High Impact

The educational design methods we observed in studio environments uniformly aimed to heighten the impact of student experience. The sites we visited were all designed to include an element of risk; design studio pedagogy is necessarily risky and disorienting. As Randall Bass suggests of high impact teaching practices in general, productive disorientation entails perching students at “the porous boundaries between the classroom and life experience,” where they benefit from the combined force of “social learning, authentic audiences, and integrative contexts.” Variations of each of these forces were present in every studio we observed. What Bass calls “authentic audiences,” we tend to think of in terms of varying degrees of publicness. Studio students worked publicly in several ways. For example, they attempted to impact issues of importance to local publics of diverse sizes and compositions, which required defending their work in critiques (“crits”)—pictured below—that were often open to the public and attended by practicing professionals. Students also engaged directly with and performed research in communities and created work for eventual public circulation.

A crit at the Urban Practice Studio. One juror, a local architect, has come up to the student team's pinned-up renderings in order to gesture at specific aspects of the images while he asks pointed questions. Other jurors and students look on.

Another crit at the Urban Practice Studio. One student and one juror crouch over and reach inside a scale model as they talk. Large renderings paper the wall behind them. Seven others, students and jurors, talk amongst themselves, some standing and some sitting on folding chairs arrayed around the model.

Mid-semester crit at LEEDlab. Jurors include both facilities staff and professionals in environmental engineering. Nine people of varying ages sit at chairs in a circle. They are in a classroom with a lectern and large screen at the front of the room. In the circle, five students, all members of the team, talk with four jurors. Two of the jurors wear CUA facilities uniforms, short sleeve work shirts with the University crest on the breast. The other two, women, are dressed for business.

Additionally, students encounter high impact learning practices in studio work by constantly juggling knowledge at different levels of scale, from the conceptual to the detailed nitty-gritty. This toggling generates impact because, as Casey Boyle writes, “when we are positioned to pay attention to in-betweens, especially the mediation work of interfaces and infrastructures, we often come to better understand how those in-betweens help configure our personal, academic, professional, and civic practices” (13). Design studio pedagogy, especially through high impact learning experiences, positions students in “in-between” situations. Mechanical engineering professor Neil Rothman describes a number of these in-between situations in the following interview clips:

In-between campus and industry

Neil Rothman: “This is one of the reasons that we want to get real projects from the outside is they’re way more interesting than stuff that I can come up with, um, they also come with funding, it gives the students the experience of working with people in the field, right, so they’re working. Kurt is an engineer from Caden. So he’s the sponsor and they have to have regular interactions with him and he’s beating on them like the other engineers on this team about what they need done, right.”

In-between different paths, or multiple right answers

Neil Rothman: “If they like math and science and that’s the only reason they want to go into engineering and they’ve never built stuff and taken stuff apart, stuff like that . . . this is gonna be bad. Because most people think of engineering as being black and white like science, and it’s completely the opposite. It’s ambiguous. And these guys find out there’s lots of right answers. Right, and some students just don’t like that. They expect it to be like math and it’s not like math. You have to deal with that level of ambiguity, the fact that you have ill-posed problems.”

In-between discourse communities

Neil Rothman: “So, those are these really interdisciplinary kinds of projects that I really like because I gotta talk to somebody who does not speak the same language. They don’t speak engineering. So, the students, even more so in terms of a kind of design thinking perspective it’s like yes, right, you really have to understand the user and they do not speak your language. And you have to figure out what that means and try to translate that into some kind of engineering requirement that you can work towards. And we tell them you are not done until you can demonstrate that your system meets the requirements, but if you didn’t do a good job translating their [user] needs into your requirements, you built the wrong thing. So, you may have built exactly what you specified, but it still could be the wrong thing. And that’s actually where a lot of the art and experiences comes in and learning how to do that. If I gave them specs they could always build something that met the specs but being to be able to develop the specifications, which is the first thing we do in this class, is meeting with the customers and trying to convert what they are telling you they want into a specification.”

Once students find themselves navigating multiple publics—including but far from limited to traditional classroom environments—and actively toggling between the conceptual and the applied, most studio heads hold students’ work to high, even professional standards of production. Rothman does so with his mechanical engineering students, relying on his experience as a former American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) judge. He describes his rationale in this interview clip:

Neil Rothman: “Our goal for this class is we call it professional practice. And so Chuck LaBerge teaches in computer engineering, similar background to mine, you know, thirty-five years in industry. He worked in aircraft landing systems at big companies, I worked in small startup medical device companies. So, we’re sort of same experience completely opposite ends of the spectrum. But we both approach these classes as, this is our last chance to teach them what a practicing engineer really does. Um, the things we do, I told you, we’re doing ‘stand up’ on Monday right. It’s a ‘stand up’ status meeting. One member from each team comes in, we’ll stand around the table and go around telling me how their projects are doing. That’s what I did when I was an engineering manager with my project teams. Right, you do it kinda like: Monday morning, tell me what’s goin on, what are you doing this week, what are the problems you’re having, OK, go off and work. Right. And if that takes twenty minutes then we’re done, that’s all we do that day.”

Similarly, Patricia Andrasik holds her students to professional standards in the LEEDlab by adhering to LEED certification guidelines and by bringing in LEED officials for crits. We see a strong connection between these instructors’ reliance on professional experience in their teaching and Lynch’s emphasis on experience as method (75). That is, Rothman and Andrasik use their past experiences in professional settings to inform how they craft growth-oriented opportunities for students that can lead to high impact learning.

It is important to acknowledge that some scholars in rhetoric and composition have raised concerns about embracing the various risky teaching practices we have described in relation to high impact learning experiences. For example, Phillips and Leahy suggest that creating unpredictable spaces might also make them less accessible, safe, and equitable, wisely stating, “Before we can construct spaces, we need to consider who will inhabit those spaces” (124). Relatedly, they also ask, “How do we avoid making unfair or potentially exploitative demands of our students when we make their experiences, investments, interests, and struggles the central focus of the class?” (123).

Students we spoke with raised similar concerns about risk and reward, voicing antipathy for the choices of some jurors. Martin, for example, commented on the need to grow “thick skin” in his role as a LEEDlab student.

Martin: “There seems to be an unreasonable level of punitive criticism that often happens.” Pavesich: “Really?” Martin: “Yeah, and you end up developing pretty thick skin, just by default. But it can wallop you because you get worked to the bone, oftentimes I feel unreasonably. You know where you’re just stretched so thin that by the time you get to a review day you’re barely awake. You don’t even have your wits about you. And then you got to sit there and listen to the, you know the little conniption fits that they throw at you.” Pavesich: “They, faculty members?” Martin and Joanna: “Yes. Faculty Members, Jurors.” Pavesich: “Jurors?” Martin and Joanna: “Yeah [laughing].”

It is not hard to imagine what effects the experiences Martin relates might have on all students, let alone students who are more tenuously holding on to positions in higher education in the first place. Interestingly, Martin’s teammate, Joanna, offers what sounds like a different stance.

Joanna: “I slightly disagree with you—I think the truth hurts but it’s necessary. There are some jurors that I’ve seen go in there and rip you to shreds like it’s fun for them. And I don’t think that’s productive at all, but if you’re standing up there and, yeah, you worked really hard, but you didn’t come to the conclusion that you should have.” Martin: “That’s true. I don’t think we should sugarcoat it.” Joanna: “Right.” Martin: “Or coddle students because that doesn’t do any good at the end of the day.” Joanna: “Right, no.” Pavesich: “Maybe there’s a sweet spot between really frank assessment and something like polite behavior.” Joanna: “Yeah!” [All laugh]

What interests us in Joanna’s response to Martin is her commitment to finding productive solutions to design problems (a response that perhaps stems from her instructor’s attitude about failure as a normal and acceptable part of the process). Implicit in her faith in the system of design studio pedagogy seems to be the idea that the expertise of jurors can always be valuable, even if students, preferably with the aid of faculty members, filter feelings of failure, or frame failure as an important step in a new direction.

These students raise serious concerns, which must be addressed in the crafting of learning spaces—especially ones that embrace risk. For some students educational spaces are already riskier than they are for their peers, and any teaching practice, no matter how well-intentioned, has radically failed if it reinforces disenfranchisement or marginalization. That said, based on our experiences, studio learning environments coordinate the kinds of work and relationships that help foster inclusivity rather than prevent it—in two ways, specifically.

First, we found that students wanted to take on projects that made a difference to real users and audiences, sometimes because of their professor’s choices but sometimes, we think, because they worked with a sense of the public in mind. In the UMBC engineering studio, for instance, students worked to adapt a lacrosse helmet for an athlete with a specific medical need, as described here by Rothman.

Neil Rothman: “We do projects for a non-profit called V-link, which makes one-of-a-kind solutions for people with disabilities. So we’ve made adaptive bicycles. These guys right here are actually working on wheelchair lacrosse . . . so we have a disabled kid who plays wheelchair lacrosse. He’s got a ventriculoperitoneal shunt that runs down his back so they have to relieve his helmet in the back and still provide protection, plus they have a device for his lacrosse stick that’s mounted to his wheelchair that he pulls back and they put a ball in it and he can shoot.”

In general, there seems to be a belief that engaged, high impact work—with real users and audiences in mind—“ups the stakes,” as Ceraso and Rothman agree in this interview clip.

Neil Rothman: “So, so these are really interesting projects because you know, they are people with disabilities. And, these guys will tell, OK not only is it . . . so, it’s not just a company it’s actually a person. And . . . [Ceraso interjects, “It ups the stakes, right?] It ups the stakes. It ups the stakes a lot, yeah.”

This is also apparent at Georgetown’s Studio Collaborative, where student teams work in the space between rhetoric, bioethics, and science policy. One team created a new hospital intake form, designed with transgender patients in mind, in order to address concerns about identity-appropriate language while also compiling proper medical history records. Our point with these examples is not that a student might not still experience marginalization in the context of this kind of work, but that, through engagement with difference and diversity, students, faculty, and other participants seem to become attuned to each other’s particular needs and struggles as well. In other words, the habits of mind they develop when working with publics transfer to classroom interactions.

Second, judging from what we observed, the risk that comes with high impact teaching encourages supportive and inclusive relationships. For example, faculty meet often with student teams in both formal and informal settings to check in, brainstorm, and offer ideas. Student teams meet in classrooms but also in alternate spaces at times of their choosing (e.g. late night meetings in makerspaces, dorm rooms, coffee shops, etc.). To counteract the feelings of uncertainty and risk associated with high impact practices, this type of community building work is essential.

We also discovered that it is not only the students who take on risk in design pedagogy, as described by Pavesich in this audio “field note.”

Pavesich: “There’s a dark side to design pedagogy in humanities classes. When I’ve taught in the studio collaborative I’ve received the worst student evaluations of my career [laughs]. Was that dramatic enough for you? Uh, but still. This is a serious and interesting issue. I’d like to qualify a little bit. The studio collaborative is a pilot project and like any pilot there are bumps along the way, which certainly affect student evaluations. Also the evals were better the second time that I taught in this class consortium than in the first. Again, but still, this raises serious questions. As we heard from Martin and Joanna, from the LEEDlab, as you may remember, uh, these students seemed pretty well acclimated to studio methods. Martin notes at one point in the interview that jurors’ feedback can seem too harsh. But both Martin and Joanna agree that such methods are good, necessary, even virtuous. It’s all about the work, they seem to agree. So what do humanities students have to say about design pedagogy practices, at least in their form at Georgetown? Paraphrasing, to protect anonymity, I’ll share with you four major student critiques of the studio collaborative from real student evaluations. Number one: There’s tons of work and it’s unevenly distributed. Super intense periods occur before the crits and there are real lulls in between the crits, students say. So much work that many students said they deserved four credits rather than three. Number two: Students react unhappily to the need that crits create to juggle different and even competing feedback from jurors and faculty members. Many of our students want linear feedback. Do X, Y, Z, and you’ll get such and such a grade. Crits will never be that straightforward. Number three: my undergraduate students don’t like that our model places them in teams with graduate students, and in some instances they struggle to create equitable team roles. Number four: Lastly, some students note that the studio work overwhelms or obscures the rhetoric work. And the students have a real complaint here, uh, that one part of their labor takes away from another. But I actually think that it’s something different. The students are still not yet seeing how the readings and discussions in class should and can inform or even shape their studio work. This feels like a failing on my part. These four complaints are real and legitimate, but we also need to put them up against the fact that the student projects have been, almost without exception, rhetorically sophisticated and impactful. And that students have been able to talk and write about how their projects work rhetorically using the conceptual apparatus from readings and discussions throughout the semester. So there’s a lot of conclusions we can draw from this feedback, but I’ll stop here. Everyone in the humanities who considers design pedagogy practices will need to think about these issues, how to ameliorate them, but also whether or not they’re in a secure enough employment position to withstand a potential hit on their student evaluations. The takeaway might be that there is real risk here for both students and faculty.”

High impact learning experiences invite more risk for students and faculty, but they also seem to bring with them a sense that the risk is worth the reward—an idea that appears repeatedly in postpedagogical scholarship. Like all teaching, the tactics of design studio pedagogy require thoughtful efforts on the part of faculty. Perhaps sharing risk among faculty and students offers a kind of ballast, or a modest form of insurance, in high impact teaching and learning experiences. If we are able to contain the risk to an acceptable degree while acknowledging that even the most careful planning can be upended by complex events, we can hit the sweet spot, mentioned above by Bass, in which the learning experiences we design include the combined force of “social learning, authentic audiences, and integrative contexts” (“Disrupting”).