international study | Ireland by Chance

I’d never been to Uzes, France even though some of my Hampton University architecture students had. Uzes is home of the famous urbanist, Leon Krier, though we didn’t get to meet him there this year. We often use his book, The Architecture of Community, in my Urban Theory class.

Visiting Uzes made for a wonderful day of learning and exploring. I even wrapped with two decent sketches of my own.

Arriving in Uzes, Mason sent us off…

…into the market…

…and lunch on our own.

Then to work–sketching…

…and discovering details of the town.

Learning to sketch from Ray Gindroz…

…a famous architect and urban designer.

One of my sketches in progress.

A courtyard of Uzes.

A street in Uzes.

A small little plaza along a street in Uzes.

My sketch of the market square, after the market finished.

The trees make this plaza very pleasant.

The audience was composed of experts and students in engineering and education.

Visiting Portugal’s University of Aveiro some weeks ago provided me opportunities to speak with doctoral students and professors of engineering and education.

After I delivered a formal presentation to a small but enthusiastic group at the University of Aveiro’s Department of Education, my host, José Manuel Nunes de Oliveira drove me to the University’s satellite campus, known as the Polytechnic School of Águeda (or Escola Superior de Tecnologia e Gestão de Águeda, Universidade de Aveiro) where he teaches engineering.

Jose and his colleagues use Problem-Based Learning to teach engineering students. They have formatted their classrooms to support group-based learning. (My DIT colleague, Gavin Duffy, visited Jose and his campus earlier in the year to see how they use space. He wanted their advice to help in the programming phase of DIT’s new engineering facilities.)

What impressed me most in touring the buildings and grounds of the Águeda campus, though, was that the students were all working in groups–and that they seemed to be doing so on every type of project.

Jose says that after the teachers introduce the group-learning approach in the first year, students embrace it and want to do everything this way.

I thought that Jose said that students receive credit for their topic courses (i.e.,those with specific engineering content), but not for their project work (I was wrong, as I explain in my subsequent blog). In architecture we refer to these technical/topic classes as “support courses.”

All the courses a students take in a semester at the Escola Superior de Tecnologia e Gestão de Águeda help support the project they have been asked to do in groups. They are able to apply what they learn in the projects they design… but they don’t get formal credit for the design activities. In architecture in the USA, the design activities are assigned the most credit (typically 5-6 credit hours per semester) while each support course is generally worth just 3 credits. The architecture community tends to value the project or “design studio” work above all else.