Part 1: Learnings from Design teachers in India
- kiran kulkarni
- Jun 23, 2022
- 5 min read
Design is one of the most popular courses in India. Roughly over 2.5 lakh students take design courses in over 4000 design & architecture schools every year. I was recently invited to an Architecture department in an Engineering School to interact with the teachers, trainers, guides and students to discover some key issues while teaching and learning design courses. The interaction was aimed to discover teachers' motivations and find possible ways to deal with it in their planning, processes and pedagogy development.
I planned a weekly working session for over 2 months with around 18 teachers to explore “learning centric issues”. I shared a board with teachers to add their ideas, thoughts and we had a series of discussions on the topics of concern or interest. We collectively agreed to dive deep into various aspects of learners, their journeys , facilities, pedagogic references, role models, learning problems and so on. The sessions did start with a strong bias -“ We know design, they (students) don’t work hard to learn the concepts”. It took me a while to dilute this situation and guide my way for open discussions on issues and not get restricted on personal opinions about students in general.
BIG ROCKS
“I struggle to understand and address the students world”
As the group got comfortable and were able to gauge the purpose of the sessions, teachers opened up about their struggle to relate to what was happening in the students' world. Smaller attention spans, addiction to mobiles, not taking accountability, not participating in design jams, not inspired, not taking ownership, not enjoying the exercises, not interested ….. the problem list was endless when it came to students. As we progressed, the important question that was really emerging was “what is the student's world? What are the things that drive them? What are their fears, insecurities, their likings and capacities to create things that they can relate to”. These learner centric questions changed the conversation from “that is what they have to learn” to “what is learning in design”. Teachers expressed their discomfort to accept this reality and hesitated to change the position of “my way”. But consistently the teachers expressed that they knew very little about the students' world and are keen to find ways to include learners' interest in the topics that they wanted to teach.
Many teachers felt that it is too much effort getting deeper into students' worlds and outcomes are either uncertain or not clear. Some felt that it's not even their job to really address this. The teachers sensed “fear, lack of interest” as key behaviours haunting starters/freshers, followed by losing faith in the education system, avoiding design exercises, finding alternate ways to pass the exams by mid term students and job seeking/centric behaviours for final year students. Most teachers sought systemic help to address students' world and “connect” with students.
“We do not have a philosophy, structure while teaching, its fragmented, each teacher brings the best of what he knows but that does not help in tying things together”
Unlike design courses whose historic root of much of today's contemporary design education is Bauhaus or Ulm school, the architecture courses flourished as part of larger university setups way back in 1913 in JJ College of Arts extending its art course. As early as 1954, students graduated as architects from Engineering schools like IIEST Shibpur. This trend of the Architecture department as part of Engineering schools rose exponentially in the last 10 years. With exceptions like government funded schools like SPA (1941) Delhi, CEPT (1962), Ahmedabad which initiated modern foundations of architectural education, most design departments under local engineering colleges failed to build their own local philosophies of design. There may be several reasons which we will discuss later but the bottom line is teachers struggle to agree upon objective knowledge based models to more explorative subjective, try and learn models. This gap creates a huge vacuum to learners as well as teachers as it tends to be open ended.
We see this as less of an issue in colleges that were started/driven by Designers themselves like the IDC, CEPT, SPA, WCFA and few more. Common pedagogic structure creates the philosophy of the school and lack of common structure fails to construct any common ideology supporting pedagogy. We should note here “Syllabus” cannot be seen as a common structure, since it's a mere description of contents that is planned to be taught in a program.
Teachers found it annoying during design reviews that many experts are free to say their points of view and it is left to the learner to pick that suits his context. Students are not just happy with this evaluation system and they have been fighting ever since to get a more structured feedback on their designs, that helps him build his knowledge, confidence and capacity to take more complex situations to grow.
“ I am not sure how to increase the quality of my guiding or any design process, I do not have a systematic method, I struggle”
Extending the above this problem surfaces due to lack of any feedback loops to teaching activities. Teachers struggle with their confidence if they cannot clearly see their efforts are working or not. And most often they do have the tools, techniques or ways to get this feedback. Feedbacks are not restricted from students alone, but they expect from their own peers, other experts, friends and institutions. If they fail to get positive feedback on their work, it gets harder to design/plan their course. Most design schools do not have a vibrant feedback system. The periodic design exam scores, teachers feedback forms, annual reviews do not actively account as continuous feedback mechanisms to improve and build pedagogy.
An active feedback system flourishes in a place where learning goals are agreed, teachers are open to each other's feedback, they co-teach, they collaborate strongly on projects or any activities as observers and drivers. Many modern startups encourage collaborative construction of services, the academia can look into their success stories to see how it might work in their situations.
“I want to motivate myself to increase the quality of guiding by strong design process, tools and investigation”
Teachers finally questioned their own self motivations. They felt that to really stay inspired and feel great to come to college everyday ,they needed to look into themselves to make space for this creative activity. They expressed concerns on getting habituated to routine monthly salary structures, lesser involvement in practice, difficulty to keep pace with changes, and planning time for pedagogy related work. Teaching a design course is an exhaustive experience as you will have to listen to hundreds of ideas, direct them, fix them, build on them, give solutions, give references, give success stories, practical tips, guide students via reality as well as enriching their imagination on a daily basis. This is no easy task.
Teachers struggled to plan their daily activities, they are looking forward to any help, feedback from their peers, students and senior faculty to grow.
I will be adding more findings to this article in coming weeks. Leave your comments to keep you informed.
Upcoming topics
Top challenges while guiding design
Future of design teaching
How might we solve some key issues
Compare Format (Syllabus) centric, Learner centric, Ideology centric approaches using learner journey maps.
Conclusions
References:
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