DESIGNING DESIGN EDUCATION: WHY AND HOW WE CREATED A GRADUATE CURRICULUM THAT TEACHES PEOPLE HOW TO TEACH
Eric Ligon
Associate Professor, Communication Design
The University of North Texas School of Visual Art

This presentation will enlighten the audience about the concerns and processes that instigated and then drove the redesign of the graduate curriculum in communication design at the University of North Texas (UNT). Now entering it's second year, the reincarnation of the MFA experience in communication design at UNT has been structured to prepare the students enrolled in it to evolve into extremely effective design educators who actually possess the ability to teach the process of design to undergraduate design students. Our MFA program facilitates a learning experience within which potential design educators are challenged to discover and develop the skills and sensibilities they'll need to become critically savvy, eclectically aware and clearly communicative analysts, motivators and leaders. The ideas upon which we built the foundation of our curricular structure were first broached during a casual brainstorming session that took place aboard a group of rubber rafts atop an isolated cow pond deep in the Texas hill country. This conversation led to the development of a curriculum that is driven by the investigation, synthesis and analysis of various forms of design pedagogy. Participants in this session will be enlightened regarding the "course-by-course, experience-by-experience, semester-by-semester" framework of the graduate program in communication design at UNT, which means they WON'T learn anything about how to teach their students new ways to run various graphics applications software programs. On the other hand, they WILL be exposed to an array of ideas that we hope will help future design educators develop the foresight and awarenesses necessary to accomplish useful and meaningful objectives within a university-level design education setting.

 

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