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 21^st 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.