Unlearning: Co-creating more inclusive spaces in design education

This was an hour-long workshop delivered for graphic designer educators exploring creative interventions in teaching and learning for inclusion and intercultural communication.

The design studio is built on signature pedagogies. However these are often tied to traditional ways of thinking about teaching formats. The crit, the lecture, the tutorial are all physical relationships that embody particularly power dynamics and forms of communication. In this workshop I shared some innovations around these formats. These were informed by students on the course and their particular barriers and represented a process of unlearning educational norms.

We used these experiences to inform our own un-learnings, reflecting to our own teaching contexts and the challenges we face in them. We used diagramming to critique our existing formats and propose new, more inclusive versions.

We then shared examples these examples with each other.

The Graphic Design Educators’ Network advocates graphic design education by developing, sharing and cultivating:
— Pedagogy
— Research and scholarship
— Discussion, collaboration and events
— Respect for plurality of practice
— Links with collaborators
— Membership

About the conference
Time + Space, asks: as educators and students, what are the realities of the environments we work within, how do we navigate these and what are the possibilities? How do we look at the management tools and structures that operate around us and use them to create – rather than hinder – space, fairness, transparency? How have we been successful in prying things apart and finding solutions that allow us to focus on what we do, what we want to do, rather than falling back on: ‘I don’t have the time and space’?