Teaching Beyond the Curriculum

Abstract

Design education has long maintained its core mission to prepare students for entry into professional practice. One unfortunate result of this narrow focus for design programs is a mostly technical skills-oriented academic mono-culture that leaves creative design fields lacking the kind of robust research culture necessary for producing deep, sustained bodies of disciplinary knowledge. It also presents numerous barriers for design academics from establishing fruitful cross-disciplinary collaborations with expert domains beyond design. This research concerns higher education in the context of constant change in conditions of design practice and explores shared themes and relationships among design pedagogy, professional identity, and program teaching environments to answer the question, “What mechanisms enable creative design programs in higher education to build adaptive capacity? How does design education respond to changes in professional practice and society?” Data from 35 design programs were analyzed using grounded theory methods, resulting in an ecological framework for understanding how academic culture enables or inhibits a program’s ability to respond to new conditions of practice. Findings provide insight into our understandings of the processes shaping cross-disciplinary academic relationships and how design programs coordinate between internal educational objectives and external disciplinary practices to promote transformation and engagement. The discussion draws conceptual connections to extant theories from perceptual affordance theory, situated learning and activity theory—domains that share a common concern with how people learn through social interactions with others and their environment. The discussion also suggests future research to increase the field’s understanding of how expressed beliefs, values, and behaviors affect design education’s ability to adapt and remain relevant.