methodology

This paper gives an answer from assessments of cultural competences in architectural design learning. Learning based on competences raises fears about a displacement of a humanistic education by job training. Even before the competences approach was adopted in the field of architectural design learning, from some points of view, neither architectonic culture nor formation in the humanities was considered necessary to design.

Its introduction increases the awareness on the possibility to lose the humanistic content in the architectural training. As a counter position to these points of view, the following article shows the results of an experiment to isolate and measure competencies of architectural culture and relate them with assessments of architectural design courses. This experiment found moderate and very high correlations between the results of formative assessments of competencies in architectural culture and those obtained by the same students in the summative assessments of the architectural design courses.

These results demonstrate that architectural design needs knowledge of the culture of architecture, whose background is a humanistic education.

Nowadays, the teaching of the Religion introduces several problems at a legislative level, in the academic area and due to the social situation in which it is involved. This type of teaching demands a huge vocational strength from the teacher, a deep Christian feeling and special attention to the dialogue faith-culture, everything in an atmosphere of freedom. That freedom, the right motivation, a strong base belief and a well-elaborated programming are the pillars of the Religion teaching in the school. In order to reach the academic excellence, there are a wide variety of means and techniques that are exposed in this present article.