Where is DESIGN in K-12 Curriculum and
(Arts) Education Reform?
Copyright: Ruth
Lozner 2012
Much
has been said about school reform, revitalizing the economy and meeting the
emerging needs of the new millennium. Advocates from many subject areas have
weighed in on what students should know or be able to do as part of the Common
Core standards. Some progress seems to have been made in math and language
arts. However, there is one additional curriculum reform concept that has been
successfully instituted and tested in several US charter schools and many other
countries but has been largely absent in the conversations of K-12 education
reform and, therefore, omitted in the recommendations to policymakers: Design
Education.
What
is design education? Design education,
considered “an applied art”, teaches problem-solving
as the application of creativity—it’s
about functionality, usability, feasibility, desirability. Design education teaches
relevance, ideation and aesthetics. It considers human factors such as
psychology, sociology, and ethnography. It teaches research methods,
visualization and presentation skills, critical analysis, collaboration and
team building. It teaches creative cognitive skills as well as productive hand skills.
In short, it not only encourages students to be imaginative, it teaches them how to harness that inventiveness and
put it to practical use. And, importantly, teaches methodologies to learning
many of the recommended 21st Century transformative academic and
life skills.
All
this begs the question: if design education can do all that, why has it been
overlooked?
Perhaps,
a reason that design is ignored is its ubiquity.
Everyone experiences design every minute of every day. Design makes our lives
more efficient, more informed, more comfortable, more productive, more
beautiful, more enjoyable, more sustainable…more possible. Behind every single product,
built environment and system – behind the very letterforms you are reading--
stands the process of innovation that was employed and the designers who
employed it. Seen this way, design becomes immensely important as the carrier
of culture, commerce and progress. And it is design education that gets us
there.
“The first step in winning the future
is encouraging American Innovation”, said President Obama in his 2011 State of
the Union Address… but if we want to win the future, then we also have to win
the race to educate our kids.” Certainly, it is obvious to the business
community that creativity and innovation drives the global marketplace. It is
the US education community that needs to embrace curricula that teaches strategic creative skills starting with
early learners. It should come as no
surprise that China has become engaged in
the modern design education movement. The Chinese government sees innovation
and design as a national priority for creating a financially secure society,
observes Lorraine Justice, Dean of the School of Design, Hong Kong Polytechnic. Since 2006, there has been a substantial
overhaul of some secondary schools to feed into the over 400 higher education
design programs in China graduating an estimated 10,000 designers yearly.
In his budget speech of March 20011, UK
Chancellor George Osbourne, following a parallel statement from China, announced
that “We want the words: ‘ Made in Britain, created in Britain, designed in
Britain and invented in Britain’ to drive the nation forward”. As far back as 1989,
the UK National Curriculum Standards mandated Design (and Technology) as a
compulsory subject area for all students aged 5-14.The project-based
multidisciplinary approach of the design methodology was also a requirement
across all subject areas. In the UK, design is widely discussed as a critical
component in innovation and the fundamental linkage in STEM, functioning as the
“silent D” in the acronym. And while the student outcomes are uneven due in
part to a lack of updated teacher training, many British design leaders have
attributed their career trajectory and success to the introduction of design
early in their education.
This past
May, after 18
months of comprehensive research, meetings and site visits, the President’s
Committee on the Arts and the Humanities issued a report entitled: Reinvesting
in Arts Education: Winning America’s Future Through Creative Schools”. For
a report that claimed to have analyzed
the challenges and opportunities that have emerged over the last decade, the
authors chose to use a narrow and outmoded definition of visual arts. They did so at the expense of omitting a huge and
critical piece of visual arts education and thereby missed a real opportunity
for expanding the definition to include design education. Design methodologies
add to the value of visual arts
curricula by teaching the practical and
purposeful application of creative thinking—the very definition of
innovation. Design as a distinct K-12 subject area can produce multiple
benefits: from starting the interests and career paths in numerous
design-related fields (i.e. architecture, industrial design, graphic design) to
fostering more forward thinkers in every field to encouraging more responsible
business leaders and entrepreneurs, to producing more resourceful and
empathetic citizens, and creating more thoughtful consumers.
In our decentralized
state-based system of education, I see at least four potential strategies for
the inclusion of design into K-12
schools: 1. expand the definition of the visual arts education, which now
stands as the traditional fine arts and crafts, to include design thinking and
skills 2. integrate design methodologies into the STEM disciplines 3. revitalize
industrial education and technology education by including design thinking and principles
, and 4. create a free-standing design
subject area and curriculum.
Of
course, if any one of those strategies is adopted, an essentially different
approach to teacher training would be required. This is an absolutely crucial piece
in advancing any subject area to respond to the enormous challenges unfolding
for this next generation. If the visual arts wishes to remain an essential
domain for teaching creativity, I see it as a cultural imperative that the
curriculum change to maintain its relevance by embracing design education.
Ruth Lozner is an
Associate Professor of Design at the University of Maryland, College Park. She
teaches design literacy and practice, and lectures extensively on the
importance of design and innovation education in K-16.
