20.06.14 - Teaching Graphic Design in schools

This Friday I attended a UAL symposium event held of the London College of communication where a selection of teachers delivering GCSE up to FAD discussed the versatile approaches and successfully ways of teaching graphic design. The event also held a series of talks form UAL staff and designers focusing on their studio practice, their design education and what they expected form young graduates. 

The event was extremely important with recent changes to the curriculum being delivered in schools and with myself teaching on a higher level course, ensuring that what was being delivered prior to this was relevant and offered students the correct experience and skill set before embarking onto a Foundation Diploma or degree. We were sectioned off into groups to discuss each of your own delivery sty;es, workshop practice and general comments on how we approach design education. We were then asked to present our findings in  scheme of work depicting skills to be obtained, how we felt this was a strong approach and what the fundamental of design education were. Throughout the night there was important information, disagreements and laughter all of which is to be expected when you place a collection of lecturers and teachers in a small space of who all consider what they deliver to be "correct". 

The night ended we an overall study of everyone's schemes and some discussed that they would consider carrying this forward into the new academic year as a prototype to consider differentiation of levels and to then analyze the results that could then start a new symposium event. Any opportunity to break from the building, meet and network with others and constantly learn about what is changing in design education is a beneficial day. I have considered the possibility of writing a brief that tests the differentiation between levels of students with my own department, this is something that was recently discussed at our department meetings and tends to be an ongoing topic that is flagged. This could be a great opportunity to put some of what has been discussed to a practical test and really explore what students require, need and can achieve at their current level. 

I can only feel that this topic and post will be revisited and continued.