Many of our creative celebrities are teachers. Michael Beirut, for instance, is a senior critic at Yale. Jessica Helfand is too. Steve Heller is Co-Chair of the design program at the School of Visual Arts. Ellen Lupton is at MICA; Frank Chimero at Portland State University; swissmiss at Parsons. And many of our other celebs give design/illustration/art workshops periodically. It’s understandable if you didn’t know this. A lot of designers and bloggers don’t exactly advertise their … day job? (It’s often noted in their about sections, except for Lupton and Helfand who frequently write and publish about their experiences as teachers.)

There is a serious disconnect between the external world of the designer and the academic world. Over the past two years, I’ve noticed that many or most of my students don’t read blogs, don’t know contemporary or emerging creatives, don’t understand how to engage with their crafts in practical terms. This is because we don’t teach them how. It’s not a secret that the transition from academia to the world at large is a difficult one to make, particularly in a creative field, but we can do more to prepare our students.

Perhaps this should be two blog posts. Anyway, I’ll start with the online community. Course syllabi are not necessarily easy to come by. Of course, if you Google “graphic design syllabus” or “illustration syllabus” you’ll see a flurry of choices; but how do we know which ones are effective? Which methods are the best? What projects produce the most important results? Without the thinking behind the syllabus, we don’t know how to choose. Several years ago, Steve Heller compiled a book to help us organize design education; but this is limited to design and now seven years old. My point is that putting our syllabi online through a class website or even, I daresay, on our own sites (which is preferable), would add to the dialogue surrounding the education of our students and foster our own development as teachers. Thus, I’m introducing a new section in my sidebar specifically to provide access to the goings-on of our class, including a link to our site.

Let’s return to the observation that my students essentially don’t understand how a blog might relate to them. I want my students and my classroom to be on the forefront of the creative community. Well, I mean that I want them to engage with said forefront, whatever that means to them. And they need the tools to understand what’s happening in the community in order to engage with it.

I’m experimenting with a few new requirements this semester, which will most likely pop up here and definitely on our class website. First, in addition to our regular presentation on historical illustrators, there is now a supplemental blog post component. Next, we are reading three books throughout the semester and a portion of our discussion will take place online. Lastly, I’m offering them extra credit for creating interesting and intelligent blog articles that I can post either here or on our site. All of these activities are designed to help them better understand how to use the internet as a tool. I want them not only reading blogs, but commenting. The world is more accessible than we often think; the internet has shown us that. Lastly, I believe that this dialogue is important for our community of illustrators and designers.

It’s important for us not just to talk about what’s happening in our classes, but how we interpret and perceive current media and trends. It’s happening already (or starting), with projects like Study Partner and The MIT Lab and to some extent Thinking for a Living; doubtless other places too. This trend – of accessibility of information, of engaging dialogue and learning – continues here.

Some possibly useful links relating to our topic:
AIGA’s Design Education
RISD (keeps much information online)
Design Education
Study Partner
Studio H
Design Is History (a little off topic)