The other day, my supervisor sent me an article from Andrew McAfee’s blog (http://bit.ly/1iPv0r) called ‘How Beautiful it is, and How easily it can be broken.’ It had a profound effect on how I think about teaching design and what I wrote about earlier in my reflection. McAfee discusses an Enterprise 2.0 conference where two presenters from Lockheed Martin detailed their successes in the employment of Enterprise 2.0 in the company structure. Mr. McAfee goes on to say that the presentation was ‘articulate and clear and well-informed,’ and the presenters gave the impression that social software platforms are now part of major sectors of the company. He (McAfee) then states how this situation is very rare and most of the time it takes a certain amount of key success factors to be achieved in unison, in order for this change to occur. This made me start to think about my current situation in design teaching and my research. Surprisingly, the situation is very similar.

As the author suggested in his case, that ‘…rare that situation really is… and that even with great presentations and advocates that have this knowledge to give, it takes ‘the right place and the right time…’ as well as a list of success factors to be followed. This is quite surprisingly the same in what I have been dealing with in education. What this article made me realise is that I need to chill out a bit with my ‘evangelistic preaching’ and perhaps to find other ways to engage those ‘factors of success’ in order to achieve what I am looking to do in some private institutes. Just as the author stated that if any of these success factors were not in place, the overall effort would be damaged. I think this is again similar to effectively introducing the aligned curricula in private design institutions. If some factors are not in place, for example, management perceptions of the learning environment, then being able to create a deep teaching and learning environment becomes very, very difficult if not impossible. I spoke about this briefly in my exegesis but I guess I never really understood its implications to degree of experiencing it right now. Amazing.

I think what I should do is take a closer look at this aligned curricula and perhaps pin-point and develop new success factors for private design institutions. Perhaps I will need to think of these key factors where the structure can be integrated into different teaching contexts and goals in order to keep flexibility and translation. It would be good continuation in any case of my research.

It seems very ironic and strange that after working during so hard during my Masters at discovering, understanding and developing knowledge of teaching in graphic design I am currently in a teaching within an institutional environment that is in antithesis of my own research. Ahh…the revelations of real life practice. I mentioned all these warning signs in my exegesis of how and why graphic design teachers might find themselves in an institutional environment, which inhibits any sort of good teaching and learning practices. Let’s see…what did I mention? Oh yes. A teacher is less likely to engage students to help develop a deep learning environment if the institution makes this impossible. “To help build an aligned curriculum…you must understand the forces that affect its design…forces include institutional criteria, teaching and learning support and departmental perceptions of the learning environment.”

So how come I am in this situation? Just as other teachers, I find myself in a place where economic circumstances have brought me to teaching 28 hours a week of technology related courses. They are not even courses I am interested in but management has forced a situation where I had no choice to accept or lose much work. I have spoken to management and coordinators but I feel I have exhausted my voice. I don’t feel I need to mention here why 28 hours of face-to-face teaching is impossible, done well. Or how what effects on learning can an unaligned curriculum have on the students because I have already spoke all about this before. The only thing I can think about now is what am I learning from this situation.

I am starting to understand now, actually how powerful are those ‘forces’ within a learning environment. Primarily, I now feel that a teacher can study all the pedagogical literature they can, finish a degree in graphic design teaching, try to insert aspects of an aligned curriculum into their teaching and learning activities but its pretty much inconsequential if there is no institutional support. I have realised that the departmental perceptions and institutional agendas and pressure can really make or break a learning environment. This is really unfortunate because I am sure there are many other teachers in a similar position that are quite capable of developing deep teaching and learning experiences in graphic design. Are you one of them?

So what is one to do next in this situation? Give up and carry on? I think not! When I got into design education, I knew the road was not going to be easy. I also understood at some point I would have to make some important decisions and have the ability to negotiate with the ‘higher powers’ within a design department. I think it is part of my duty as a researcher and design teacher, especially in respect for what I have done over these years. So, I think it is about time I see if I can organise a meeting with these ‘institutional forces’ and see if I can present my findings. Who knows, maybe something will change or maybe not, but at least I can say I have tried. This is really important to me as a design educator because now I think I have the ability and knowledge to confront such an issue, which is not an easy one to tackle as a new teacher.

Maybe we can start some sort of online group. Are you a new/sessional teacher who is teaching in a private institution with similar circumstances? Please contact me through my blog. Let us see if we can start some sort of global conversation on the topic.

Wish me luck.

Until I am able to embed this file, you may now view my exegesis: Teaching Teachers: Learning through Graphic Literacy at: http://issuu.com/designteachers/docs/gdt?viewMode=magazine

Enjoy!
Updates will now occur in my page: GDT (Graphic Design Teachers)

Hello avid followers. It’s time to get back at reading my blog posts. It’s been a hairy ride with my Masters and all but it is all coming to a close. I passed my examination and next week will be submitting my final amendments. So stay tuned! I will be posting my exegesis magazine for all to read! That’s right, my research plus comic series in a easy to read format. Design educators get ready!

Heard Rick give a presentation this evening about design—or some trendy words that some people like to label design Design thinking and Critical design. It’s funny though, the crowd was very tight lipped about the whole thing. I guess Melbourne designers are much like the Canadian mentality—try not to disturb the peace. I think Rick raised an interesting issue that many (graphic) designers are not ready to deal with yet. He describes that possibly some (graphic) design needs to go back to its roots lets say and discover and accept visual aesthetics as viable communication methods. He states that it is necessary for graphic designers to reclaim their “input” and definition of design thinking towards something that is whole and human-centered. It sounds like a lot of practice based research to me. What I do agree with is how graphic designers, lately on the research band wagon seem to need to classify, label, structure everything and if it’s not within a classifiable research method it demeans what we do and are trying to communicate. The element of discovery+research+visualisation might just be lost in order to gain control of our practice. At what cost though?

Dear Faithful readers. As you might understand by now, I haven’t been adding any posts lately. Please excuse the laziness. I have been preparing for my final examination for my Master of Communication Design degree. This coming Friday, May 29th I will either come out of the presentation with tears of joy or happiness. I’m pretty sure it will be the later but you never know. In any case, I will be giving this blog fresh input soon after. Perhaps, I will be able to expand my number of readers from 4 to millions. Unfortunately, at the moment, I will not go through my discoveries of these two years of research but stay tuned! I will also update you on my presentation.

Until next week.

Currently, I’m writing a paper on the above topic. It is a paper long overdue from some past research work that I was involved in. In the paper, I discuss how graphic visualisation techniques and reflective practice can substantially inform research outcomes of a given project. In a way this paper digs in a bit deeper than my exegesis did concerning visualisation a content analysis. That’s fine though. I think my masters research went far enough that road, and stuck to its research question succinctly. Back to the paper though. I’ve been finding a whole lot of information though on visualisation but usually it is more directed towards clinical data, business data or any other data that presumably can be quantified into graphs, pie charts maps. What is missing though is some understanding of how qualitative information can be visualised and thus create relationships or enable researchers to ’see’ deeper into their own research. I know, I know. You guys will say, check out psychology or even a practice-based research project. Well I will keep looking but I think some sort of debriefing, intense and deep book on the subject in the design field is well over due. And yes, I am aware of Beasley & Noble’s book.
Okay, jumping a bit. This paper raised some questions for me as a design practitioner to explore. Some of you might be aware that I have found a concurrent passion to all this. It’s service design. I’m not going to get into the whole thing right now and how I ’saw the light’ but for now let us say that it is a field that I would like to explore and work on. With the economic crisis underway, businesses need to find ways to streamline their processes. Whether it be organizational, social or production, business are having a tough time keeping up without sacrificing usability and customer service. This paper got me to realise that possibly graphic literacy needs to be used within the workplace or better yet hired to educate decision makers and stakeholders of a company their options and strategies within these dark days. I’ll get the reference and insert it later but today I read that visualisation can help reduce cognitive load of understanding information and can in fact help create possibilities in the decision making process. If I can make this more explicit, it may be the starting point for something great.
Stay tuned!

Once again I apologize to my readers for the absolute lack of attension to this blog. The last four months have been a little bit ‘hairy’, with the submission of my exegesis and all. Actually, it will be submitted on Monday. The title has changed, which has been reflected in this blog as well. Teaching teachers: Learning through Graphic Literacy is the new update. It really reflects in a succinct manner the original with a stronger focus on what I have been really doing. It’s funny, I read it over once again before going to press and it seems really easy to read and thankfully, it all makes sense. There is a coherent structure to it now, which I accredit to some great supervision and editing by Mr. Jeremy Yuille. Also want to give public thanks to Mr. Paul Goodrick for his help in the editing process as well. Thanks! The entire document really takes the reader on a journey of my perceptions and conceptions of design education from the very beginning and follows through to a solid argument. I will talk about the argument a bit later. I don’t want to say large portions of the exegesis are formed around my reflections of this research, but let us say, there is substantial reflection. I believe this is good though, for a couple of reasons. One, it breaks away from traditional Master of Design research exegesis’, in a manner that the reflections demonstrate really what ‘research through design, (Downton, 1997) and practice-based research is about. Second, the reflections demonstrate increasing knowledge and ‘mastery’ of the subject matter. That is my point of view anyway.
The 114 page, perfect bound, magazine style exegesis contains: An introduction, A comic preface and writing describing “How it all Began”, “What’s going on in Design Education”, The Role of Graphic Literacy in Education, 3 comic chapters and a lot more! Should be a good read.

My next step is to defend it all in a presentation to my examiners. I will brief you more on this whole process soon.

The Educator’s Role in Preparing Visually Literate Learners
Susan E. Metros (2008)

Metros gives us a good background on how our culture has become dependant on the visual
-visual literacy: capacity to communicate instantly and universally.
-advances in technology fueled shift

- Some students and some teachers lack a vocabulary of vision to communicate non-verbally and the ability to express themselves visually

Why Visual Lit?
(Hicks & Essinger) (1991)
Research into cognitive science suggests that users prefer visual displays of information to verbal descriptions.

Not to negate written word as it is just as important. This multi-modal literaciy enhances highly cognitive thinking possibly by allowing the user to see relationships between graphics and text allowing a faster reaction to anylizing.

-The human eye-brain system automatically searches for a visual order and heirarchy in wat it perceives.

It reduces learning cognitive load by simplifying meaning and providing clarity to complex concepts.

(Some reasons above why graphic literacy, if used well, is important to facilitate pedagogical theories. Describe deep learning again?

Graphic/Visually Literacy
- connect abstract concepts to life
- direct user’s focus and attention
-aid the user’s perceptive and cognitive skills
-stimulate interest and excitement

Tang,G.
“Graphics have been shown to be efficient tools for making visible  the knowledge structures which underlie the information. In other words, graphics communicate the shape of the information, thus making it possible for students to transfer their learning beyond the immediate lesson.”

What?
It sounds a bit like student-centered learning. In this case graphics are used to stimulate learners to actively participate in their own learning and move beyond ’surface’ learning to start to think about relationships and abstraction.

“…graphics, thus, provide a context which can be recycled and reused…”

I thought it was a good idea at this stage, with of course suggestions from my supervisor, to map out my entire research. I want to create a visual map to describe my journey and more importantly my learning succession from my projects. Starting from Florence, Italy where I begun my research part-time to where I am now, busy after a penultimate, I tried to show my learning and deep knowledge through a “river” or line.
Take a look:

I found that any horizontal movement represents time that I was really learning something. Gaining knowledge. Although at the same time during this period I also felt I was doing nothing. In reality these time I was usually in “reflection” mode and during those times, quite often you don’t realize what you have learned until a bit after or quite awhile after! This is why after periods of reflection the line dips (representing deeper learning or understanding).  Got to go more later…

Let’s start again.
Throughout this mapping process, I learned about my progression, knowledge, and learning throughout this research. At first I included all the projects and what I learned from each project as well as comments from GRC panels and successive shifts in my research question. Papers were pasted up on my wall, from acceptance letters and rejections…to first skype meetings with my supervisors. I tried to remember what I was thinking during that time, what was I researching and why.
Here’s an excerpt on some of my thoughts then.

After filling up my wall, I tried to connect various projects with/within others, grouping, eliminating and really reflecting on what may have caused the shift of knowledge which I described in my last iteration of my map. To my supervisors and to myself it may be obvious of the progression but now especially wrapping things up I want to try and make this learning and knowledge explicit. In the last shift I tried to express major shifts in my research and thinking by placing horizontal dotted lines. But back to the progress…
Here is the one the first drafts:

I first tried to represent my learning by suggesting and linear vertical movement. I have not seen this time as a linear horizontal movement because that limits depth. The problem with this map is that it does not take into account for periods of learning, just depth. There were many times where I was reflecting on past projects, assembling fragments of discussions, activities, reading, sketching that needed to be accounted for visually. It seemed like a stairs going down, at each rise there was a project then (space) which was the step. Reflecting back on this (learning) space, at the time, I didn’t think I was learning. For the most part I was struggling with concepts and thinking about how to develop the research further (asking new questions). The space led to deeper learning and then another project. If I look that time now I see I was progressing my research by reflecting, reading, teaching and mapping. At one point on the map I pinpointed collecting material, reading literature surrounding educational structures and models. At the time I didn’t think much of it but now I find that information gave me the starting terminology to commence my deep reflection excersise where I wrote about my past teaching experiences. I started to introduce a lexicon into my writing through my previous research. That’s cool!

Other learning phases also consisted of presentations. For example my presentation at New Views 2 in London where I was locked up in a room with experienced educators from all over the globe! Here was the first time I felt very different opinions about design research, practice based research and the future of graphic design education. After my presentation I reflected on comments about my research and comic and I tried to begin to understand who my audience really was and how I could sculpt my narrative to engage educators. I also started to think about the use of the comic medium and graphics in general and how they may be better in communicating pedagogical theory. I didn’t know why yet but it definately laid a foundation.