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FOREWORD
For over a century now, we have been educating the majority of Norwegian architects at our faculty. The education has
been embedded both in a polytechnic based curriculum teaching tradition, and an academy training tradition. However,
the actual process of learning has for a long time been kept alive as a tacit body of knowledge in our collegium.
During the last decade we have been touched by two highly inspirational impulses:
• Many of our students are capable of creating beautiful real live projects as students, often independent of a formal
teaching framework. Where does this empowerment come from? Did we do something right in our education that could
support this? We are not yet quite sure how this happens, but we are eager to find out.
• By getting in touch with the section for university pedagogics at NTNU, UNIPED, we were introduced to a broad
knowledge base on learning processes. By embracing new didactic models and methods we are now equipped for a
more systematic and research based approach on developing our teaching at the faculty.
Our aim now is to understand how to release the power in the students by developing new didactic frameworks and
methods based on solid pedagogical research. This approach was the basis for our application for a Center of Excel-
lence in Education in 2013, “
TRANSark
”. We did not achieve the formal center status, but our own experience with the
application process and the positive feedback from the expert panel has given us strong reasons to believe that we are
really on to something important here. We are therefore now establishing
TRANSark
as an educational center at the
faculty with support from the rector at NTNU.
This collection of texts represents a status platform as a point of departure for the development of innovative learning
at NTNU.
Trondheim November 2014
Fredrik Shetelig
Dean at the faculty of Architecture and Fine Art, NTNU