How to define Today's Learning Time, Spaces and knowledge structures?

Are the physical and digital infrastructures, ie buildings or online platforms, the only spaces or structures where learning and knowledge transfer can take place?

It will be the teacher's knowledge and access to "all the information of the world" the only guarantees that we acquire the correct and necessary knowledge to: perceive who we are, what distinguishes us, what motivates us and what allows us to have the sense of accomplishment?

And is the teacher's knowledge in the books, in his powerpoint presentations, in what he publishes, and what is seen and reviewed by his peers?

Are, for example, the Ted.com, aggregators off "all the information of the world" according to their own perspective and focus, the guarantee of our freedom and capacity to design our education and qualification of skills, knowledge and techniques relevant to our personal and professional context? 

Nobody questions that Learning e Knowledge are the foundations to enable our life purpose, as humans, to contribute effectively and productively to build a better world and our legacy for generations to come, if so, why are we pushing this Human characteristic "to 19th century, obsolete houses of knowledges"? 

Why we still think of education in space-time silos, impersonal and completely mischaracterised socially and out of scale and context? 

Why the scale is not the person and the community nearby? why most of the orientations are for global logics, patterned and formatted to the masses in this sense, non human / student centred?

How can we continue to be sure that having a learning structure based on closed and pre-defined spaces and time, we ensure that there is a true transfer of information, its sedimentation and that it becomes empowering in the context of our personal and professional life?

If we look back, the space and time where we learn the most, understood and "master" world around us was our childhood, why? maybe because in our childhood learning was more "natural" based on a strong relationship with a tutor/mentor that leads us to discover the world not based on fixed structures and packages of contents but rather as a basis in experimentation, imagination, coding meanings and a constant discovery of what surrounds us through all our senses, was it not?

If nothing science tells us that lifelong learning can not have the same principles, Why do we insist on formatting the evolution of our learning through different layers or levels that we need to successfully overcome measured through pre-formatted indicators, always designed based on the constraint of time and space?

The past week has made me wonder if teaching can only or should only happen in a definite space and time, where the transmission of information begins on a certain day and ends in a certain day after a certain evaluation to which we are subject and that guarantees to the "system" that the contents have been disseminated, even if the additional skills have not been acquired.

The design thinking post graduation (last year's edition) formally and institutionally ended in July 2017. Most students were focused on a teaching / learning process in which they measured the knowledge and tools they learned on that specific date, whose perception was perhaps based on quantitative indicators, to determine the so-called "quality" of what they received in the time and space of formation.

This approach was never my intention in the creation and coordination of the course, I always insisted that what I was looking for was to "change" the mentality and the learning behaviours of the trainees for life, and not with metric objectives of short term measured by the quantification of models and tools defined.

As I said this week, some of the students who "understood" exactly this value proposition began to bear fruit...

Two students, Joana Beirão e Mário Pires, saw their work valued by the Secretary of State for Tourism, who now have the opportunity to continue what they started "in the time and space" of the post-graduation"

My mentor / tutor work, more than teaching, has continued and will continue now within the applied research group that will help the project gain scale and territorial scope.

Two other students from the same postgraduate course, continue to be linked through the Applied Research Group and weekly they emerge in University, attend all kind of classes, research different and random type off subjects needed for innovation in what they do in their companies. I continued as a mentor / mentor of his evolution in the ability to implement in real context processes of change in his organisation.

That is, the time and space of the learning processes I advocate do not begin and end in closed formats, determined by periods of time driven by excel sheets of financial exploration.

An DELLI, this approach of teaching / learning models, focused on human relations and not dependent on space and time "typologies and packages" either physical or digital, we call it "Design & Pandemonium".

Design & Pandemonium is where chaos, entropy, a constant challenge to self- discovery and the appeal for the construction of the personality and attitude of the students is expressed in their learning manifestos, either regarding their transformative role of society or focused on their personal statement to the world of Design. 

The Design & Pandemonium model implies that "time and space" is built to each student's rhythm and the metrics that define their evolution and the introduction of new degrees of complexity of the challenges posed to the students are based on the fact that there is an effective "internalisation" of the knowledge and skills objectives of the previous phase in each of the students and that are expressed in the degree that "mastery" of its practical and creative application.

At DELLI - Design Lusófona Lisboa, we believe in a deep relationship with students based on mentoring and tutoring formats that creates the linkage between the students' experimentation and exploration of the "world" and the "design" and the "classroom" learning experience. 

By "classroom" please understand all physical / non physical "space and time" where learning may happen such as the community, organisations, institutions and even households, they are part of today's and the future's learning models and processes. 

If you wish, at DELLI we defend that we need to make the "Masters" resurface, but in our definition, Master, in a teaching / learning logic, it is not the one that encourages your students to follow the "Masters pathway" or to be a "copy" of their knowledge, but rather it is someone who encourages others the ability to discover their own way, to discover who they are and what their space and time in society and the world of Design in our case.

The students need guidance from the "Masters" for these ambitious journey that is why at DELLI - Design Lusófona Lisboa our research unit its emerged within the "classroom" space, since day one of the DELLI learning journey, working hand-in-hand with each student to support them with methodologies, models and tools to empower their discovery quest, instigate them to be curious, to question existing dogmas and trues, to adapt their own processes and design methods, in short not to be followers but creators of their own design pathway.

Therefore, DELLI's research space and time its present in the classroom itself and in active teaching / learning models oriented not to the contents and pre-defined subjects at different closed "educational levels", but rather, guided by challenges to the self-discovery of the subjects by the students in a continuous journey along all 3 years (plus the master), where the complexity and the request of demonstration by the students of the mastery of this same complexity through practices, processes and creative capacity by itself developed throughout the program is what changes and guarantee a "Natural evolution".

AMÉRICO MATEUS - Head of Research at DELLI - Design Lusófona Lisboa