Five Recommendations for Incorporating Design Education

By Michael Eddens, Director of Arts Education Programs

Design education is the teaching of theory and application in the design of products, services and environments. It can include disciplines like graphic, web, packaging, fashion and interior design. Design education has great potential for seamlessly fitting Oklahoma?s new C3 Standards.

Oklahoma C3 Standards allow Oklahoma PASS standards and the newly developed and widely adopted Common Core Standards to come under the same umbrella for a seamless integration of knowledge and skills deemed important for 21st century learning. Oklahoma C3 paves the way for student success in the areas of college, career, and citizenship readiness; and recognizes that while not all students will be college bound, all students should master the same basic thinking, problem solving and literacy skills to foster success in any path they choose.

So how does design education fit into the new C3 standards?

• Design education focuses on creative thought and problem solving
• Design education easily integrates into other curricular disciplines
• Design education is about literacy and communication
• Design is the lens through which today's society understands the world

In order for design education to be deliver properly there are a few things that must happen:

1. Design education must be aligned with fine arts standards and curriculum. While there is a clear distinction between design and fine art, the foundation is shared. To attempt to understand design elements and principals apart from those of fine art is to try to understand Shakespeare without a basic grasp of the English language.

2. Design education should be considered for its own set of standards and stand-alone courses. Yes, design and the fine arts do cross-over; however, the mechanics or hands-on side of design often require completely different skills and tools. The good news here is that a national coalition, the National Coalition for Core Arts Standards, is currently working on the development of national standards for a curricular area called “New Media,” which will encompass skills and knowledge essential to not only visual literacy, but also design related to film, music, gaming, animation and web based applications. The goal is to establish curricular standards in the areas related to new media under the umbrella of the fine arts. With this in mind, perhaps design standards specific to visual and or graphic disciplines should be established as well.

Until New Media standards and curricula are formally adopted at the local school district level, fine arts specialists in any of the arts disciplines, can reference the visual literacy standards established by the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) and develop standards and curriculum of their own. Doing so will enable educators to deliver cutting edge instruction in Dance, Music, Theater or Visual Arts while integrating components of the 21st Century Skills, and position themselves to be recognized as instructional leaders within their individual learning communities.

3. Design education must be taught by highly-qualified fine arts specialist.?While there is no argument against content-specific educators integrating design education into their subjects, it is flawed to think that an instructor with no formal background in fine arts could be effective at teaching fine arts content.

4. Design education (just as traditional visual art education) should start in the elementary grades. If students are to be expected to integrate technology and communication into their learning, we cannot afford to wait until students are in high school to introduce them to those skills.

5. Fine arts teachers should start early! The movement to incorporating design into the mainstream of K-12 education has already started. However with the advent of formally adopted standards and curriculum there will soon be a great demand on fine arts teachers to reinvent themselves. With our commitment to the purity of art music, theater and visual art, teachers have been resistant to the adoption of technology as legitimate media tools for the work we do with students; this is quickly coming to an end, especially for the visual arts. The adoption of media, technology and design literacy in our coursework will afford the fine arts educator the best opportunity to be true instructional leaders in our respective schools. If we wait until the day that design education and new media are fully adopted we can find ourselves to be ill-equipped and less able to make the adjustment.

For more on the value of design education please read: Joseph Schwartz Makes the Case for K-12 Design Education.