Since 1998, I've taught design in one form or another at Flagler College, The University of New Mexico, Santa Fe Community College, Cañada College and Vancouver Island University. I have a career that I'm passionate about, thanks to my teachers, and I feel pretty strongly that its important to do the same for the next generation of designers.
I've taught graphic design and web design courses at nearly every level, from beginners to advanced. At St. Augustine, Florida's Flagler College, I introduced graphic design students to basic Macintosh based design software: Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop and (at the time) Quark Xpress.
At Santa Fe Community College in Santa Fe, New Mexico, I first taught two levels of web design, refining and updating the course material to encompass the evolution of online design and production techniques. After being hired as an Associate Professor, I rewrote and enhanced the interactive design core of the Media Arts program. I expanded from two courses to five, adding beginning visual design and graphic design fundamentals to the early years of the program and advanced CSS and individualized project-based courses to the upper division. I expanded the school's online education offerings, and taught several distance learning courses. I also created a sort of cohort plan, encouraging students to pass through the courses sequentially over their time pursuing their degree and to work with the same group of collaborators through their time at the institution. This focus on collaboration was planned to enhance group-based problem solving as a realistic model for future employment.
I also modified to program to rework the two core classes to focus on non-traditional students, creating in essence a second course track allowing for shorter, seminar-based courses for working adults and other non-traditional students to explore web design, as was demanded by our community mandate. This allowed for different levels of intensity for each track, encouraging the appropriate level of effort and instruction for each group.
I also worked in an administrative capacity, advising students on degree plans and serving on committees in the institution. I worked closely with the Department Chair and other faculty to encourage enrollment, and developed revised art for the institution's standard template recruiting brochure.
I taught Architecture students at the University of New Mexico a seminar on basic principles of graphic design as applied with Adobe's software, so that they could better present their projects and themselves to audiences.
These experiences with online learning led me to the focus of my Master's thesis, an exploration of the possibilities of distance learning for design students. My master's class core group included many foreign nationals, and I was taken by the idea that while remote collaboration between different parts of the world are common and succesful in business, they are much less so in education. Research led me to postulate a hypothetical course model for teaching design specific courses in a distance learning environment. I focused on a web design course for my thesis, but the model could be applied to any visual design or graphic design course. While still mostly unfeasible technologically, the learning model I applied to my speculative remote environment—Project Based Learning—has informed my teaching ever since.
Most recently, I've been teaching Graphic Design for Publishing at Vancouver Island University, which has been really exciting for me. Instead of bemoaning the end of traditional publishing, I've instead challenged the students to find new ways to present a publishing model—in this instance, newspapers—that could flourish in our modern environment. Options included alternative formats of size and paper, as well as user-interaction options such as encouraging commuters to write comments upon newspapers and leave them for other people to read and further comment on, a sort of 19th century discussion board. From the best possibilities for paper publishing, we moved into design for tablet based reading—all the while instructing the fundamentals of good publication design—typography, layout, grid theory.
I feel strongly enough that design instruction must embrace the future while remaining mindful of its roots. Web design, graphic design, interaction design—whatever the course or program, the fundamental skills a designer must learn can be taught and made applicable and relevant to the student and their creative path. Mastery of these fundamentals will allow students of all fields to be flexible enough and innovative enough to adapt to the design challenges we as instructors cannot even imagine yet.
“The plan is success. The details are forthcoming.”
—JTK