Inês Salpico University of Lusiada, School of Architecture, Lisbon, Portugal 335
and consciousness. The result of this constant questioning and confrontation must
be an affirmative bi-univocal correspondence between aims and processes, between
speeches and images, guarantying that objects are not plastic, mechanical answers
to proposed problems but the materialisation of operative thought around the ques-
tions aroused.
From the paradigm of “right vs. wrong” the teacher-pupil dialogue is shifting to
that of “PASSIVE AWARENESS VS. PASSIVE RESPONSE”, meaning that the degree of
success of a teaching process won’t be focussed in the apparent quality of its answers
(even because such a quality will be growingly difficult to define) but much more
in the level of involvement they embody and the degree of complexity to which the
debate around them could be taken. Teachers must adopt a posture of complicity with
the students work but of simultaneous constant confrontation, assessing its substance
and proving its arguments’ strength, exposing it in first hand to the vulnerability it
will suffer in professional context (or perhaps more correctly, professional market).
The matter of technology and media and the way they are being used is fundamen-
tal in such a learning context: in this demand for coherence the student must inevi-
tably be confronted with whether he/she is merely performing a visual script taking
pure instrumental advantage of those resources or is actually using their possibilities
and specificities to structure a methodology and justify its aims and premises. Once
again it is about assessing if the student’s individual working and creation path is
being given substantial content and is aware of how it frames fundamental concepts
within its singular identity.
Facing apparent total freedom and absence of constraints there is a high risk of
not being able to keep track of one’s own learning and professional route and to
manage the multiplicity of inputs given by the contemporary overflow of informa-
tion. Therefore, the teacher’s task mustn’t only consist of giving options but also,
and essentially, about demanding conscious and coherent choices, making students
develop that critical, analytical, selective approach of the real (and with it of their
own identity) that is the key part of professional maturity and creative adulthood.
Seductive as they might appear works without a solid background won’t resist the
dilapidation of time and the unpredictability of this ongoing paradigm change that
will introduce and define perhaps unthought-of assessment criteria, to which only
thought coherence and argumentative strength will be able to respond. In conclusion,
there really isn’t a future for “rebels without causes”.
James Dean, 1955