The Design Studio as a Place of Study: Critique as Hermeneutic Conversation

Abstract

As postsecondary design educators, are we providing students a place of study or are we just instructing? Educational theorist and historian Robert McClintock’s “Toward a place of study in a world of instruction” (1971) was published as a critique of the instructional culture in education in which he observed an overemphasis on pedagogy and the role of the teacher in student learning. In McClintock’s conception of study the student is not a passive being reliant on a teacher to provide learning opportunities, but rather an active agent in their own self-cultivation. With the ongoing academization of design education and the outsized impact of communication design on society, there is an urgent need to consider how our own understandings of communication design, its history, and design education impact the future of our discipline and larger society. As part of a Master’s thesis conducted using a hermeneutic approach and interpretive analysis to gain a deeper understanding of the lived experience of design educators, two communication design educators in a Canadian university were interviewed. Amongst the revelations was the value and significance of conversation, including within the design critique, as a necessary foundation for a studentteacher relationship that supports learning for both parties. This presentation explores Gadamer's concept of the hermeneutic conversation (1960/2013) as one approach that may help teachers and students transform the design studio into something closer to McClintock’s “place of study” and open possibilities of self-formation for students and educators.



Author Information
Naoko Masuda, Alberta University of the Arts, Canada

Paper Information
Conference: ECADE2022
Stream: Teaching and Learning the Arts

This paper is part of the ECADE2022 Conference Proceedings (View)
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To cite this article:
Masuda N. (2022) The Design Studio as a Place of Study: Critique as Hermeneutic Conversation ISSN: 2758-0989 – The European Conference on Arts, Design & Education 2022 Official Conference Proceedings https://doi.org/10.22492/issn.2758-0989.2022.25
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.22492/issn.2758-0989.2022.25


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Posted by James Alexander Gordon