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.

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)