My teaching journey began in 2012 when the public university in my home town of Querétaro, Mexico, inaugurated the School of Architecture within the Department of Engineering. I returned from Germany, where I had been living for the previous seven years, to become one of the first generation of teachers of the school and taught there until I moved to Finland in 2017.
I emphasize the word public to elucidate that, in a country like mine, inequities are palpable everywhere, including in education. A great part of my learning experience as a student of architecture unfolded in the guarded, impermeable, abstract, and often homogeneous space of a private institution. In contrast, my learning experience as a teacher developed in the porous and ever-changing world of a public institution that attended to the education of thousands of students of diverse economic standing who were arriving from the city centre as well as the urban periphery, the semi-rural settlements nearby as well as towns in remote locations, all of them moved by their desires to learn.
I am inspired by all of these students, who often shared their stories with me and opened my eyes to experiences different to mine. From them, I have learned that each individual is full of knowledge, situated knowledge, legitimate as any other kind, and that education should aim to be meaningful to them and relevant to the societies they are embedded in. Teaching in this university forged who I am and what I believe in, and it has profoundly influenced the way I teach and what I understand to be the purpose of education.
dalia milián bernal 