James Corazzo
Profile
For the past nine years James Corazzo has been a lecturer at Stockport College where he works full time on the Graphic Design degree course. He also has a practice designing publications and books for galleries and fine art publishers.
Much of his pedagogical research and teaching interests hover around attempts to reconcile the employability agenda with the notion that (degree) learning should be about the broadening of external and internal horizons.
In 2008 a casual conversation about work placements for design students became an opportunity to turn the work placement on the head – instead of the students going out to work in a range of companies James and his colleagues invited a practising design agency to pack up their studio and move into the design department. It turned out to be a fruitful collaboration that sparked an interest in hybrid modes of design education. As a result he has started to investigate a small clutch of design, management and business degree courses throughout America and Europe that are embracing experience based, purpose driven, collaborative and entrepreneurial approaches to education. These programmes represent a shift in the model of learning and teaching from 'apprenticeship-certification-entitlement' to 'discovery-ownership-accountability'*. The fellowship represents an opportunity to test some of these pedagogical ideas within the curriculum.
*The model cited was developed by Richard Cherwitz at the University if Texas under the banner of Intellectual Entrepreneurship
tTS Studio Stockport College, photographer Thoughtful
Project
Control / Surrender: Shifting the Model of Design Education
Shipbuilding
“I set up situations that involve abandoning control and finding out what happens”1 This is Brian Eno’s* description of his working methodology and I must admit it holds some appeal as an approach to design pedagogy – especially because as design tutors we ‘control’ so much of what takes place. Eno acknowledges that control is an important aspect of creative practice but says our preoccupation with it has underplayed the role of surrender. In characteristic fashion Eno illustrates this idea with reference to the history of wooden shipbuilding: the first kind of wooden ships had to be regularly caulked because they were prone to leaking. As technology improved ships were built by holding the boards together in different ways so they leaked less, however, the resulting ships were stiffer and this meant they had a tendency to break up at sea. Shipbuilders returned to making ships that didn’t fit properly but had flexion. In Eno’s words the successful vessels surrendered – they moved with the circumstances of the sea.
Flexion
This ADM Fellowship project is about the relationship between control and surrender in teaching and learning. In the face of increasing demands on the graphic design curriculum, in terms of content and technology, and the expanding remit of the graphic designer in an increasingly complex and unknowable world what are the necessary conditions that cultivate ‘flexion’ in design graduates and the ability to adapt to the ‘circumstances of the sea’?
The genesis of this lies in an earlier project that explored alternative approaches to the work placement for graphic design students at Stockport College. The idea was simple – rather than the students trying to find a work placement in lots of different design agencies, a design agency would do a placement within the college. We secured funding and working in collaboration with design practice Thoughtful (whose clients include Tate, British Council and Royal Mail) we created the Thoughtful Six Project.**
In January 2009 Thoughtful closed down their studio, packed up their whole outfit and moved into a dedicated space within the design department at Stockport College. They chose six second year students who exchanged their studies to join Thoughtful full time for six months and work across a range of commercial projects including Colour Chart for Tate Liverpool and Teepay a new brand for howies – but uniquely from within the walls of the college.
The upsides of the project were great: a unique and immersive six month work placement for the students and an emerging ecology of collaboration between the college and industry. It provided the opportunity to look at the learning that took place in this environment. I found it developed the less tangible, but no less vital, capabilities within the students such as; dealing with uncertainty, collaborative working, flexibility, communication, and working with independence and reflexivity. In short, enabling students to develop capabilities to deal with an increasingly uncertain world. However on a pragmatic level the project had a considerable downside – only six students benefitted directly and this made it relatively expensive.
What a student needs to know is not the tutor’s decision
The next thought was to search for a way to integrate a similar kind of learning within the design curriculum but in a more sustainable way. A colleague told me about Communication Media Design(CMD) a course at NHL, a university in Holland. The CMD course represents a more radical departure in the delivery of design education. Established in 2001 along constructivist educational principles the core pedagogical ethos of CMD could be summed up in this statement: what a student needs to know and needs to do is not the teachers decision, the onus is on the student discovering what they need to know and how to do it.2 CMD is a fascinating degree programme with an educational philosophy that shifts the model of learning and teaching from 'apprenticeship-certification-entitlement' to 'discovery-ownership-accountability'.3
At CMD there is no classroom no teachers, no curriculum and as their programme document testifies; ‘at CMD you decide yourself what you want to learn’.4 – they call this ‘on-demand learning’ and the emphasis is on self-discovery. For example, if your commission has been to make a commercial you may have no idea how to go about this and what requirements you need to satisfy – it is with that question that the student goes looking for answers – contacting a specialist, research through literature or online or by booking a consultation with a tutor. Students work exclusively in groups focusing much of the learning on collaborative, negotiated activities that forefront the importance of relationships, working as part of a team and being a leader. All projects are live and entail meeting real deadlines and dealing with real clients. The students are placed at the centre of the assessment process, at the beginning of a given project it is the student who identifies what learning outcomes they propose to be assessed on, the course is flexible enough for the students to build individual routes and areas of specialism through the programme.
Aims and Outcomes
This is a condensed version of the underlying pedagogic principles at work, but hopefully enough to make the point about the role of control and surrender.
The ADM Fellowship project aims to:
1. Design and implement a short experimental programme that trials the pedagogic ethos of CMD.
2. To approach the development and implementation of the experimental programme as a highly collaborative process between staff and students.
3. To evaluate and reflect on the process.
The intended outcomes of the project:
1.To visit CMD as a means to gather further information on the pedagogic ethos and structure of the course.
2. To devise and run an experimental 3-month optional programme for second year design students from various disciplines (graphic design, illustration, moving image and surface design) that would allow us to introduce the pedagogic ethos in collaboration with our students and explore ideas like on-demand learning.
Notes
1. Surrender. It’s Brian Eno. Guardian Arts Interview 29 April 2010 by Stuart Jeffries
* Eno’s Wikipedia entry describes him as an English musician, composer, record producer, music theorist, artist and singer, who, as a solo artist, is best known as one of the principal innovators of ambient music.[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Eno accessed on 24 May 2010
** See Corazzo, J. (2009) ‘A Design Agency Goes Back to College; A New Model for Collaboration’ in Networks Autumn 2009 (8) Brighton: Art Design Media Subject Centre Higher Education Academy pp.33–35
2. Taken from the Communication Media Design course documentation.
3. The model cited was developed by Richard Cherwitz at the University if Texas under the banner of Intellectual Entrepreneurship see https://webspace.utexas.edu/cherwitz/www/ie/index.html accessed on 24 May 2010
4. Taken from the Communication Media Design course documentation