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…
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Looking for contributors
Let us talk about design teaching and learning. I want to hear your success or horror stories. Write me something interesting and full of honesty and I will consider in publishing it in my next magazine/graphic novel. Students also tell me about your perceptions and thoughts on learning! Let’s share! Send me an email if interested and possibly a 100 word proposal.
Cheers,
Roberto
Good Teaching
Quite often, I discuss issues that surround poor teaching practices and the institutional forces that make teachers’ environments difficult. What I don’t usually discuss are the great teachers out there and their practices that help our students. Well, actually I do discuss that issue although often part as a reference for my complaining. Recently, I have been observing the practices of a few teachers in my college and found that they have really shaped the students’ learning in a strong manner. It is not how they write their lesson plans or curricula nor their creative projects that inspire the students but their expression and communication with students in class. We tend to forget how important this ‘expression’ and connection is to students no matter how great you schedule teaching and learning activities within a lesson. This connection, feedback and expression becomes the identifier of the teacher and perhaps one of the crucial evaluative factors in the minds of students. I am not talking about sympathetic or empathetic values but the successful ability to communicate verbally with students and demonstrated energy expressed during the lesson. This could be time for me to start researching students perceptions and conceptions of the teaching environment. Another graphic novel?
A little reflection
I have been teaching a portfolio course for the past seven weeks. For the first couple of weeks I tried to facilitate deep learning environments through group activities. I wanted to students to have a strong foundation on concept development before immersing themselves into the project. I believe the activities did help them start grounded but unfortunately on my part, these activities were not followed throughout the rest of the weeks. This created inconsistency within my teaching environment, which possible led to confusion. This noted, I am totally aware now of those ‘forces’ I was trying to make explicit in my research.
I am definitely more aware of what I have learned in the past years and will continue to push this knowledge forward.
New thoughts for 2010
Hello All! Happy New Year!
With this great year coming I thought it was time to start asking some new questions.
1) Should new design teachers be put through some sort of short induction course to familiarise them with some important aspects of pedagogy which I have discussed earlier? If so how would this be regulated? In Australia teachers who work in the private sector need to go through a course call TAA Certificate IV. In my opinion, it is completely useless for the design teacher or any post-secondary teacher. It’s basically a ‘paper work’ course. You learn how to document everything but not how to teach.
2) Who would fund this? Should design organisations become more involved?
3) I mentioned before in a previous post concerning developing some sort of flexible pedagogical success factors for private and public institutions:
a) How much of an investment are institutions willing to make in the maintaining and developing of good teaching and learning environments? Any ideas?
Well more on this later.
Is all hope lost?
I know I have written about this in the past but I feel I need to talk about it again. What to do…when there is almost no possible way to align your teaching (constructive alignment). Institutional forces sometimes seem to be so great that there is no way around attempting to provide a deep learning environment. If you are able to achieve well focused student-centred learning that aligns with your assessments etc. through the modification of your teaching and learning activities, the larger problem becomes “are you the only one doing it”? Are students jumping from one environment of learning to another? I mean, we don’t all have to teach the same but some sort of congruency of basic pedagogical principles and theories needs to be taken into account. Or is all hope lost for these institutions?
I think the design community with the help of design organisations, should think of something quick. There are many private design colleges and the number seems to keep on growing. Many of these students end up working in DTP environments with quite construed view of what design is.
What is our message to these institutions?
(my political post)
To download my exegesis…
Through this blog you may view my exegesis via the “Graphic Design Teacher Magazine” page. If you would like to download it completely, please email me a kind request at: info@designteaching.com
Thank you,
Roberto
Cumulus 38° South Hemispheric Shifts Across Learning, Teaching and Research
Today, I presented my research at the Cumulus conference. I am glad I submitted my paper for this opportunity because I managed to receive good constructive feed back to help me move this research forward. This was the third conference I have presented so far and some speakers were inspiring and some were not. In any case, it helped me think about the possibilities and concerns that are contained within this project.
I was however somewhat shocked at some of the presenters understanding of pedagogy and how they are running/changing curricula. This seemed to be more prominent with educators who deal with smaller institutions rather than the universities here in Melbourne. This made me think even more that my research is well grounded and could be pushed even further. I don’t want to ‘save design education’ but I do feel that it is important for all educators to at least reflect on their teaching practice.
Hemispheric Shifts Across Learning, Teaching and Research
Reflection on what I wrote a day ago…
The other day, my supervisor sent me an article from Andrew McAfee’s blog (http://bit.ly/1iPv0r) called ‘How Beautiful it is, and How easily it can be broken.’ It had a profound effect on how I think about teaching design and what I wrote about earlier in my reflection. McAfee discusses an Enterprise 2.0 conference where two presenters from Lockheed Martin detailed their successes in the employment of Enterprise 2.0 in the company structure. Mr. McAfee goes on to say that the presentation was ‘articulate and clear and well-informed,’ and the presenters gave the impression that social software platforms are now part of major sectors of the company. He (McAfee) then states how this situation is very rare and most of the time it takes a certain amount of key success factors to be achieved in unison, in order for this change to occur. This made me start to think about my current situation in design teaching and my research. Surprisingly, the situation is very similar.
As the author suggested in his case, that ‘…rare that situation really is… and that even with great presentations and advocates that have this knowledge to give, it takes ‘the right place and the right time…’ as well as a list of success factors to be followed. This is quite surprisingly the same in what I have been dealing with in education. What this article made me realise is that I need to chill out a bit with my ‘evangelistic preaching’ and perhaps to find other ways to engage those ‘factors of success’ in order to achieve what I am looking to do in some private institutes. Just as the author stated that if any of these success factors were not in place, the overall effort would be damaged. I think this is again similar to effectively introducing the aligned curricula in private design institutions. If some factors are not in place, for example, management perceptions of the learning environment, then being able to create a deep teaching and learning environment becomes very, very difficult if not impossible. I spoke about this briefly in my exegesis but I guess I never really understood its implications to degree of experiencing it right now. Amazing.
I think what I should do is take a closer look at this aligned curricula and perhaps pin-point and develop new success factors for private design institutions. Perhaps I will need to think of these key factors where the structure can be integrated into different teaching contexts and goals in order to keep flexibility and translation. It would be good continuation in any case of my research.