Carrying out the exercise for a third year questioned the relationship between what I was establishing as teaching objectives and the actual understanding that the students were taking with them.
This year was more complicated than the previous ones for the group grew to around 60 students. I brought along Alfonso Gómez Arzola as a second instructor to help in the process.
I did became aware of general creative stagnation in the development of the books. All I can really think of is that it has to do with the size of the class. It was hard to get collaboration going between many of the groups and it was even harder to communicate with the students on a more personal level.
If I have the opportunnity to perform the activity once again, I will have to analyze the implications of the exercise and evaluate how to alter it to make it more revealing to a larger class. I will probably consider the possibility of asking to divide the group in two and invite another graphic designer to teach the other half.
These are some of the 2007 samples made by the students.
Being re-invited for a second year in a row to partcipate in the program allowed me to explore the pedagogic implications of my teaching style, while at the same time develop an explanatory strategy about the idea behind design research.
The bit of informality which I had introduced the first year of the exercise did not generate a clear instructor/student relation. I thought that with such an approach I would have established a better student/teacher relation, but in reality, it created problems of respect. This second time around I addressed this issue by modelling myself into a more professor than friend.
These are some of the 2006 samples made by the students.
During 2005, 2006 and 2007 I was invited to be the graphic design instructor in the Polytechnic University of Puerto Rico’s Architecture School’s Summer Program for High School students. The summer program is very similar to the design camps in the US, where design schools expose high school level students to various disciplines that might be of interest to them as they near the college selection stage.
I used my experience at Barcelona, building on the framework established by Müller’s exercise, to create a week long experience for the students. The program I established tried to provide a glimpse of the many stages of a graphic design proyect: research, content, form, material selection, execution and delivery. At the end of the week program there was a general critique were the students had explain the reasoning behind all of the categories and the final outcome.
These are the 2005 samples made by my students as I first implemented the proyect for real testing.
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In May of 2005 I attended the LAUS Awards and design week at Barcelona, where I was a student of Lars Müller. The 6 day course he titled The book as an object. In this studio/seminar excercise we explored the relationship between a book’s communicative condition and its innevitable fate being an object.
Identity of the LAUS 2005 awards.
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As I have been able to observe from various creatives in different fields, one of the most essential aspects of any professional career is being able to provide it with a constant influx of energy, a continued exposure to contemporary ideas and a round-the-clock laboratory to experiment. For many, the classroom proves to be this space to search and find such needs.
I am in the beginning stages of my career, and as such, I seek to understand the professional field of design that sorrounds me. As I undergo my initial investigations in form and function, as both a designer and a current graduate student at North Carolina State University, I am also priviledged with the opportunity of learning through teaching.
As a graduate student, I am part of a teaching seminar class with Meredith Davis. We are covering a wide-range of general pedagogic ideas, traditions, tools and styles.
As a current teaching assistant I aid Santiago Piedrafita in a senior level practicum class. Through him I am learning pedagogic ideas of timing, patience, context, project objectives, deliverables, and course descriptions. Every session he teaches generates a personal conversation within me where I question things I assumed or that I thought I knew about graphic design and its teachings.
I have created this page to explore and understand what it is that I am learning through teaching. I can only know that I’ve learned something once I have been able to explain it to others, so I will use these written expressions to develop (and/or understand) a pedagogic self.
