It seems ages since I have written anything. As many teachers, I have gone through love/hate relationships with the teaching and learning environment. It seems to always come down to those ‘forces’ I have described in my earlier posts. These forces are situations beyond and intertwined within the teaching context, which may be institution politics, class sizes or class dynamics. My question for today is how much ‘external’ design work should a teacher be involved in while teaching? In some higher level teaching environments teachers are research focused, thus they are not necessarily ‘practicing’ graphic design though their contribution to the practice and teaching can be thought of as process that moves and changes practice and teaching more than the actual act—thinkers of the practice. By being so focused in research there can be gaps in the reality of the industry and changes in day-to-day processes. This can effect students’ approach to the industry and their process to design practice. On the other hand being centrally focused on practice can also block higher cognitive design thinking. Where is the medium? More to follow…