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To draw is to select, to select is to interpret, and to interpret is to propose.

Manuel de Sola-Morales

“The Culture of Description,” Perspecta 25

Cynthia Ballenger writes, “In our minds as we teach are goals and objectives, evaluations and directives, and a whole host of assumptions about how things should go. The act of teaching, however, does not often encourage curiosity” (2019, p. 5). I suggest that if curiosity is not the active agent animating the work, then that work is not teaching. Perhaps it is something else: administering.

I entered secondary education sideways: a practicing architect and university lecturer, I left to teach at and then help lead a Philadelphia charter high school. In that capacity, with an extraordinary team, I’ve cultivated a national model for 9-12 design education.

Walking down the halls, listening to what was emanating through an open door, I often commiserate with students: ‘what, precisely, were the teachers doing?’ Perhaps this was instruction, but it wasn’t learning. The sense of a quest, pursuing a quandary, the thrill of a search, was completely absent. This was particularly true of a language arts class across the hall.

Dutro rightly points out that students will resist their marginalization (2009), often through their voice, be it written or spoken. In this case, the resistance takes the form of bored disengagement. Detached from the subject, the students bide their time until the bell. Curricular inequity continues unchecked by student opportunity. It’s devoid of their language and voice to construct, maintain and resist (Dutro, 2009). For the students, the formal curriculum’s point of view remains a distant prospect.

This literacy backdrop offers yet another glimpse into design education’s potential. Design education covers a vast terrain of learning activities informed by professional design fields and their respective practices. Historically, design education is situated either in higher education, to prepare students for design professions, or in professional practice, as part of continuing education (Schön, 1991). In the late 1960s, artificial intelligence pioneer Herbert Simon (1969) helped coin the term ‘design thinking’. He suggested that design is a way of thinking in the sciences, writing “Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones” (Simon, 1988, p. 67). It is fundamentally a praxis of making, informed through its own locus of literacy.

In the design classroom, making is the constant. Sketching, drawing construction, and model construction are a daily enterprise as students learn to ‘think with their hands’. They are, quite literally, constructing points of view through every act of making. Students establish, cultivate, and express their ‘epistemic privilege’ (Campano, 2007; Moya, 2002; Dutro, 2009) because they are the authors, forging the connections, the narrative through lines of their projects. Students form points of view, critically study their propositions, and refine these prospects of understanding through iterative layers of work and reflection. In lieu of written language, the literacy of making yields artifacts reflecting the process. Collectively, they offer a trail of breadcrumbs to guide the discussion. Through making, facilitated by a teacher functioning as a shepherd, students construct their curriculum.

Projects originate from a conceptual prompt (often determined through parallel lists and a roll of multi-sided dice). Students construct their narrative through iterative work layers. As the process unfolds, each artifact is a response to prior artifacts. Other than dimensional parameters – essentially, formatting – there are no boundaries of ‘possible responses’ (Dutro, 2009) against which the work can be measured. Such a notion is antithetical to the design process, which seeks solutions, not answers. Critiques are offered regarding craft (technical understanding, practices, and skills) and, more importantly, concepts. (Process is also evaluated. This is a time management analysis, relating efforts and outcomes.)

Concepts can not be directly evaluated nor matched against ‘possible responses’. Instead, the work artifacts are an argument: making is an act of rhetoric, the artifacts are articles of persuasion. The student offers both their premises and their constructed responses through their work. The work is then the focus of the critical dialogues which follow. Making, whether two-dimensional drawing or three-dimensional model, is object based inquiry. Ideas are embedded in the objects and teased out through dialogue. These objects, laden with assumptions, transparently or opaquely offer world views. Studied closely, artifacts can be understood as evidence of a point of view.

Reciprocally, “Students’ ideas, their work and their words, are embedded in their lives and in their cultural and intellectual experiences” (Ballenger, 2019, p. 1). She validates design education’s intent. “When we pay their ideas and approach a searching attention, [students] have the capacity to not only demonstrate their intelligence and share their ideas but also to cause us to question some of our own unquestioned assumptions about teaching and about subject matter. When we make students’ words and ideas the objects of inquiry…we are granting our students the sort of respect all thinkers deserve” (p. 6).

Design literacy feeds design thinking. It is a skill, cultivated through a hybrid of life experience and formal training, whereby the relationships between criteria (both physical parameters and intangible influences) and results might be decoded or applied. Like language, design literacy is a tool wielded to privilege certain perspectives over others, intentionally or not, in the construction of an identity. (Dutro, 2009). The design thinker operationalizes his or her literacy into a problem solving instrument. Contexts are studied, assumptions are made, responses are developed, tested, and refined. Design literates actively construct their knowledge. They develop and wield an awareness: a knowledge and a skill set indeginous to the design fields. Meanwhile, through design literacy practices, design thinking draws from social constructivist frameworks and offers students empowerment and agency – empathy, creativity, and rationality – to apply to their problem solving.

Pacione (2010) offers a historical argument for the potential of design literacy to disrupt education and impact information age commerce. He notes that business leaders, educational practitioners – and some politicians – fervently advocate the role of design in their enterprises. This fervor is supported by a 10 year study into design led businesses relative to their peer economies. According to the study, design literate businesses trounced the competition by 200%. Ballenger notes, “The conventions and culture of teaching define what counts as an appropriate interpretation or response in academic work…these evaluations by teachers tend to rule out, or even miss altogether, unexpected and often powerful ideas and responses rooted in students’ varying experiences and backgrounds” (2019, p. 1). If teachers can not predict the ‘possible response’, this threat to creative agency is neutralized.

The challenge design literacy faces, besides schools readmitting making as a curricular necessity, is how to harness the processes and dialogues without constraining the inquiry stance. It is important not to assume a ‘generic’ student exists or standard response is even possible. By its very nature, design thinking is rooted in context, including native biases, and resists linear compartmentalization toward a solution. Responses should not be anticipated. Artifacts must be received on the terms of their making. This is not to suggest, however, they are beyond the reach of critique. The question is how to bridge the likely gap between student and teacher cultural experience in such a way as to receive the former, without imposing the latter, yet still draw the work toward excellence. At a more basic level, how can teachers, too often vested in the model of delivering content rather than working through unanswerable questions, detach from such praxis to embrace the fluidity of design thinking?

References

Ballenger, C. (1992). Because You Like Us: The Language of Control. Harvard Educational Review, 62(2), 199-208.

Ballenger, C. (2019). Reframing the Achievement Gap. Lessons from Puzzling Students. The Reading Teacher. August 28, 2019. Vol. 73 (2), pp. 141-147

Christensen, K.S., Hjorth, M., & Iversen, O.S. (2016). Towards a formal assessment of design literacy: Analyzing K-12 students’ stance towards inquiry. Design Studies 46, 125-151.

Dutro, E. ( 2009). Children writing “Hard Times”: Lived Experiences of Poverty and the Class-Privileged Assumptions of a Mandated Curriculum. Language Arts 87(2), 89-98.

Isola, R. & Cummins, J. (2020). Transforming Sanchez School: Shared Leadership, Equity and Evidence. (2020). Philadelphia: Caslon Publishing.

Paris, D. & Alim, H. S. (2017). Culturally sustaining pedagogies: Teaching and learning for justice in a changing world. New York, NY: Teachers College Press

Schön, D.A. (1983). The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action. Boston: Basic Books.

Simon, H. (1969). The Sciences of the Artificial (1st ed.). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Pacione, C. (2010). Evolution of the mind: A case for design literacy. Interactions, 17(2), 6-11.

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Decades ago, my classmates and I would share beers before last call. Another pitcher, or two, in Zeno’s basement and we’d be back to our desks, working the night through. Thesis reviews were close.

We were living the closing weeks of five years together studying Architecture. We’d all seen one another at their best and their worst. Stalling one night, a mock award ceremony commenced. My award: most likely to become my thesis.

This thesis included the design of a hypothetical monastery, anchored on an open parcel in Brooklyn, just north of the bridge’s massive pier. The site stretched between the majestic river and a long, abandoned warehouse once used as a hospital during the Civil War. Surveying the buildings, I’d wonder what primitive medicine occurred within the thick brick walls punctuated by rhythmic arched openings. Those events were far back enough in time that the creepiness had worn off. It was just spooky.

That year, I came to know my site’s prospect well. Ever since, I recognize the location popping up in countless movies and television shows. Not because movies and television feature the site or the former hospital; they use the place for the view. Lower Manhatten becomes the scenic backdrop for dramatic characters pacing unseen ground, my ground. Or it offers an iconic shot, an opening establishing place: New York City.

I didn’t understand any of this at the time. I just thought it was the right place for the idea. My monks were Franciscans, an order dedicated to serving the city. In this case: Manhatten, just across the water. It was a good story. All thesis’ are stories. This was probably the best part of mine.

Today, I realize I actually have become my thesis: I teach High School.

Daily, I take an early train into the City of Philadelphia. From my modest home in a near-burb, I cross the waters of the Schuylkill River, a horizontal sun peeking between Center City’s skyscrapers. If it’s not mid-winter, then it’s still below.

It’s a quiet journey. Interior. Monk-like. You prepare for the day.

At day’s end, during the ride out, the sun’s on the other side. Low, if it’s still up. It’s a short ride but I have to set the alarm on my phone so I don’t miss my stop. Exhaustion too often prevails over will.

In between, my daily performance: Mr. Phillips. 7.30am to 4.30 or 5pm, no intermission. This is the role I play.

The performance is not an act. It’s a calling: it’s where my gifts, meager as they are, attempt to meet the world’s needs, massive as they are. It’s a vocation in the city. Daily, I work with the utterances of pleading youth rising out of the streets. It’s the most compelling work I’ve ever done.

I left my position at an Ivy League school for this. I’d worked there fifteen years with Graduate and Undergraduate students studying architecture. It was a great job. I learned how to be an instructor from masters at the trade. And I remained a student, learning how to understand the world.

To my surprise, as much as I enjoyed that life, I have yet to miss its comforts. At Penn, technically, my title was ‘Lecturer’, or some version of that. Students would call me ‘Professor’ until I corrected them with the more familiar ‘Andrew’ and the semester would politely unfurl.

I now respond to ‘Yo, Mr. Phil, Philly Phil, P-Money’, whatever. That’s fine. I used to profess. Now I teach.