IN-PERSON MADRID FOCUS ON PEDAGOGY. SECTION A

Abstract

Against the backdrop of rapid digital evolution and global challenges such as climate change and environmental pollution, architectural education must abandon established practices and question traditions that caused significant destructive impact in the first place. However, relevant knowledge is rapidly and continuously evolving, often lacking sufficient grounding in experience and practice. How do we address this challenge? Teaching is a message that may only take effect long after it was delivered. While we may not be able to offer immediate solutions in our field of expertise, we can closely observe the challenges the students face and engage with them meaningfully. Currently, we are educating a generation whose lives, minds, and understanding of time and space had been fundamentally shaped by virtual environments from the outset. We are already observing the consequences: difficulty concentrating, social anxiety and the feelings of being easily overwhelmed. Embodying and teaching critical thinking, logical reasoning, compassion, and social and emotional intelligence as universal values empowers people to connect and engage with overwhelmingly complex challenges. Through a series of seminars for architecture students, we examined the practice of somatic presence, physical interaction and embodied teaching as means to connect, activate and empower students. Experiments such as collective visual communication, drawing on walls while in movement using the full range of the body, and perspective-shifting debates may provide examples of how to inspire the experience of self-efficacy and, consequently, the ability to act.