I love to teach design. I feel as though I am genuinely working on the future of the discipline in the classroom.

I approach my teaching with a scholarly rigor, attempting to understand the history of the methods of teaching design, and attempting to practice experimental pedagogy in order to continually adapt to changes in tools, media and audiences for design. This experimental attitude challenges the historical methods at key strategic points. It is a personal goal to educate leaders, not followers. Design instruction that mimics contemporary clinical practice will render good employees, but will not prepare any student for visionary practice.

It has been, and continues to be my ambition for my students to become leaders in the field of design. It has simultaneously been important to me that the student want to be pushed. My ambition for them is not normative nor fascist. It has been important to me that the student exhibit desire, hunger, or drive. I have taken it as my challenge to identify and awaken that desire by my passion for the subject matter in the classroom. I feel strongly that the student must be an equal partner in this, or more so, because the drive to excel must be internalized by the student. If the drive is always supplied by external pressure, then the student will not continue after we have parted company.

In the classroom, it is, has been, and will be my interest to see that the student seek, find, and assert their own artistic and intellectual capability. This capability will find its expression in a diversity of forms, visual, verbal, and performative. In my context at the University of Denver this has taken the form of requiring advanced students to embark on meditations of self and process through their work. The theory being that if the students gain self-awareness of their methods, they can then work to create and protect situations wherein they can be lifelong creators. The results aren’t always pretty or beautiful in a canonical sense, but the ethic of the making is so important that it matters more that they continue to make.

As I address the challenge of preparing students to slip into a highly dynamic situation, I continually ask myself the question “what is appropriate and necessary to teach – to pass on – today?”.

I find myself in a critical relationship with the historical methods of teaching. Methods that were formulated and disseminated in the 1920s at the Bauhaus, and which were refined in the 1950s at the HochSchule fer Gestaltung Ulm, and the Kunst GewerbeSchule at Basel, found receptive institutions in the US at Black Mountain College, Yale, MIT, the Illinois Institute of Technology, and at UC Berkeley. At these august centers of artistic learning, the new, modernist methods of making, and teaching about making, were synthesized with methods that were original to the Ecole de Beaux Arts, Paris, from the turn of the 18th century.

It is a special and ongoing challenge to recognize when it is appropriate to draw from this rich history, and when it is appropriate to critique the history and seek another way.

[…]

This is an excerpt. There are a few more paragraphs. It was (re)written in 1996, 2002, and 2006. Not Now that I look at it again, it requires more rewriting. I am no longer teaching anything like what I was teaching when I wrote it. Some of the more concrete elements need to change.

The statement has emerged from a reflection on my values, and my understanding of the history of my discipline, and of how that discipline has been passed on to generations leading up to mine. It has three audiences. The first audience is myself in that I hope to render an accurate reflection. The second audience is potential students. They don’t always care, but if they do, it is my aim that my actions in the classroom will resonate with my statements above. The third audience is potential ajudicators of hiring, tenure, and promotion decisions. To the extent that an institution cares about the quality of instruction, a coherent teaching statement that resonates with in-classroom action will be important. (ugh, clumsy syntax)

I have posted this excerpt here for @Notational (Justin Lincoln). It was too long and clumsy for a direct message via Tumblr’s infrastructure.