PanSIG 2025

TEAM-BASED LEARNING AS A TOOL TO FOSTER CRITICAL THINKING: USING PHOTOGRAPH

17 May 2025, 12:30

25m

BLDG 8/1F-109 (Kanda University of International Studies (神田外語大学))

Research-oriented Oral Face-to-face presentation Art, Research, and Teaching B8-109 SAT: Critical Thinking, Study Abroad & CALL; SUN: CALL

Speaker

Jesus Alberto Pulido Arcas (Center for Global Education. The University of Tokyo.)

KEYWORDS

Architecture, sustainability, SDGs, Team-based learning, active learning.

ABSTRACT

Amidst the popularity of university-wide courses taught in English to international students in Japan, sustainability issues, and more specifically the SDGs, have emerged as a transversal topic. Yet integrating an objective assessment of sustainability and a critical approach to the arts into the same curriculum may seem contradictory at first glance. This presentation explores how to address this challenge through a TBL (Team-based Learning) activity in a course titled Sustainability in Japanese Architecture, in which students create an informed critique of a work of contemporary architecture through the lens of the SDGs. As this activity is the culmination of their learning journey, it is when they have to demonstrate critical thinking and application of course content. This presentation will show how the TBL methodology, and more specifically how one of its cornerstones, backward syllabus design, can equip the students with the skills to interpret a work of architecture through the lens of sustainability. This methodology is expected to be helpful to instructors proposing courses that must meet two opposing yet complementary goals: Interpreting works of architecture, and more broadly, art, and incorporating the SDGs into the course syllabus.