Last week, I was going through John Biggs’s book in quality learning and I came across a section that I have gone over before but I obviously wasn’t ready to absorb it yet. Biggs spoke about Alignment of the teaching method and from a good teaching system comes the alignment of teaching methods, assessment to the learning activities in the objectives.
Reading more about objectives I found how truly integral they are to a teaching/learning system and quite often teachers do not relate their objectives to the teaching activities (Biggs). This really throws the system out of order in my opinion. If I am about learning how research can be used (integrated) to create deep learning environments.
One issue that Biggs points out is that in able to cite the objectives a teacher needs to first discover what knowledge is involved in the learning process. He states, Declarative knowledge: knowing about, Procedural knowledge: action, sequences, ect. and Functional Knowledge: Theory, Analyze, reflect and basically the when and why, putting procedural and declarative together. Problem Solving. One thing that stood out was how according to Biggs most teaching was done in the two streams of declarative and procedural. Student are then left with two set of information and left to sort the mess out.
I see significant relevance to what Biggs is describing and how it relates to what I have witnessed in graphic design pedagogy. Tools and technology are taught to students, separately, principles and procedures. How can the student put all this information together and gain knowledge from it? Enquiry-based learning helps and so does practice-based research.
I think the key here is to implement ways of teaching and learning so that all design courses have an underlying connection of creating designers with deep-learning skills and be able to articulate this knowledge in practice. Of course their are “forces” involved by this statement but I will get to that soon. (The academic institution and practice)
