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Dear Lubomir Andrew and All I have to agree with the sentiment that what happens at schools affects what is possible at universities. For the last four and a half years I have been responsible for developing curriculum and assessment in design for the senior school system in Western Australia. One of the tasks has been to incorporate a range of pre existing subjects into a single design course. We now have a design course with a single set of sullabus content that is taught in four contexts; Graphic, Technical Graphics, Photography and Dimensional Design. These contexts allow teachers to have some link to their previous subjects, and now that the course has run for two years, teachers are beginning to see the benefits of teaching across contexts and broadening the educational approach. 2010 was the first year of the external exam for this course (Design is now a university entry subject)and the examiners chose to set a common exam. This exam produced good results on all measures and was well received. A feature of the course that is of benefit to university education is the emphasis on themes; for example in stage 3 (typically year 12)the themes are Environment in first semester and politics in the second. All students respond to task with these themes and the theme becomes more significant than the context. From reviewing student work in 2010 it is clear that the emphasis on the topic is weakening the sylos. I am now developing a program at university level and find that students who have come through this school system are prepared to take on bigger picture tasks. With other colleagues we are now in the process of developing programs that focus on sustainability with opportunities to deal with both 2D and 3D elements. Regards Alun Alun Price Edith Cowan University Western Australia ----- Original Message ----- From: "Lubomir Savov Popov" <[log in to unmask]> To: [log in to unmask] Sent: Tuesday, 15 March, 2011 3:44:04 AM GMT +08:00 Beijing / Chongqing / Hong Kong / Urumqi Subject: Re: innovative curriculum design: getting rid of the old vocational silos Dear Andrew, You point towards something very important: "The knowledge and understanding of the young applicant is built upon either their secondary school curriculum, or the advice of their teachers. Both of these sources are normally hopelessly out of touch with current thinking..." I have the same problem. In secondary school, students develop the wrong impressions about the nature of professions. Secondary school students are counseled by teachers who interpret professions in a very outdated way, or just not very professionally. Most of the students who come to interior design believe that it is about decorating your bedroom. It takes several years to change such believes. The effort is about changing student convictions without affecting the integrity of their personality. Your idea that the disciplinary thinking is already developed in secondary school might change the flow of the discussion. Actually, the problem with disciplinary organization of knowledge is be bigger that its implications for design education. The innovation should start at the early stages of education, at least in secondary school. Once the habits and the beliefs are established, it takes a lot of pain and effort to debunk them. However, when we expand the problem to review the whole educational system, I would rather back off. It is too much of an endeavor. Best, Lubomir -----Original Message----- From: PhD-Design - This list is for discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Andrew Jackson Sent: Sunday, March 13, 2011 4:55 AM To: [log in to unmask] Subject: Re: innovative curriculum design: getting rid of the old vocational silos Whilst I concur with all the previous posts about disciplinary boundaries and faculty inertia, the problem is compounded, in the UK at least, by the fact that under-graduate courses are market driven. Courses that don't recruit don't run. This means that academics who are re-developing or re-naming courses have to keep in mind whether or not the average teenager will buy into their new offer. The knowledge and understanding of the young applicant is built upon either their secondary school curriculum, or the the advice of their teachers. Both of these sources are normally hopelessly out of touch with current thinking, in either higher education, or in the design industry. The consequence of this is that courses called 'Graphic Design' or 'Product Design' are much more likely to be given the green light by faculties than courses called 'Visual Communication' or 'Interaction Design', simply because they are more likely to recruit students. Andrew Jackson --- On Sat, 12/3/11, Gunnar Swanson <[log in to unmask]> wrote: From: Gunnar Swanson <[log in to unmask]> Subject: Re: innovative curriculum design: getting rid of the old vocational silos To: [log in to unmask] Date: Saturday, 12 March, 2011, 13:43 On Mar 12, 2011, at 5:36 AM, Andy Polaine wrote: > Gunnar - I don't buy the argument that, "one of the several reasons that a system of silos has evolved is that it is an easier structure for the assurance of quality." My experience has been that this kind of management, especially in large academic institutions, offers an illusion of the assurance of quality, but it's far removed from what happens at the coalface. The process of government QA audits is that the institutions prime their staff, send out forms to fill in to assess the quality of teaching and research. Faculty know what they *should* fill in here (and are sometimes coached in this) rather than what the reality is. This gets fed upwards and filtered and presented to an audit committee who hear exactly what they want to hear. It's the same effect as the old joke that the Queen thinks the whole world smells of fresh paint. All the boxes are ticked and management assume everything is working fine, but it isn't. That's why top-down command and control of silos is so often a failure in terms of lived experience of faculty and students. Andy-- Sorry if I seemed to imply that university administrators have a damned thing to do with quality assurance. That certainly doesn't happen in my experience. To whatever extent quality assurance happens in the (US) universities I've seen, it happens at a fairly low level and is then, as you imply, bureaucratically reified by those farther up the food chain. My point is that when hiring, granting of permanent tenure, promotion, and evaluation are dealt with directly by people from the same "silo," they recognize whether the other grain in the silo is wheat or barley and can make better judgements about quality than those without specialized knowledge. (This does not mean to imply that I think a whole truckload of stupid stuff doesn't come into play in the process.) When people do not understand what others do, their judgements are very different. None of this is meant to claim that current university structures are sustainable. We agree on that. But when redesigning universities, it would make sense to remember that affiliations based on similar expertise do have real value. That doesn't mean they need to be the center of any organizational scheme but it does mean that dismissing them as merely a remnant of feudal allegiances is a mistake. Gunnar ---------- Gunnar Swanson Design Office 1901 East 6th Street Greenville NC 27858 USA [log in to unmask] +1 252 258 7006 http://www.gunnarswanson.com