Conclusions

Based on our observations of four studios, we believe that design studio pedagogy represents one productive future of the current postpedagogical moment. We believe so, in part, because design studio approaches speak to a number of recent and pressing concerns in rhetoric and composition—like public engagement, collaborative practices, embodiment, and materiality—and also because they provide a way to describe and enact process as a layered phenomenon.

With cautious optimism, then, we want to conclude by offering some preliminary recommendations and caveats for experimenting with design studio methods. These suggestions are meant to highlight concrete, practical ways of implementing design studio pedagogy in writing and rhetoric curricula. However, we do not mean to imply that all universities and colleges, all writing programs, all students, or all faculty are equally able to benefit from the approaches we have described in this webtext. In fact, later in the conclusion we touch on the issue of how one’s position in a particular campus context determines the degree of one’s ability to incorporate design studio methods. We maintain, however, that the flexibility of the teaching practices we have described makes it possible for instructors who are situated in a variety of agential and infrastructual positions to experiment with design studio pedagogy on some level.

Assemble your own frame-for-work by surveying the landscape of affordances and constraints in your class and on your campus, but make sure it facilitates interaction that is in some ways high impact, collaborative, DIY, and ecological. Developing frames-for-work should involve different configurations of what we have identified as the four features of design studio approaches. While it is tempting to say that our classes will benefit even if we pick and choose from one or two of these features to inform new pedagogical practices, we do not think that is the case. Rather, in order to achieve a rich, well-designed learning environment, all four features seem integral to creating the conditions for impactful learning experiences. Again, these features are not intended to be prescriptive. As we have shown throughout this webtext, there are many possible ways to incorporate different aspects of these features into a learning context. Regardless of how instructors choose to design learning experiences in their courses, it is worth considering the following suggestions when constructing frames-for-work:

Talk about process in a new way. In spite of the coming (and perhaps passing) of the postprocess moment, most of us in the field have never stopped invoking the importance of process in some fashion or another. Rather than thinking of process as a knowable series of tasks, we suggest approaching your course design as a non-linear, flexible workspace. This is not to say that predetermined tasks do not exist; rather, in a studio approach, teams will inevitably need to rearrange, invent, and reinvent tasks according to their own needs and work-styles.

Many depictions of the design process have begun to appear in higher education contexts, and we think it is useful to consider a few of the examples we have encountered during the course of our research. Pictured below are three interesting models of design pedagogy from recent conferences. The first picture is a PowerPoint slide from Peter Kittle’s presentation at the 2016 Conference on College Composition and Communication. Kittle visualizes design by mapping its process directly onto the conventional steps associated with the writing process. We appreciate this effort to begin to “design-ify” process, which is necessary and important work. Yet, this set of steps still represents a more or less linear, chronological sequence. In other words, renaming the steps in a traditional process model does not transform that model, and therefore it still represents what postprocess theories critique about traditional process. What we find most valuable about Kittle’s visualization, however, is his attention to “release” and “community,” which the other two models pictured below do not consider. In this sense, Kittle offers a model that is higher impact than other representations we have seen.

Peter Kittle stands to the right of a projector, gesturing toward his black and white slide, which is titled “Making Shifts in Stance.” The heads of some attendees of his talk can be seen at the bottom of the image. The text on the slide is presented in two columns: “Previous” and “Current.” The words in the “Previous” column are: “draft,” “peer feedback,” “revise,” “edit/polish/publish,” and “classroom.” The words in the “Current” column are: “prototype,” “beta test,” “iterate,” “release,” and “community.” There are arrows between the columns pointing to the right, from previous to current.

The next two photos are of Marlo Ransdell’s slides from her 2016 presentation at the Association of American Colleges & Universities Conference. Ransdell works in the fields of interior design and architecture. One slide depicts writing processes and the other visualizes the design thinking process. In some ways, these slides make improvements on the process represented in Kittle’s presentation. In Ransdell’s slides, process is represented as ambiguous, plural, and—maybe most importantly—recursive. These images more accurately show that students’ individual processes (the “how I work”) will not emerge until they are well into the process of developing projects in collaboration with team members. Much like Arjun Dhillon’s description of “squiggle,” in these two slides process is depicted as something that we must attempt to articulate, but which we can never fully know ahead of time.

A picture of Ransdell's slide called “My Design Thinking Cheat Sheet,” which shows a diagram she cited from Guido Kovalsky. The diagram contains five hexagonal images in different colors with the following words inside of them: “Empathize,” “Define,” “Ideate,” “Prototype,” and “Test.” There is an arrow that goes from Test back to Empathize, indicating the recursive process of design thinking.
A picture of Marlo Ransdell's slide, titled “Mapping the Writing Process.” The slide contains a diagram that starts at the top left corner and continues diagonally to the bottom right corner. The text, starting at the top left, includes the following: “Understand the Prompt,” “Gather Information,” “Identify Purpose and Audience,” “Compose Draft,” “Re-see and Revise,” “Polish.” There are circular lines and arrows connecting these processes, indicating the recursive nature of the process. The bottom left corner contains the following text: “The writing process is not linear. It will generate new questions and ideas. Often you will find yourself circling back to earlier stages, so that you can incorporate these understandings into your work.”

Engaging with students in process-talk but in a design-savvy, plural way must play a prominent role in design-oriented pedagogy. Adapting or revising “designified” process models similar to the ones featured above will provide students with some initial structure while also giving them the freedom to figure out ways of working and collaborating throughout the development of their projects. Indeed, such models hit the right balance between determinism and chaos, depicting the form of complexity we discuss in the Introduction.

Model the dispositions that you hope to cultivate in students. The “8 Studio Habits of Mind,” which are published in Studio Thinking (Hetland et al.) and promoted in Harvard’s Project Zero (“Project”), offer one account of helpful dispositions. We found this version for artists—from Rankine-Landers’ “Teaching Channel” blog post—to be especially useful:

8 Studio Habits of Mind

  1. Develop Craft: Learning to use tools, materials, artistic conventions; and learning to care for tools, materials, and space.
  2. Engage & Persist: Learning to embrace problems of relevance within the art world and/or of personal importance, to develop focus conducive to working and persevering at tasks.
  3. Envision: Learning to picture mentally what cannot be directly observed, and imagine possible next steps in making a piece.
  4. Express: Learning to create works that convey an idea, a feeling, or a personal meaning.
  5. Observe: Learning to attend to visual contexts more closely than ordinary “looking” requires, and thereby to see things that otherwise might not be seen.
  6. Reflect: Learning to think and talk with others about an aspect of one’s work or working process, and learning to judge one’s own work and working process and the work of others.
  7. Stretch & Explore: Learning to reach beyond one’s capacities, to explore playfully without a preconceived plan, and to embrace the opportunity to learn from mistakes.
  8. Understand (Arts) Community: Learning to interact as an artist with other artists (i.e., in classrooms, in local arts organizations, and across the art field) and within the broader society. Arts is in parenthesis here as it can easily be switched with other disciplines, like science or history.

We might turn to sophistic pedagogy to clarify how to cultivate these “Studio Habits of Mind.” As Debra Hawhee notes, “sophistic pedagogy emphasized the materiality of learning, the corporeal acquisition of rhetorical movements through rhythm, repetition, and response. This manner of learning-doing entails ‘getting a feel for’ the work” (160). That is, through repetition and practice, teachers and students can get “a feel for” these habits of mind until they become dispositionally incorporated. However, it is important to point out that these habits of mind will look and feel different for each individual learning situation. This is why response is key. Hawhee states, “sophistic-style rhetorical training is always bound up with responsiveness within particular contexts” (160). Even as we assemble environments in which students can work, thus enabling them to hone their own repetition-and-response habits, we continually re-invent and co-occupy these spaces with students. Designing spaces for students to co-design with us, in other words, will help us cultivate these dispositions in ourselves, even as we help to cultivate them in students. Design pedagogy requires a deeply collaborative environment where teachers and students necessarily work together to develop practices that can lead to significant learning experiences.

Keep ethics at the center of design approaches. While terms like “design,” “design thinking,” “hacking,” “making,” and “makerspaces” are often deployed in fluid relationships with each other, they are not the same. These terms have very different histories, practices, purposes, and ideologies. For example, design thinking, for many academics, evokes an association with the corporate, for-profit world of start-ups. Sometimes that is enough to repel interest, but not always. In his keynote at the 2016 Thomas R. Watson conference, for instance, Scott Wible discussed how he uses design thinking pedagogy to connect his students at the University of Maryland, College Park to local community members and projects (e.g. non-profits) as opposed to using design practices to forward more business-minded, profit-making efforts. As Wible notes, “Design thinking pedagogy and practice helps us to understand one way that knowledge can be mobilized to foster co-generation of solutions that fit with a community’s worldviews and everyday practices” (“Design Thinking”). In harnessing the power of design thinking to create significant, community-based learning experiences for his writing students, Wible echoes our field’s longstanding commitment to “service learning” and engaged public work. Like Wible, we see design thinking as a way to energize existing pedagogical service models and opportunities. Reframing and adapting design-oriented pedagogy to reflect one’s own values is key to using this approach in ethical ways.

Inclusivity is another important ethical consideration of design-oriented pedagogy that often gets overlooked. Makerspaces tend to trumpet their progressive, bottom-up political orientations; they aspire to be free spaces for creativity—community centers for non-hierarchical productivity. As Ann Shivers-McNair notes, however, they are also predominantly white, male spaces (“What We Can Learn”). This statement rang true in our field research observations as well. For instance, in Neil Rothman’s mechanical engineering class at UMBC we encountered a large white male majority. This was surprising to us since UMBC has a reputation for having one of the most diverse STEM programs in the nation. According to Daniel de Vise, “Many higher-education leaders say no institution does a better job of seeding black students into the sciences than UMBC.” The gendered make-up of the course was also extremely unbalanced (there was only one female student in attendance on the days that we observed). Even at a school that is known for its diverse STEM program, problems with diversity persist. We say this not to criticize UMBC in particular, but to point out a larger trend in design-focused classrooms: based on what we have read and observed, diversity may be getting more attention at the institutional-level, but there is a long way to go for design spaces to be truly inclusive. It is critical to consider how race, gender, and other aspects of students’ intersectional identities (e.g. disability, socio-economic status, etc.) might affect the inclusivity of a design-oriented learning environment.

One way our field might improve the inclusivity of design spaces is to bring design approaches to a general education student population. Pavesich’s class in the Studio Collaborative, for example, is an Introduction to Rhetoric course that satisfies a general education requirement. The students in this class are not yet segregated by historical patterns of major or specialization. Students from all backgrounds sign up and find themselves immersed in a design experience. By exposing students to design approaches in general education classes, such as First Year Writing, in a range of different institutional contexts, our field can start to contribute to the necessary work of breaking down the historical exclusivity of these modes of work and workspaces.

As our Introduction demonstrated, postpedagogical compositionists already embrace many aspects of the design studio pedagogy we have laid out. For example, postpedagogues encourage self-propelled learning and distributed knowledge-making. Some postpedagogues also ask students to share their work with different audiences or publics beyond the classroom. What we hope our work amplifies, however, is the need for more deliberate, explicit, integrated studio approaches in our field. That is, to unleash what we now see as the power of design-based approaches, we need to do a better job coordinating all four features of design studio pedagogy in order to craft potent learning experiences. Our pedagogies must be complex—neither deterministic nor chaotic. We must push ourselves even further to design flexible frameworks for students to learn how to learn on their own and with each other. These pedagogical frameworks should embed students within an ecology of materials, ideas, technologies, spaces, and people that can ground their learning in meaningful, high impact experiences.

We recognize that design studio pedagogy may not work for every instructor—or at least may not work in the same ways. What about the faculty member teaching in a writing program with a rigid curriculum or a common syllabus? Or one whose labor is precarious in a way that erodes opportunities for experimentation? Or one who teaches at a community or city college rather than the kinds of institutions we visited in our fieldwork (relatively privileged, albeit in different ways)? We would argue that instructors without as much power, freedom, or security can still make use of design methods in more incremental ways. For example, one might choose to tweak rather than overhaul existing assignments, units, or curricula to make them higher impact, more collaborative, etc. In other words, faculty might adopt—to a smaller, manageable degree—some aspect of each of the four features of design studio pedagogy. This would allow for a holistic approach to designing learning experiences without having to make big (perhaps impossible) changes. Additionally, each of us wields some power to shape our students’ learning experiences at some level of scale. Unless one teaches within a writing program or department that micro-manages every aspect of course design, then one has the ability to encourage student work that is more open-ended, public, and independently driven. Of course, for those fortunate enough to have the freedom to entirely re-shape their own courses, we encourage experimentation at that scale. Even better, if one is a writing program administrator, seed these methods at the level of the program. Design studio methods do not depend upon expensive studio spaces, radical faculty autonomy, or financially privileged students. They depend, instead, on faculty members eager to invite students into new ways of coordinating the work of writing and learning, and such work can succeed in different degrees and at different scales.

We began this webtext with Paul Lynch’s provocative question: “Is teaching still impossible?” As we have attempted to illustrate, design studio pedagogy moves away from models of knowledge transfer and reimagines teaching as the practice of designing environments and contexts in which significant learning can take place. Teaching is possible, even in a postpedagogical moment, when we learn to think of ourselves and our students as designers–as co-architects of learning experiences. Like Lynch (and Dewey), we believe that each learning experience should be seen as cumulative and future-oriented—as an opportunity to exercise and strengthen habits of mind and body that enable us to better respond to and account for later experiences.

Throughout the course of our fieldwork, we observed students becoming. That is, in design-based learning, students become different, often self-consciously; they become better able to stitch together new experiences and knowledge with prior tacit knowledge, or “para-expertise” (Rice). This stitching together is what we have been referring to as “coordination.” Becoming happens constantly and idiosyncratically for each student in each moment, of course, but we have always known that. What feels different to us about the combination of design studio pedagogy and postpedagogy is that it encourages experimentation with new practices and areas of knowledge, small and large dispositional shifts, and the pursuit of thinking anew via the recombination of materials, ideas, and experiences. The design-based approaches we observed create complex experiences for students that avoid tipping too far over into either impossible determinism or chaos. And perhaps most importantly of all, students seemed to feel the truth that good work is rarely efficient—that good work can intentionally embrace periods of inefficiency.

Much like the students working in design spaces, we became different through researching and producing this webtext. As we immersed ourselves in design learning environments, we began to see immersion itself as a vital research method. We also began to think of the design of this webtext in terms of immersion. The multimodal artifacts we include from our own experiences provide a way for readers/users to experience the contexts we explored, however attenuated this second hand version of our experience might be. These two central ideas—that learning is coordination and that immersion is a method—are reflected in what we have said about teaching and learning, and also in our research methods and design choices. Through engaging with this project, we hope others find a potentially transformative experience, much like our fieldwork was for us.