Drawing Alicante / Drawing Palermo. An Experience of Teaching Innovation within the Erasmus+ Program

Abstract

The present research work exposes the results of a teaching innovation experience carried out in connection with a mobility between Spain and Italy. We strongly believe that an inter-university experience, within the framework of a traditional academic program, can help students to learn new ways of understanding teaching, drawing, the profession and the architecture itself. The starting hypothesis defends the self-assessment as a method to build a critical positioning with respect to the drawing. To understand the research, it is necessary to explain the process: The students of the University of Alicante, within the framework of the Master of Architecture, have had the opportunity to propose a series of exercises to students of the first course of Architecture and Urbanism of the University of Palermo. The objective has been multiple. On one hand, the ability of students from Alicante to build statements that, in a graphic context, were coherent and could adapt to a specific academic year. On the other hand, the solvency of the students of Palermo to solve small graphical exercises outside their current educational program. But the experience does not end at this point. Once the exercises have been done, the students have played the role of teacher to assess, with the pertinent justification, the results of their proposals, and have sent their considerations and advice to their foreign colleagues. The conclusions of the work, as will be argued during the detailed analysis of the results, are as encouraging as they are exciting. The possible union links that were intuited at the beginning of the work have ended up constituting firm bridges of communication. Thanks to these bridges the students, exercising a role with more responsibility than the simple learner, have been able to maximize their abilities to help, in a graphic context, to build a shared criterion that, surely, will lay the foundations of their maturity as draftsmen and, therefore, as architects.