IN-PERSON MADRID FOCUS ON PEDAGOGY. SECTION A

Abstract

As early-career lecturers in the Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture (FADA) at the University of Johannesburg, we confront a critical rupture in architectural pedagogy across Africa. Our experiences as practitioners in African architecture reveal persistent gaps in our own education, gaps we now recognise ourselves perpetuating through inherited teaching frameworks. This paper emerges as a pedagogical reflection, through interrogating how inherited Global North techno-pedagogies alienate majority-Black students through digital-access disparities. An alternative pedagogical intervention emerges, specifically responding to South Africa’s resource inequities. Lebala la Skolo (“Forget School” / “School Ground”), a deliberate Tswana double entendre, anchors our approach of curriculum acupuncture: strategic, needle-like interventions into inherited pedagogies. It signifies both the necessary rupture with Global North dependencies (‘Forget School’) and the constructive re-grounding of design education in context, resourcefulness, and marginalised knowledge systems (‘School Ground’). Rather than wholesale overhaul, we insert two precise “needles” into the Department of Architecture existing framework :”Forget School” abandons tech fetishism through the “radical workshop”. Central to this is conducting design critiques in multiple vernaculars, both oral and material , enacting Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s (1986) call to reclaim epistemic sovereignty through mother-tongue praxis. Simultaneously, “School Ground” reframes CAD as a critical laboratory honoring craft intelligence (Bhargava, 2019), and scrap-material/ digital co-building that celebrate material resourcefulness as embodied epistemology (Escobar, 2018), transforming digital scarc