Another year older and what have I done…

I’ve just sent my first batch of students blinking into the sunlight of a long, well earned, summer break and now seems the perfect time to look back and reflect on my inaugural year in lecturing.

My students this year are foundation level, pre degree, and this group contained no pure designers, by which I mean the group were all very interested in exploring all areas of the art and design curriculum and were very open minded in their approaches. I was responsible for introducing them to both graphic design and the more ambiguous subject of digital media.

The first obstacle I had to overcome was an inability to remember names, something I have always struggled with and that, I think, is linked to my dyslexia. This may seem a small issue but is actually a real problem if you don’t address it directly with the students, as it can appear very rude if you keep addressing them as ‘erm’. I decided to tackle this directly after about the second week, by owning up to this short coming and admitting that it may be months before I could remember their names, if ever, and that it was nothing personal. The pronunciation of foreign names, of which there were several, was also an issue which I solved by calling first names only on the register, as for the most part they were easier to pronounce correctly.

Spelling, mine not theirs, was also an issue which again I chose to address directly by explaining that I was dyslexic and would at times struggle with certain words and that they should feel free to point out any words I may misspell. Because I was open about this issue, I hope it also allowed students with similar learning issues to talk more openly about then within the group. It is an accepted fact that there is a greater number of students with dyslexia within the creative arts and there are many, many studies showing that creative people are creative because of their dyslexia rather than despite it. I believe that my dyslexia is an integral part of my personality and has helped shape the way I think and as such is something I am feeling more and more confident to discus openly with colleagues and students.

Advances in technology have liberated designers in many, many ways, however it is also a huge barrier to young students taking their first steps in the discipline. Since so much that we do is now software reliant, it would have been easy to spend a whole term delivering week after week of software training and forget what I was really there for was to develop their interest in graphic design and visual communication.

I took the decision whilst developing my initial scheme of work that I was going to teach as little software as possible, and instead spend time showing the group how to teach themselves using on-line tutorials. Any knowledge is more valued when you find it yourself and by being there as a fall back when they couldn’t find a solution themselves I think that this approach has been extremely successful.

Some examples of student work

What I hope I have given this, my first group of students, is a sense of intellectual curiosity; the sense that they can shape their own futures, that lecturers are only really guides, there to point students towards learning and a sense that knowledge is something they are all more than capable of finding for themselves. I hope some of my passion for my profession has rubbed off on them, and that they realise that learning is a two way process and that they have taught me as I have taught them.

I now realise that teaching design students feels very close to the role of a Creative Director in an Advertising Agency or Design Group in so far as you, as the senior creative, are their to facilitate your team members individual creative voices. The pleasure comes, not from feeding young designers your ideas, but from allowing them to discover and then fully express their own.

So as I sit here wondering what the future holds for my departing group of student, I would like to thank them for their support, their enthusiasm and for sharing their talent with me and I look forward to meeting my next group in October.