Hello all,
I jump in and hope that this is in line with the commentary thus far....very little time but here goes.
I pick up on Mark Evans' thread and add our perspective:In our institution the requirement for professors with Ph.D.s is very strong and if we advertise for a PH.D. we must hire one. However, we also believe strongly in having the baccalaureate level exposure to the practice and the experience of practitioners who teach. We have found that we can hire those from the field as adjunct and they add a richness on helping develop the specificity of practice, while the professors may arrive with the terminal Masters and the preferred Ph.D.s each with diverse theory, practice or theory/practice backgrounds....
We have an interesting mix of what Mark describes, with the older faculty from the teaching / consulting backgrounds and the newer faculty with mixed theoretical or theoretical/practice mix or pure traditional Ph.Ds....Ideally, a practitioner who has reflected on their practices and brings this to all levels of education, baccalaureate, masters or Ph.D. is interesting as a way of allowing both perspectives to co-exist, not "either-or"....in my mind, theory informs practice and practice in turn informs theory and this is the richness of design education.
I agre with Mark that the new requirements may hamper the "practice" element in teaching, but I would propose that at bacc level practice must be balanced with reflection (critical theory) and research , inversely, must have a thread of situating the realities of practice in theory-maling. We are trying to create this balance with a diverse corps of professors who show students diverse points of view.
Best
Tiiu
Tiiu PoldmaUniversity of MontrealMontreal, Canada
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