Knowing and responding to your students’ diverse needs
Contextual Background
I teach typography on the BA Graphic Communication Design programme at Central Saint Martins. International cohort with a variety of interests, abilities and prior educational experiences. Students are from a wide range of social, economic, cultural and ethnic backgrounds. This is both a key attribute and challenge of teaching.
Evaluation
Students are exploring a wide-range of subject / disciplinary areas relating to graphic design and range from generalists, exploring many aspects of the subject, to specialists, who might be focusing on one aspect of graphic design. We have also seen a rise in students without the experience of a foundation course and our diverse international cohort means there is rich potential in exploring the subject with a decolonial approach. The specific challenges are concerned with engaging students with typography where it might not be their primary interest, providing fundamental skills whilst also allowing more advanced students to develop, and to encourage and nurture a decolonial approach to the subject.
Moving forwards
The diversity of student interests and abilities has been met so far by providing a variety of learning activities that engage students in different ways: from reading materials, visual references, class presentations, and my online ‘Typetorial’ video series, to more hands-on activities such as calligraphy exercises and object-based learning. We have also developed a ‘media agnostic’ typography project in unit 2, allowing students to respond with any media/method so that they can bring their own disciplinary interests and approaches in solving a typographic project.
These approaches could be further strengthened by identifying the ‘threshold concepts’ of typography, which could inform the design of a series of sessions, tasks, activities, projects that incorporate these concepts. (Land, 2005, p.53).
Further work could be undertaken in terms of decolonizing the curriculum. Typography is a subject that is taught from a Eurocentric perspective and I’m aware of giving feedback / guiding students from a position of ‘Epistemic Totality’. It’s important that we can work towards Achille Joseph Mbembe‘s idea of the ‘Pluriversity’ (Mbembe, 2016) if we are to fully support our students develop a range of approaches to the subject.
I believe there is a need to balance some of the more objective teaching, supported by cognitive science relating to how humans read, and how this informs how we design texts considering readability, with an openness to discussing approaches to typography from other cultures and traditions.
This could be a particularly useful approach for the students’ Critical Reports in Unit 10, where they design their own research paper. This will hopefully surface a range of exciting typographic approaches relating to individual research projects.
In my upcoming ‘Designing your critical report’ lecture/presentation I can show a more diverse range of typographic examples and also ask the students to submit a selection of publication/typographic design references for discussion. By utilising an object-based learning approach, we can discuss different approaches to typography and how they relate to content, from a range of cultural contexts. This could help to promote discussion and criticism, as bell hooks describes, from ‘various intellectual locations and standpoints if we are to transform art practices in ways that interrogate, challenge, and alter in a lasting way politics of domination.’ (hooks, 1995, p.105).
References
Land, R. ‘Threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge (3)*: implications for course design and evaluation’, Rust, C (ed) (2005) Improving Student Learning Diversity and Inclusivity. Oxford: Oxford Centre for Staff and Learning Development.
Mbembe, A.J. (2016) ‘Decolonizing the university: new directions’, Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, 15(1), pp.29–45.
https://doi.org/10.1177%2F1474022215618513.
hooks, b. (1995). ‘Talking art as the spirit moves us’, in Art on my mind: visual politics. New York: The New Press