Workshop Premise

Even though they have MFA Ph.D. degrees in fine art, architecture, design, advertising or communications, the vast majority of community college or university educators or those seeking positions in these creative programs do not have any specific teaching experience and or any pedagogic training to become educators. They typically possess professional experience and MFA degrees in their area of expertise, but they have not had training and/or specific coursework necessary to effectively prepare them for immersion into the classroom or the university environment.

Over 5,000 Americans claim some form of “university level design educator” as a job title on their tax returns. They teach at over 1,700 collegiate-level programs that offer at least an undergraduate degree in graphic design, interaction design, interior design, industrial design or fashion design, or some variation of one of these. Less than 20% of these professional design educators were ever enrolled in more than six credit hours of graduate-level coursework that were designed to actually teach these future teachers how to teach, plan to teach or assess the manner in which they teach the process of design. This has resulted in an enormous number of collegiate level design education programs in the U.S. being facilitated by people who, whatever their professional and academic qualifications, haven’t been exposed to very much of what might even loosely be described as “design pedagogy.” And even those who have had educational training occasionally need to “refresh” their thinking and their base of knowledge regarding how to best teach their respective students in their respective programs

This workshop has been designed to address both the needs of those who have held positions as university-level design educators for many years or those who have just embarked on this career path. Over the course of two-and-a-half days, it will immerse its 7 to 12 participants in a mutually inclusive, seminar-based learning experience. The issues listed below will be broached in a manner that will make use of the shared knowledge regarding educational practices in design that are brought to it by its participants and by Professor Gibson. Largely the interactive, face-to-face dialogues that transpire between the participants and moderated by Professor Gibson will largely inform each of the sessions.

Workshop Brief

The issues that will drive the dialogues that comprise each of the sessions:

• Facilitating an effective critique (which requires a high degree of self-awareness, maturity, and a pretty solid understanding of why you are who you are...);
• Facilitating a level of verbal criticism effectively enough (over the course of a class-period, a week, or an entire semester) to ensure that students actually learn how to engage in the process of generating viable ideas;
• facilitating a level of verbal criticism effectively enough (over the course of a class-period, a week, or an entire semester) to ensure that students actually learn how to engage in the process of creating effective, gestalt-based visual relationships;
• engaging in an eclectically informed, critical examination of specific iterations of a given student’s work well enough to be able to offer “effectively actionable” feedback to that student;
• utilizing stochastic reasoning or other diagnostic methods to inform a critical approach to analyzing a given student’s attempt(s) at engaging in the design process that is actually well-suited to teaching that student what he or she actually needs to learn;
• planning a course (flexibly) so that its learning experiences actually map to a whole curriculum and to the learning experiences that must occur in other classrooms;
• planning a curriculum that is flexible enough to accommodate students whose time is carved into disorganized chunks devoted to social networking, work and a “little bit” for school;
• building and maintaining relationships with the community of design educators and other scholars that are situated around you in your institution as a means to facilitate the broad base of teaching and learning that must actually OCCUR in a design program;
• engaging in a critical level of reading/seeing/analyzing the world around you at a deep enough level to allow them to utilize these processes to aid the learning experiences of their own students.

Workshop Logistics

This immersive, seminar-based, two-and-a-half-day workshop will consist of two three-hour roundtable sessions per day during the first two days and a final three-hour summative session on the last day. The first of these daily sessions will occur from 9 am until noon, and the second will transpire from 1:30 pm until 4:30 pm. The “last day” session will consist of a summarization of the key issues presented and critically examined over the course of the first two days. This session will culminate with a “call to action” consisting of key objectives for individual and group participants to initiate, sustain or modify within their respective collegiate design education settings.

Ideal Workshop Candidate

This workshop is ideal for people seeking part time adjunct or full time teaching positions.

This workshop encourages the participation and active contributions of a broad cross-section of people who have professional and/or academic experience as fine artists, designers, art directors, interior designers, architects, writers, photographers and musicians. The unifying experiential knowledge that applicants to this workshop should share ought to be derived from at least two years of academic or professional experience in their current specialization and from interest and or significant experience in either or both of these arenas collaborating with, directing or managing the development of others seeking knowledge in this area of creativity. The workshop is ideal for professionals, graduate students at both the masters’ and doctoral levels, full-time university-level educators, and experienced artists or business people who are interested in expanding their ability to teach others in an institutional setting.