Designing Shared Worlds: Reflections on a Decolonial Teaching Approach in Architectural Projects

This article examines pedagogical transformations in the author’s university teaching practice through an engagement with Brazilian Afro-Indigenous thought and its relationship to decolonial perspectives in design. The article links an encounter with a group of Yawanawá women in the Brazilian Amazon to personal and pedagogical bifurcations that traverse the field of architecture. It analyzes the methodological strategies applied while supervising the Final Degree Projects presented at the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), which have fostered a historiographic questioning movement, both in terms of references and methodological practices. It concludes that these pedagogical experiences bring together different logics, including the students’ interest in exploring and experimenting with non-canonical ways of thinking about and practicing architecture in collaboration with situated communities and territories.