Rethinking the Curriculum in Architectural Education in a Global Habitat: The Case of the Trans-African Dialogues Series

Pedagogies in architectural education have recently received a great deal of criticism on the relevance of the curriculum to the lives of the students and to the issues of our era, and its impact on both students and the profession. Many have called for the urgency to reinvent the discipline of Architecture, resolve the crisis of its identity, and transform the curriculum in higher education in order to enable interdisciplinary, equality, inclusion, resilience, the capacity for critical thinking and therefore the skills to engage with and shape the field itself. This paper looks at interdisciplinary teaching through the lens of the trans-African dialogues (TADs) approach, which first takes the shape of a module introduced as an elective course for architecture students at the German University in Cairo (GUC), and second, explores relevant and meaningful ways in which this approach may be adapted to other regions of Africa, specifically the renowned Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) in Ghana. The TADs approach engages with the UN 2030 Sustainable Development Goals, notably SDG4, SDG11, and SDG17 directly. It provides a platform for collaboration and the sharing of empirical knowledge on innovation, entrepreneurship and issues of sustainability, inclusion, cultural identity, authenticity and technology, through the lens of human settlements in Africa. TADs’ study reveals the students’ increased awareness and profound grasp of the built environment principles through an interdisciplinary lens. It provides a conceptual framework for future architectural education.