Design Pedagogies

Koehler and Mishra's article examining technological pedagogical content knowledge fits into a larger conversation about how people - not just teachers and graduate students - feel about design pedagogies. In a meta sort of way, the article reaffirms many of the key trends in composition studies by testing design pedagogy on people who are generally thought of as its practitioners or purveyors. In the same way, by building from Lee Shulman's (1986) idea of pedagogical content knowledge, this article theorizes something that a colleague and I tried to carry out last semester... here's a run down of what we did, why we did it and how it connects to the Koehler and Mishra.

Problems and finding solutions = better pedagogy

Visual rhetoric was a term I had never encountered before I got to MSU. I knew it existed, but had never been in a discipline that valued it or theorized it in any real way. Curious as I sometimes can be, I wanted to investigate the tenets of visual rhetoric and its place in the writing curriculum.

Oddly enough, the first place I turned was resumes. To me, resumes represented a good entry place. So I bought Robin William's "The Non-Designer's Design Book" and started theorizing how I might teach visual rhetoric, through resumes, with technology.

What resulted is a workshop that uses Adobe's inDesign as a mechanism for teaching visual rhetoric. We made this decision based on our own pedagogical content knowledge. What we did, in many ways, represents the amalgam that Shulman and Koehler & Mishrata talk about.

Faced with a design problem of sorts, we collaborated to find a technology that'd help mediate our process. We considered the content, how we wanted to represent that content - through play and design pedagogies - and what we knew and could deploy.

We ultimately developed a workshop that allows for all of these using an interface that had otherwise been reserved for things like laying out print and web documents.

At one level our project deployed design pedagogy by allowing the student/writers in the workshop to look at available designs, design for themselves and then, in the end, have a new design. At another level, like the folks in Koehler and Mishrata's study, we were faced with a problem that needed a pedagogical solution.

Judging by our conversations in session, we also had an affinity for design pedagogies. Many of our proprietary technologies built off "available designs." Also, what we did was, I think, fun and successful which echoes the momentum of this article.

Teachers really ought to be exposed to this type of thinking in professional development situations. Even if new technologies don't arise, perhaps they'll think of old technologies in new ways. This of course requires that teachers think on a project by project basis, consider learning goals and evaluate the affordances of already available designs.