PREPARING THE PROFESSORIATE

Meredith Davis
Professor of Graphic Design
NC State University

The history of practices in design education mirror those of the field in general. Our apprenticeship roots, emerging out of the trades of printing and typesetting, extend to the preparation of teachers in American colleges and university design programs; students watch their teachers in order to determine appropriate pedagogical behavior and use projects they undertook as students as models for their own classrooms.

It is curious to me that we accept such behavior in teaching, but would consider this replication as less appropriate in professional practice. Why are we less demanding of innovation and responsiveness to audience in the design of learning experiences than we are in the design of web sites, brochures, and annual reports?

The historic location of graphic design programs in departments and schools of art has shaped curriculum structure, project definitions, teaching practices, critique patterns, student admissions criteria, and the reward system for faculty. As faculty, we are products of the arts environment and its value system. But as graphic design shifts its status from a trade to a profession, the demand for scholarship and evidence that design has its own ways of knowing and doing become more apparent.

The behaviors that distinguish a profession from a trade in any discipline are fairly established.

*Professions have a body of knowledge that is transmitted through literature to its practitioners. Over the past decade the writing on design history, theory, and criticism has matured, adding to the traditional "picture book" libraries that defined the field until the early 1990s. It is notable that Phil Meggs' History of Graphic Design was the first comprehensive history of the discipline but not published until 1983, and that the first major exhibition on graphic design in the United States occurred at the Walker Art Center as late as 1989. The more mature scholarship and writing of the last decade is largely responsible for the emergence of a design "discipline" that has value for study beyond the professional issues of design "practice". As a result, we now see "design studies" as a constellation of courses in many colleges and universities, with some schools actually developing majors that focus on non-studio instruction in history, theory, and criticism. While it still requires a little research, faculty can now find textbooks that support the study of graphic design with more than professional examples of work annotated by a few lines of copy. And it is now possible to find applicants for facultypositions with PhDs in design history.

*Professions exhibit deliberate consideration of the modes of inquiry and methods of practice, as well as study of these methods by other fields. It is significant that the most frequently requested videotape among Ted Koppel's Nightline programs is the one detailing the process of design innovation at IDEO, the international industrial design firm. Surely, there are not enough industrial design firms out there to create this high-level demand for copies. The clear articulation of a problem solving process, one shared by most design professionals, has implications for a broader audience and is evidence that discussion of design methods has expanded to include transferable behaviors other than intuition.

The Institute of Design at Illinois Institute of Technology has recently announced the creation of a Master of Design Methods degree program as an extension of its interest in the design process. And design theoretician Clive Dilnot writes on the characteristic nature of design knowledge , extending the work of Herb Simon (in the Sciences of the Artificial) by professing that the design professions hold unique understanding of the role of artifacts in the acquisition and articulation of knowledge. Our work at NC State Universityin reforming K-12 schools through the pedagogy of design education is yet further recognition of design's unique contributions to work in other fields.

*Professions have a segment of their practitioners who are devoted exclusively to research and knowledge-building. While there are now design firms for which research is a specialization (example: Fitch, Doblin, Sonic Rim, ELab/Sapient), the majority of this work is proprietary and does not circulate through the field. In response to the growing demand for knowledge that informs the large practice of design, several universities in the US (Illinois Institute of Technology/Institute of Design, NC State University, and Carnegie-Mellon University) have developed PhD programs to meet the demands of the shifting problem space in design practice and to provide an alternative to the demographic-driven, profit-motivated science of marketing. A handful of master's programs have ramped up the rigor of study in preparation for high expectations in the field and in an effort to create clear distinctions between undergraduate and graduate degree work. Such programs no longer see portfolio refinement or preparing students for mainstream practice as their primary missions; instead, the ability to define meaningful questions about design (questions that are not being addressed by practice) outweighs the need to provide answers to already-known client problems.

All of this adds up to greater accountability for design education and new needs in the preparation of design faculty; accountability to the profession in which our students will practice for the next forty+ years, and responsibility for defining the discipline we build as a community of scholars.

So, how are we doing as design educators with respect to these obligations? I believe we are showing symptoms of growing pains under these new challenges.

*Increasing frequency of requests for statements of "teaching philosophy" in the search for new design faculty.

The ever-expanding enrollments in college and university graphic design programs creates an unprecedented demand for new faculty and a financial incentive for schools to start new graphic design programs. Unlike the disciplines of architecture and industrial design, with 120 and 50 programs nationwide, graphic design has supported the proliferation of programs in American colleges and universities; it is estimated that there are 2000+ schools in the US teaching the discipline at some level. This glut of programs is neither matched by a demand for new practitioners or by the availability of qualified faculty and adequate institutional resources.

As schools struggle to fill teaching positions, often dipping deeper and deeper into the pool of applicants, the need to sort applicants for basic teaching competencies becomes important. As a result, many schools now ask for "teaching philosophy" statements as part of the standard application package. Unfortunately, these "Miss America" monologues are rarely context-specific or appropriate for the level of faculty recruited.

It is difficult to imagine how a philosophy statement, usually restricted to a couple of pages, could address all the possible contexts and audiences for design education. What faculty believe is appropriate for a public university with students enrolled under open admissions criteria, couldn't possibly address the needs of students recruited in competitive portfolio reviews for an art school in a metropolitan design center. Nor would we expect faculty to teach BA students, who take a few graphic design courses in their junior and senior years, in the same way they teach BFA students who are immerse in the major from their first semester.

Further, rank, salary, and the limited pool of applicants increase the likelihood of recent MFA graduates being hired. But it is difficult to imagine that a year of teaching assistance as a graduate student results in a mature teaching philosophy; in the absence of extensive classroom and curricular experience, few recent graduates are capable of writing philosophical statements that have much meaning in the application review process. What I believe is more appropriate and more useful is a teaching portfolio that includes learning objectives; project briefs' descriptions of where the course is placed in the curriculum and the type of curriculum it supports; descriptions of student population; and the results of project implementation, including teacher reflection on student outcomes. Certainly, most search committees don't want to review this for every applicant, but initial screening could easily determine viable candidates from which additional information is sought Again, we expect this kind of comprehensive information about candidates' design practice. Why then are we willing to accept less with respect to teaching?

*Proliferation of publication of project and curriculum descriptions by faculty in design programs.

I receive several publisher requests each year to review manuscripts for project-based design books and to author discussions of model curricula. In recent years, publishers have identified design education as a new market, although their notions of what might be useful to classroom discussion leaves much to be desired in many cases. Rarely do these publishers ask what content is especially difficult to teach, how books are used in studio-based courses, or what faculty expertise is necessary to make use of such literature. The "publish or perish" criteria for tenure and promotion at state universities has also accelerated the number of books detailing classroom projects; design research is generally under-developed, so faculty retreat to documentation of classroom experiences as more familiar content territory.

The problem with these discussions is that they are frequently decontextualized; they fail to reveal the degree to which institutional setting, course scaffolding within a curriculum, faculty expertise, overall faculty depth, student admissions profiles, and resource availability influence what and how faculty teach. Likewise, the projects are rarely linked to a discussion of professional competency and readers never see the number or quality of failed student responses as only the best examples are illustrated.

The assumption is that projects and curricula are transferable across institutional boundaries with relatively similar results. In addition, these descriptions rarely include reflection on student outcomes; the "evidence" of success resides solely in the artifacts themselves, with no regard for articulating the level of faculty intervention or quality of student learning. In this way, these "education" publications model the less-than-satisfying aspects of professional design competitions, with the publisher standing in for the design jury.

*Confusion over evaluation of teaching expressed in the requests for external review of faculty for tenure and promotion.

Requests for external evaluation of faculty for tenure and promotion exhibit a similar decontextualization. Having completed nearly forty such reviews over the past decade, I've discovered the need to be very direct with college administrators regarding the evaluation of teaching performance through slides of student work and a few project briefs. While such artifacts may help departments narrow the field of prospective faculty for initial employment, they are poor indicators of teaching performance on which to base a lifetime professional commitment by the institution.

True evaluations of teaching should not only address the issues of institutional context, teaching assignments within specific curricula, course objectives, student population, and resource availability, but they should include classroom observations and substantive assessment of faculty performance over time. Such long-distance reviews are not possible by people who are not very familiar with the program and faculty, conditions that frequently disqualify them as "biased".

*High levels of generality in the catalog descriptions of program outcomes among significantly different educational institutions.

If we are to believe the c atalog copy across institutions teaching graphic design, two-year, four-year liberal arts, four-year fine arts, four-year design, and master's programs all produce the same thing; a fully-qualified, graphic design professional capable of working in print and digital media. When challenged that such outcomes being equal is unlikely, faculty cite stories of successful graduates who stand for the degree to which departments deliver on their missions.

Not only does these pervasive claims of comprehensive education confuse and persuade students to follow educational paths that are mismatched to their goals and abilities, but it prevents practitioners from understanding and critiquing outcomes of particular programs with any specificity. As an expanding and complex field, we should be able to identify distinct but equally attractive missions among schools that offer graphic design instruction. In doing so, we would decode an indecipherable system for students and their parents and make easier our own assessment of programmatic outcomes. We may realize that it is ok for some schools to do certain things, while other schools focus elsewhere.

So how should we envision the preparation and work of design faculty in response to the emerging nature of practice and shifting academic expectations. The late Ernest Boyer, head of the Carnegie Foundation and a great supporter of art and design education, provided a way of viewing teaching in his 1990 publication, Scholarship Reconsided: Priorities of the Professoriate. Boyer described four aspects of "teaching as scholarship", which I'd like to pose as challenges for design education.

*Scholarship of discovery

This type of scholarship is research or knowledge building in the traditional sense. In most professions, the university is the seat for such activity and graduate student dissertations and faculty publications are the means for dissemination. Research is conducted within strict parameters and subjected to rigorous peer review. Clearly, as the profession of graphic design evolves, the need for such research increases, especially when the consequences of design decisions are substantial. Witness the last presidential election, the outcome of which hung on the design of voter ballots; the self-images of young women who struggle to find messages of female accomplishment in contemporary media; and the legions of children who fail to succeed in schools because the design of information and its delivery favor another learning style.

In this climate of enormous need, however, the challenge to design educators is to overcome the self-inflicted expectations of faculty in the academy. In efforts to establish design in American universities, we successfully argued that freelance practice, exhibitions of self-expressive work, and publication of student projects are our form of "research". As a consequence of justifying our place in the academy through these arguments, we so diluted the notion of what might constitute design research that young faculty can't distinguish the value among competing ways to use their time.

While professional and creative development may be entirely appropriate for determining faculty tenure and promotion, they are not research and little of this activity makes any lasting mark on the field. Criteria for evaluating faculty professional and creative development in most schools reside entirely outside the value system of professional design practice (faculty rarely compete with top professionals for complex, demanding assignments), the well-developed world of art criticism, and the rigorous study of teaching practices found in education programs where the PhD is the terminal degree.

We need to uncouple these arguably meritorious activities from the definition of research and prepare graduate students who aspire to teaching careers with the skills and dispositions necessary to engage in true discovery. The growth of PhD programs in American universities is the first move toward the scholarship of discovery in design education and the field needs to throw its support behind these efforts.

*Scholarship of integration

Mark Van Doren, Pulitzer prize-winning poet and professor of English at Columbia University, said that "the connectedness of things is what the educator contemplates to the limits of his capacity". If this is true, what have design faculty done to make effective use of non-design study and research from outside the discipline of graphic design?

In many design schools and departments, faculty apologize to students for the number of general education courses required for the degree or construct special sections of these offerings for art and design majors only. Many admissions criteria compensate for student shortfalls in traditional academic courses, populating the profession with individuals who are less able to move across content and strategies than in some other fields. In some cases, the opportunity for students to integrate design thinking with ways of knowing outside design is held hostage by the faculty's own limited education; the engagement of content outside design is often presumed to reside solely in the subject matter of the object being designed, not in ways to view problems, audiences, or contexts.

J. Christopher Jones, in his 1970 book Design Methods, tells us that the design problems of post-industrial society exist at the level of systems and communities (interrelated systems), not in the lower levels of products and components. These systems-level problems are ambiguous, complex, interdependent, and in a constant state of flux. They require interdisciplinary efforts for their solution and consideration of those solutions across lifetimes.

How do students prepare for these grand challenges in professional curricula that have become so specialized that courses are titled by the objects produced during the semester; web design, exhibition design, book design, etc.? These curricula, while offering a professional alternative to the more broadly-defined Bachelor of Art or Bachelor of Science degree, seem at odds with the nature of contemporary design problems and the scale at which design is currently practiced.

The AIGA and the National Association of Schools of Art and Design are about to begin work on a sixth briefing paper in the series begun several years ago. Focused on General Education in the Design Curriculum, the paper will address the need for greater integration of design content with study in areas such as psychology, sociology, critical theory, economics, and writing. To meet the challenge of preparing professionals for a more complex world, the preparation of design faculty must expand their frames of reference for design projects.

*Scholarship of application

Under this aspect of scholarship, Boyer describes curricula and instruction as modeling the application of knowledge to consequential problems and how social problems define an agenda for scholarly investigation. On the surface, application appears to be design education's strong suit and the social agenda occupies an increasing amount of the subject matter in student portfolios. While there are many design programs focused primarily on buying and selling, it is not difficult to find others where subjects such as AIDS prevention and anti-smoking are typical content of student work.

This arbitrary segmentation of work for commerce from work for society, however, does little to teach students about responsible action in a capitalist economy; about the impact of commercial messages beyond their competitive position within the marketplace. It is not unusual to find graduates of graphic design programs who desire and believe they can sustain themselves across a forty-year career as designers in practices composed entirely of self-initiated social projects or work for non-profits. Many graduate students look to teaching careers as a means for turning down clients whose content is directly related to their own social agenda.

Whether directly through conversation, or indirectly through project design, critique, and role modeling practices, many graphic design faculty have graduated students who see no opportunity for social change in the mainstream work of the profession, no opportunity to construct messages that model positive values at the same time they sell, persuade, or otherwise meet the client's needs. For these students, social conscience lies solely in the subject matter of the client's work, not the means or messages through which content is communicated. Further, few of these commercially-disenchanted students are equipped with the research, strategic planning, and articulation skills that enable them to swim upstream in practices that could benefit from a social conscience; this aspect of the social agenda is rarely delivered in their design education. There is much work to be done in uncovering the social consequences in a broad range of design problem-solving and in expanding students' notions of activism and responsibility.

*Scholarship of teaching

Boyer tells us that the work of the professor becomes consequential only as it is understood by others. If so, how are we preparing future teachers to engage in and disseminate the scholarship of teaching? I've discussed the shortfall of project or curriculum publications earlier in this presentation, citing the lack of context and reflection as a critique of quality. But on a deeper level, the field needs serious discussion of what constitutes curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment.

In developing the soon-to-be-published AIGA/NASAD briefing paper on Experience Design, I worked with a committee from industry and education. Art Center's Brenda Laurel, author of Computers at Theater, Hugh Dubberly, former vice president at Netscape, Shelley Evenson from Seescape, and Sharon Poggenpohl at the Institute of Design were influential in the work. The task of writing a technology-focused curriculum, which by definition had to serve students who would not apply their learning to practice in the field until five years into the future, raised interesting questions about curriculum development. The assignment placed our academic comfort with prediction and continuity in juxtaposition with technological content that is time-sensitive, responsive to volatile systems outside design (such as the global economy), and undergoing rapid and constant change. Ultimately, our decision regarding the Experience Design curriculum was to use verbs describing design behaviors that arise from fundamental audience needs and the nature of human interaction in the world at large, rather than through the typical products that designers make, the venues in which they are seen or used, or the technology or processes used to make them.

It was immediately apparent to me that our typical discussion of graphic design curricula in colleges and universities is wrought with preconceptions about how design education works; we debate issues such as where to teach typography, how to use history in the studio, and what software is necessary but have barely scratched the surface about how young people really learn to think as designers or the problem space they will face as practitioners. We rarely talk about the kind of world we hope they will make as a result of their life's work or how people will be different as a result of their actions. Graduate students who enter teaching quickly adopt the concerns and practices in place at their alma maters, perpetuating the status quo. As mentors for future teachers, we have an obligation to engage graduate students in rigorous discourse about curriculum as well as about design.

At North Carolina State University in the Master of Graphic Design program we are experimenting with explicit discussions of education in addition to design. In fall 2002 we offered a teaching seminar that addressed some of the issues I've raised in this presentation. Content includes:

*Writing project, course, and curriculum plans
*Institutional context and program philosophy
*Integrating writing and speaking in the design curriculum
*Critique strategies
*Rigorous program assessment (objectives, outcomes, measures, and action)
*Teaching portfolios and preparing for the job search
*Expectations for design faculty/faculty research

In conclusion, I urge design educators to look to the future and the preparation of colleagues, who will not only define the nature of design education but who will shape the quality of human resources in the profession for the next half-century. I suggest that we build our profession of teaching as deliberately as we impart the skills of design practice.

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