ABSTRACT
In Australia, despite a healthy level of diversity among the cultural background of architectural educators who demonstrate strong individual leadership towards internationalising the curriculum, internationalising education in general is still largely market-driven, more accessible through economic advantage, and largely reliant on the design studio and its variations as a pedagogic instrument to challenge the potential pedagogical hegemony. The production of new technologies and processes and its fast pace have significantly impacted the construction industry. This phenomenon, in turn, amplifies pressure on education to change, in order to meet expectations and prepare students for careers that might be in transition or under development. For example, internationalization and cross-cultural competencies are more and more sought after in our globalized societies. This contribution aims at discussing the latter from an architectural educator’s perspective. It specifically looks at international experiments speaking to the Global South through an Australian case study. Using a mixed method, the first data collection concerns all the Australian schools of architecture to quantify the cultural origin of their permanent educators and the educational strategies that are expressly targeting international experiments. The second set of data regards interviews with educators to unveil pedagogical intents, objectives and outcomes. The aim is to evidence, or not, whether there is a direct link between the educators’ cultural background and the experiments they lead: in other words, to understand if the architectural pedagogy is based on institutional or individual leadership.
