Senior Thesis

A Pedantic Position for Potential Progress in Pedagogy: A Renaissance in K–12 Education Through Good Design [PDF]

This paper asks

What problems exist in education? Why do these problems exist? What has graphic design figured out about communication that pedagogy needs to understand and apply to improve education?

Introduction

The failures of American education in the late 20th century can be directly attributed to one problem—technology. In the late 1980s, we began a critical shift away from proficient information understanding and toward only basic understanding. This was the beginning of an era where we can find everything but understand nothing. To regain a relevant and effective position in the world, our public education will need to focus on teaching methods for understanding information, not systems for accessing information. Finally, the members of society critical to the systems of information access—designers—need to step up and usher in the era of understanding. Not only are there questions of authorship, ownership and audience that society must answer, but this paper will (eventually) attempt to answer as well.

Recommendations

• Create ‘Dynamic and Profound Learning’ environment
• Use collaboration to shake-up ownership and control
• Consider the university’s research-and-instruction model
• Re-invent the textbook
• Reconsider the teacher-student relationship
• Grow the public sphere
• Separate content from presentation
• Diversify teaching methods
• Designers as consultants—from the beginning
• Legislate progress by restructuring federal arts grants
• Standardize ‘what’
• Re-envision parents as Stakeholders