school facilities. The developed pattern language manual entitled Charter Schools Patterns of Innovation: A New Architecture for a New Education includes a graphic vocabulary that synthesizes learning research with best practices in school planning and design. Professor Harwood lectures to academic and professional audiences nationally and internationally and has published over 50 journal articles and conference papers. Professor Harwood is a registered architect and is a principal in the award-winning firm Harwood + Tabberson Architects, Muncie, Indiana.