Andrea De Chirico

“Why these 8 points
How to teach design? Is it really possible?
Which are the strategies and the techniques to do so?
How is the teaching practice affecting my design practice and viceversa?
I have been looking for answers to all these questions for years, and I do it partly through theoretical reflections, in books, and partly through my teaching practice. I do not hide my surprise when I realized that the pedagogical practice is the one that perhaps most of all influences my work and makes me constantly question it. Moreover, all my reflections on the current state of our reality almost always lead me to the theme of education. Pedagogy, as well as the places appointed to it, universities, academies and schools, must be the laboratories of reality and the places of transformation par excellence. Unfortunately, I often realize that this does not happen, above all because like all the other spheres of our life, this too falls within a neoliberal system that has a fatalistic ideology and an inflexible rejection of dreams and utopias, precisely the things we need the most I believe. The fact that I cannot find myself in the current academic system has given me the push to start looking for answers to my questions, and here I will share some of my findings. Even if presented in a fragmented and out of context way, the intent of these eight points is to start a collective debate around the theme of education, inside and outside our filtered bubbles.”

Notes:

1_Educazione e precarietà / Education and Precarity
Ben Hayoun on the University of the Underground – Design as Learning (A school of schools reader, Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Art) 2018. (…) If you wish to modify the way that institutions, politics and rules have been establish for the past hundred years, you must be ready to deal with fast-moving and ever-changing situations. It’s essential to understand how to endure precarity, as it’s an essential condition for social change”. 

2_Educazione e la guerra / Education and War
Black Mountain College Bulletin – Liberal Education Today as a Tool of War (1943) (…) The preservation of our cultural heritages is not superfluous in a modern civilization; it is not a luxury…It is what we are fighting for. (…) A college must be concerned with scrutinizing the values of modern society and the frameworks through which people see themselves and their world; it must question convention and tradition, be unafraid to condemn or to criticize, be continually in search of the basic, the foundamental, the real. In time of war, when meaningless verbal symbols are multiplied a hundredfold, when emotionalism tends to replace analysis, when propaganda takes the place of information, and when unconsidered judgements make a thousand intermediate greys black or white, such education is of tremendous importance.

3_Educazione e Libertà / Education and Freedom
Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire, Verlag Herder (1968)
Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other. (…) Education as a practice of freedom denies that man is abstract, isolated, independent, and unattached to the world; it also denies that the world exists as a reality apart from people. Authentic reflection considers neither abstract man not the world without people, but people in their relations with the world. Education is constantly remade in the praxis, In order to be, it must become.

4_Un corso / A class
Practical Quotes, Fornasetti at Palazzo Altemps, Electa (2017)
To whom who are asking me how to learn “design”, this strange myth of our modern times, I answer: “go to a school of nudity, this is the place to learn design”. 

5_Criteri di amissione / Admission Criteria
Education on a Mountain – The Story of Black Mountain College by Luis Adamic (…)
Among the desiderata are capacity for deep dejection and a tendency to say once in a while “I’m no good!”; a capacity for indignation and an inclination to get hot under the collar; a sense of order, a sense of form, and an inward love for truth.

6_Comunicazione / Communication
Note from the activity report from the “Communication” group of Global Tools (1974)
Carrying on our work we shall always remember that:
The men who make use of their experience, “exposing themselves to risks”, namely running the risk of losing their identities, slowly and progressively depriving themselves of every concern, feeling inclined to let others get in touch with them, and, in conclusion, to lose or to exchange with other people, something belonging to their own inner life, those men may be persons inclined to “communicate”. On the contrary, the person who has got a lot of experiences, who stores up information, and crams himself with notions, patronizing and fostering his self-assurance, maintaining his own unalterable identity and exploiting these experiences to increase his prestige in the group and in the society he lives in and acts on, we can assert that a person like that, really isn’t in the mood for communicating and actually exchanging his own experiences with other people’s.

7_Curiosità / Curiosity
Pedagogy of Autonomy, Paulo Freire, Edizioni GruppoAbele – (1996)
Being historical-socio-cultural beings, we, women and men, become beings for whom curiosity, overcoming the limits that are peculiar to it in the vital domain, becomes a fundamental factor in the production of knowledge. Even further, curiosity is already knowledge.

8_Una (possibile) Storia / A (suggested) Story
Global Tools (Casabella), tipologia didattica/didactic typology (Superstudio: Nota 1) (1973)
It may be that the history of the school began with a man sitting under a tree and teaching others. And surely a woman, while sheltering a child, began to teach him the names of things. So that the history of teaching is more a story of love than a story of teaching aids.