For my microteaching, I brought a card deck I created to explore public space through a gender lens. The deck invites joyful, collaborative engagement with complex topics that can sometimes feel distressing, helping learners recognise intersecting forms of power that shape our experiences of the city. Although I teach design studio in BA architecture, this work may sit naturally within an ethics curriculum.
The activity I proposed was a card game, which I called Find the Connections. This was built around two Learning Outcomes:
- to familiarise learners with key themes and ideas about public space seen through a gender lens, and
- to find common links between safety, movement, belonging and urban design.
Alongside the cards, I used colourful pens and a long roll of paper to create a live mind map capturing the group’s ideas.
Despite the limited amount of time, I wanted to test this game in a classroom setting to observe students’ responses. In the introduction, I warned of the sensitive content, inviting participants to step away if needed. The 20‑minute session moved from introducing safety lenses to pairs selecting cards and finding a connecting words. Pairs then reported back for a live‑mapped discussion. Here, my reluctance to interrupt passionate contributions let the activity overrun, leaving less time for a final reflection. In future, I will aim to be more assertive with time keeping.
Colleagues felt the introduction and moderation were professional, engaging, and designed to foster conversation, pair work and sharing. They noted the clear, concise introduction helped make a complex topic approachable, while the live mind map captured ideas with empathy and energy. They appreciated how the mind map visually re‑connected the pairs’ chosen words to the initial concepts, revealing how ideas interlinked, reinforcing learners’ sense of agency.
Peers valued the variety of cards and image +text format, which enabled diverse choices and further supported agency, encouraging learners to develop their own interpretations. This reinforced my view of the value of interactivity and agency. The approach was seen to disrupt a top‑down teaching model, allowing learners to shape the experience and co‑produce knowledge, rather than passively receive it, aligning with constructivist principles (Chand, 2023).
Framing a large and sensitive topic within 20 minutes felt tight, and more time for reflection could have helped process feelings of vulnerability. Feedback questioned whether less briefing upfront and going straight into the task would help focus on the learning outcomes. Some felt the text on the cards was less intuitive and more didactic, while the illustrations raised questions about ‘set’ views that shape users’ interpretation. A suggestion was that students could write or draw the concepts themselves to further support agency, an aspect that is already part of the deck as ‘imagination cards’ (Publica, 2023).
I plan to address these comments in future workshops and adopt PMI (Sharma and Priyamvada, 2017) to support critical peer feedback and reflection. The microteaching experience was enriching, allowing me to experiment with complex topics while maintaining a safe space. The feedback received was highly constructive and I was inspired by observing others’ methods, which I hope to also integrate into my practice.
References
Publica CIC (2023) Right to the Streets: Project Report. Available at: https://issuu.com/publicaassociates/docs/231206_0265_rtts_report_final_v7_pages (Accessed: 06 February 2026).
Prakash Chand, S. (2023) ‘Constructivism in Education: Exploring the Contributions of Piaget, Vygotsky, and Bruner’, International Journal of Science and Research (IJSR), 12(7), pp. 274–278. doi:10.21275/sr23630021800.
Sharma, H.L. and Priyamvada, P. (2017) ‘PMI (Plus Minus Interesting): A creative thinking strategy to foster critical thinking’, International Journal of Academic Research and Development, 2(6), pp. 974–977.
Note on the use of Copilot:
Microsoft Copilot has been used to help condense the text without generating any of its own inputs, in order to adhere to the word limit. This was then edited manually to create the final blog.