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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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An Offering for Christ Church Philadelphia,
delivered to the full congregation on 17 November 2013,
at a service commemorating its (and – eventually – the Episcopal Church’s) 318th anniversary.

At the lectern….

My name is Andrew Phillips.
I usually sit over there with my family at the 11 o’clock service. Two pews behind where Betsy Ross sat; across and back a pew from where George Washington sat.
I’m sure there were other notables around us, but we never knew them.

I’m a member of Christ Church almost 15 years.
I’m here, because of you.

It could be I’m here because of my mother-in-law. Her family tradition asks that all the babies wear the same baptismal gown that’s been worn for generations.

It could be I’m here because of her daughter, Alice Dommert, whose hand I’m blessed to hold. If there’s no Alice, there’s no son; no son, no baptism; no Christ Church.

Elliot was a big baby. He would soon outgrow that gown. We had to ‘get it done’, and fast. It could be I’m here, because of Elliot.

We began to church shop. First stop: Christ Church. It was close; we lived in Old City.
Convenience, we figured, was important, totally misunderstanding that faith is never convenient.

One visit was all it took. It was early June, I think.

We met Tim, who’d arrived just two weeks prior. His sermon was brilliant that first day.
This, I wasn’t expecting. I thought it was a fluke. So we returned the next week to check. We’ve been coming ever since.

It could be I’m here because of Tim.

Soon, we met Harvey Bartle. He introduced himself without hesitation. Turns out his daughter Louisa is one of my graduate students in Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania.

Maybe it’s because of Harvey that I’m here.

Harvey’s wife, Nathalie, is a southern girl who hits it off with Alice, a Louisiana belle.
Maybe it’s because of Nathalie.

Two years later, we have our daughter Claire. Now we’re really in deep.
With her, I’m baptized from that font right back there, the same one used for William Penn.

It could be, because of Claire, I’m here.

A crisis. Though they barely know me, I turn to Sheldon Hackney and Harvey Bartle for help. They give it, just by listening, unconditionally.

To this day, I’m haunted (and humored) by the image of Harvey leaving a courtroom full of people stranded for an hour while he sits in his chambers and carefully listens to my dilemma by telephone.

Countless times a kind face and voice has come to our rescue, often in ways so subtle we didn’t even notice. This place is crawling with good Samaritans. I’m convinced they were a very quiet people.

It could be, because of the Samaritans I’m here.

Alice and I try to reciprocate. We try to give back, with whatever treasure, talent and time we have to offer, knowing it’s only a fraction of the abundance we receive.

A few years ago, Alice and I decide to take new life paths. New callings.

Alice trains to help others through yoga and mindful meditation. She begins to build her wellness practice. I leave Penn and become a public high school teacher.

No longer Andrew or Professor Phillips, I’m now ‘Yo, Mr. Phil’.

As Mr. Phil, I’ve witnessed tragedy and joy. Before, at best, I’d read about it. Before, it was always a safe distance. I now swim daily in a sea of teenagers and their struggles with multiple poverties: education, nutrition, opportunity, safety. You name it.

I’ve held students grieving over a classmate shot dead; a drug deal gone bad.

(I’ve held faculty at a Buddhist funeral, placed incense sticks into an open casket, sobbing over the loss of a shining young man who didn’t live to see his 18th birthday; a motorcycle accident. I’ve held that young man’s best friend who, a mere 6 months later, buries his own mother in the family plot, next to his best friend – there was no where else to bury the best friend.)*

I thought I was going to ChAD to teach a subject: design.

It became clear to me one night on the phone. ‘Aren’t you building buildings anymore?’ my father asked, confusion and slight disapproval palpable. Understandable, I have three degrees in architecture, including one from Harvard. ‘Dad,’ I said, ‘I used to build buildings. Now I’m building people.’

Every Sunday, you lift me up to go back in on Monday. Every Sunday, wherever I am, I get the message: you’re with me. It’s because of you I’m here.

I am an architect, so I speak with some authority on this. This is a building. (Gesturing to the vault above, the walls and columns surrounding us.)

But you – we – are the church. I am here because of you the church and, I hope, you are here maybe a little because of me.

What we put in that plate, what we pledge, helps us and everything around us.

It helps the clergy. It helps the music. It helps keep this building open, and that one, and the garden and the burial ground and all of it. It helps people yet to enter our door and it helps people who will never enter our door.

It’s not what you give; it’s what you leave, so you can depart with something else. Every time we come together – we depart with something greater.

The pockets might be a little emptier, but the heart is fuller.

Alice, Elliot, Claire and I give, as best we can – week after week – to lift up a place whose coordinates are almost magical. After all, I met Alice right over there (pointing south), on the El platform at 2nd and Market, one Saturday morning so many decades ago.

We lift this place up because it lifts us up. Every time. That’s why we pledge, every year.

Most every Sunday we come, maybe a bit empty, but we leave something here and we depart fuller. We depart with more in our heart than in our pocket. And that’s good.

And we hope what we leave behind helps to make the next three centuries as giving to the people we’ll never know as it has been to us.

Because of you. Thank you.

* Omitted during the witness: too hard.

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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.