Enjoying life with your design students...
by Paul Berkbigler, (5 comments)
As the semester starts to pick up some serious steam (and the students start to show the first signs of the midsemester steam wavering!), I’m back online to try to maintain my commitment to BE A to generate at least a post a month, and also back online to take a bit of a breather from grading, course planning, freelance work, freelance work, other school-related commitments, and everything else that continues to fill up my dayplanner. Adrian was kind enough to send a couple of links to me a few weeks back that provide some really illuminating advice for design students and teachers alike - comments that fall into “I wish I’d heard these as a student, but I’m glad to have them as an educator” category for me.
Enjoy some counsel from Allan Chochinov of Core77:
First, for students.
Second, for educators.
I’m just on the cusp of introducing a real-world project to my layout & design class that follows Allan’s “treat them like working designers, not like they’re only possibly going to be” line of thought: a collaborative project between business students taking a Marketing course and design students taking my Layout & Design course which will produce printed brochures for a couple other departments / programs on our university campus. If you just heard the sound of a couple screws and metal supports hitting the ground, you can guarantee it was a pair of training wheels falling off both the student and the educator experiences in this class.
I won’t deny that I have some “opening night” jitters running through my stomach as I look to tomorrow morning’s intro to the project plus a Tuesday morning meeting with our partner class teams to kick off the work, but I also remind myself that any performance that started without those jitters ended up fairly flat and lifeless anyway.
More news as the project unfolds - enjoy Allan’s comments in the meantime…
Comments (5)
PixelHustler said:
Ahh, one of the best things I got out of my time at RIT…the real client-driven projects! That’s great that you’re presenting your students with this opportunity. I know I always worked just a little bit harder, spent just a few more hours, and tweaked everything one more time when I was working on something that someone besides my teacher would see. Those projects just felt more “real.”
Posted on October 2, 2006
L-Fo said:
I can empathize with your jitters, but I can assure you that you will be making the right choice to give them a real world excercise. I teach a senior level design course, and I find that the students have to be treated as though they are designers especially at that level. I assume that they have been schooled in the basics of color theory, layout, composition, etc and that they are now ready to do some real work. I sort of approach my role in the classroom as though I am not necessarily a teacher (though they do learn) but that I am their Creative Director. I give them an assignment, debrief them and then help direct them to a successful result. I think at some point they need to be told the truth about the competitive nature of the design community (interms of finding work) and that they will need to have that passion and commitment to get work. I believe that many students don’t really view college as preparing for the real world but they just go through the motions to get that coveted “piece of paper” at the end of their 4 years. They need to be passionate about design and not just doing an assignment to “pass”. I try to instill some excitment and truth into my classroom as well as give them a feel for working with an Art Director. I have found it to be successful for both myself and the students and encourage other teahcers to at least give it a shot.
Posted on October 2, 2006
Nate Voss said:
Brilliant. Eye-opening. Thanks for pointing those out. Every educator could stand to read both of those.
As for the real work, we did a lick of that when I was at UNK but it paled to the internship I held at an ad agency over a summer. I honestly think it was because the work at the school was filtered through a professor at all times, and the work at the internship was much free-er. (“free-er” is not a real word, right?) As a result, it felt much closer to the work I do now professionally.
Posted on October 2, 2006
Kyle said:
Paul, I couldn’t find Allan Chochinov at Core77. Is it still online—can you provide a more specific link, please?
Posted on October 10, 2006
p.berkbigler said:
Kyle - You may have already figured it out, but if you simply click on either the “For students ” or “For educators” text above you’ll be directed immediately to Allan’s two articles…
He may not, in fact, be an explicit part of Core77 - sorry if my superficial research has provided misleading information!
Posted on October 10, 2006