Tag Archives: education

Be An Activist For Your Own Education

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A Manifesto for Students of Any Age

Exactly two years ago today, I felt compelled to write the following piece as a Facebook post, written for my students. It was during a time when I felt that academia was being assailed by ‘greater’ powers and that intellectualism was under attack by populist demagoguery. I feel the same today, even while the gap of the last two years has been filled by one of the most challenging disruptions to education in recent history. I still feel that students need to reassess the value of their education, take ownership of it, and fight for it without taking it for granted. So I’m reposting the message here on my blog, with a few minor revisions. Hopefully some of you may find something of value in it.

The Urgency and Power of a Good Education

This is a message to my students – past, present, and future – wherever I may have taught you, in whatever capacity. Some of you may remember my saying to you (quite often) that as teachers, we’re not really training you for a career – we’re training you for a life – teaching you how to be a responsible, compassionate, contributive, and free-thinking member of your community.

Now, more than ever, it’s important to realize the importance of that last quality… the ability to think freely. And it’s important to realize how much that quality is now in jeopardy. And not just now… this has always been so. The indisputable truth is that through the vast timeline of human history and within almost all cultures of the world, the structures of power have feared the individual, independent, educated person. To put it bluntly, it’s not in the interest of those in power to equip you with the education that will question them or their policies. So while they give lip service to the importance of education, look behind the curtain and realize that most of them are working to limit the influence and scope of your educational ambitions if it doesn’t align with their own agenda.

That’s not to say that all governments or government agencies are out to suppress you. There are indeed some power structures and individuals in the world that are truly seeking to empower more people by giving them the freedom to be educated and to educate others.

The Agenda of Power Structures

One need only look at the budgets of most governments of any scale to see what they prioritize over education – usually it’s War or Political Aggression, disguised as ‘Defense’. Next in priority is usually commerce, but that too is largely designed to profit only the bigger financial players. Despite all the speeches you hear claiming otherwise, the common man is rarely the prime beneficiary of governmental economic policy, and even so it’s most often in the form of welfare, which is only helpful after the fact. It’s what you’re offered when all other systems have failed you.

This brings me to corporations, who are often the second tier of power structures that academics seek out for help and opportunity (and in some cases, the hidden first tier). Indeed, a huge amount of money and influence is poured into academia by corporations, as well as by individually affluent corporate tycoons. Indeed, a lot of this comes in the form of individual scholarships, which is nothing to scoff at. But it’s never enough to fulfill the actual demand. And by the way, don’t be fooled by the apparent generosity of such grant-awarding corporations. Very few of them are willing to give full autonomy to the academy or student to pursue educational aims that will further the recipient’s own personal agenda. Corporations are more likely to cultivate the seeds of their own agendas. They seek either to sow the small crop of a new elite governing class to propagate their own narrow financial goals, or to make potential worker drones just educated enough to be trained to work within the company’s own proprietary limits – automatons who are programmed to primarily fuel the company’s own unchecked growth and influence. They’re investing in you so that you become good, loyal, unquestioning employees.

The fact is (and this has been proven time and again) that if you go through the motions of your education as narrowly defined only by the curriculum structure or whatever technical skills you’re taught, then you will forever be an unwary tool of some power structure or another that defined those skills in the first place. Which is why we as teachers implore you to take your education seriously and openly. To learn how to think independently and critically. To avoid becoming clones of us. To find ways to supplement what we teach you with your own learning, so that you foster your own individual growth as well as that of your family, community, society, nation, or world. This is why it hurts us when you miss our classes, harmless as it may seem. This is why it hurts us when you don’t live up to your own academic potential and become a victim of distraction, laziness, mediocrity, or ambivalence.

Education for a Life

I admit that I’m not the best example of a person who followed this advice. I struggled deeply as a student in my early years, and it was only when I saw education not as something to get me the career that I wanted, but to get me the life that I wanted, in which my work could actively and physically contribute towards the well-being of the world around me. That was when I started to take my education seriously and to enjoy it and succeed in it.

I’m lucky to have taught students who are now literally spread out all over the world, and wherever you all are, I’m sure you’re not so sheltered that you can’t bear witness to what is happening around you. Academics and scholars are being ridiculed as being elitist and out-of-touch. Intellectualism and critical thinking are being devalued in favor of operational and technical skills. Students are being demonized as brainless cattle when they speak their own minds. The academy, meant to be the institution in which we invest our highest trust, is in turn becoming mistrusted and its freedoms are being curtailed.

I don’t particularly care where in the political spectrum your beliefs lie. I simply implore you to treat your education as a very precious gift – and not one to be passively served to you on silver platter, but an empowering tool with which you work actively and tirelessly. And you must realize that what we teach you as part of a formal education is only the beginning of the process that crystallizes your identity and personality; the process continues informally long after you leave our classrooms and studios.

Therefore, I say again that you must treat your education as a precious gift, because there will always be someone who wants to devalue it, to demonize it, to take it away, or even to use it against you. Don’t take your education for granted either, because I guarantee that for every one of you happily being taught, there are a hundred others in the world who would literally give up everything to be in your place. This isn’t just about making you a productive professional, but a responsible and independent academic activist for your own personal agenda. And in such academic activism, you will always encounter resistance. Hopefully, we teachers have some part in teaching you how to RESIST BACK.

delayed gratification: the long term benefits of learning

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Choosing to make a profession out of academia has innumerable challenges – the bureaucracy, the workload, the unfortunate behind-the-scenes politicking, and of course the disproportionate compensation relative to one’s perceived expertise. And then there’s the frustration of being unable to connect with students in a class or to motivate them. Indeed, many of my colleagues have left academia because of these challenges and I don’t fault them in the least. It does take a toll.

One coping mechanism that helps me deal with these challenges is to detach myself from the expectation of immediate gains and to seek satisfaction in the long-term results of my teaching, results which often bear fruit long after the student has left the classroom, well outside of my purview. No doubt, it’s a wonderful thing to see a student’s discovery unfold before your own eyes, within the duration of a class or a semester. It’s a great satisfaction to see that glint of an awakened mind, an imaginative thought, a deep reflection, or an innovative idea. But the absence of visible awareness in a student doesn’t necessarily mean that the teaching didn’t make it through, or that the student didn’t learn. The aftereffects of learning can sometimes be quite delayed.

I’m fortunate that, for most of my own education (especially my design education, which I undertook when I was older and mature enough to notice such things), I was able to appreciate what I was being taught right at the time of learning it. But much of my appreciation also came later, as a working professional. Some of it happened when I became a teacher myself. This delayed appreciation isn’t a bad thing; it’s natural and expected. So as a teacher, I assume the same happens with my own students and I’ve stopped looking for immediate results. Most students don’t become talented designers overnight, or even within the few years of design school. Many young designers really start to thrive when they’ve had the time and space to build on what they’ve learned in school and supplement it with the knowledge and resources that come from the profession or further studies. As long as I’ve inculcated in them the ability to continue learning far beyond graduation, that’s fine with me.

There’s no better example of this delayed outcome than the daily reminders of the accomplishments and achievements of former students in their current lives and careers. In my case, this is no exaggeration. Literally on a daily basis, I get some notification from somewhere (one of the few reasons I still appreciate social media) that a former student has done something good for themselves, for their clients, or for humanity at large. Sometimes this manifests as an award, sometimes as a successful project, sometimes as a new role or a job promotion. Whatever form it takes, it’s a reminder to me that I had some tiny part in that achievement, either directly as a teacher or mentor, or in my role as an administrator.

Six years ago, with great hesitation, I relinquished my role as a full-time teacher and agreed to become an administrator and academic leader. I say “with hesitation” because any teacher would know the sense of loss that comes with not being in a classroom day to day. But one of the things that propelled me was knowing that my impact, while indirect, was now broader and embraced many more students in many more disciplines. Teachers don’t often get a lot of appreciation (at least, not as much as they deserve), but the appreciation for administrators is even rarer. When students succeed, they may credit their teacher first and foremost, and rightly so. But rarely are academic administrators thanked for, say, framing a new curriculum, or requisitioning a new lab, or facilitating the hiring of good teachers. Occasionally, an administrator might be able to connect with some students directly, and that does make things better, but it’s more often that the efforts go unrecognised students. And that’s ok. I’ve made my peace with that.

The satisfaction instead comes from the quiet knowledge that you had some small part to play in a student’s success, either before or after graduation, that small part is multiplied by all the student successes that happen year to year. By my own rough estimates, I’ve directly taught about 600 students in my overall career. As an administrator, I’ve overseen the education and graduation of perhaps another 600. All told, that’s a lot of successes to have played a small part in, even if some of those graduates barely knew me, I did impact their education in some way, whether they were aware of it or not. And I’m nowhere near finished teaching; I still have many years left in my tank, and many more students to come.

What keeps me going through the sometimes frustrating parts is the awareness that although most of the students leave my teaching not fully knowing the value of what they learned, some of them will likely figure it out over time. The delayed gratification that comes from deeply embedded learning makes it fruitful for me, and in many ways the fact that the outcome is delayed somehow actually makes it even better because you realise that the learning wasn’t momentary; it stuck with them and guided them when they really needed it, even if they weren’t fully cognizant of it. I advise my colleagues sometimes when they’re really upset about a difficult batch of students, or angry at the “system”, that this is really what teaching is supposed to do, and it works better when the learning materialises over time. One just has to be open to seeing it.

teaching for uncertainty

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Adapting to new academic realities during a global pandemic and how it changes not just HOW we teach but WHAT we teach

Over the last few years, in many conversations with students, parents, designers, and educators, I’ve been using the word uncertainty quite a lot. Colleagues of mine have used the acronym VUCA over and over, which stands for “volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity”. For many of us, this has been a guiding parameter for framing the way we teach. Seen in a larger perspective, it frames how we prepare young people for a future professional life.

The biggest problem I’ve experienced with many existing academic curricula is that they work from a fixed set of knowledge and skills that the professional world presumably expects from a young graduate. That knowledge base and skill set are often addressing concerns of the now, and sometimes even worse, of the past.

I’ve always maintained that this is a mistake. What’s the point of preparing students for the future by using skills and knowledge designed for the past? Or the present? And even if one is forward-thinking, it’s still a mistake to assume that the future is something that can be predicted with any degree of certainty. Even five years from now. Even two years from now.

Heck, even a few months from now. Look at our current situation in March 2020, in which we face a crisis of global proportions that no one predicted a few short months ago (well, predicted by a few, but not in this time, in this way, or in this form). The ongoing Coronavirus pandemic has shoved aside all other crises in in conversations around the world. Everyone has been talking about a good number of different crises lately — climate change, extreme politics, misinformation, inequality, gender rights, safety of women, air pollution, and so on. All of these things have been overwhelmed and even subsumed by a crisis that no one expected, that has impacted everyone on the planet, every single country, every demographic group, every industry, every sector. It has disrupted healthcare, education, the workplace, and all kinds of social interaction. And if what they say is right, it’s going to have an even deeper impact economically, and very likely not for the better.

In the education sector alone, the disruption caused by this pandemic is forcing us to change the way we’re teaching. I remember several years ago when my institution gave us a mandate to shift 30% of our teaching to hybrid-blended online mode. Back then we had lots of conversations about how we would do this, and why we should do this. There were intense arguments and debates, and some of us were resistant to the idea, not necessarily in theory, but in application. “Sure, you can teach accounting online, but not design! You can’t remove physical contact! What about the design studio?!”

Much of the skepticism was from thinking that this was just something that our business-side colleagues were proposing to reduce costs and increase profits. Even I was skeptical about some of it, who already had significant experience in Distance Learning:

  • In the mid-1990s, I had a part-time job working in the Distance Education office, making Powerpoint slides for tech-unsavvy professors.
  • In 2006, I completed a one-year PG Diploma in Theology entirely in distance mode (offered by an Indian university, while I studying in New Jersey).
  • In 2012–13, when I was pursuing my Masters and simultaneously teaching, I was using Moodle both as a teacher AND as a student.
  • In 2010 my wife was working in the Distance Learning office for her university, helping facilitate learning for 75+ learning centers all over India, and she teaches at three of those centers even today.

So, even someone like me, a clear Distance Learning advocate, was wary of trying to make design education overly ‘remote’.

Yet here I am, sitting at home, grading assignments and giving feedback to students on Google Classroom. Why? Because of uncertainty. Because at some point in my life, I realised that it would benefit me to be more flexible in my thinking and more adaptive in my approach to teaching. Because I had no idea what’s coming next. I had no idea whether teaching GenZ would be similar to teaching Millennials. I had no idea whether the skills for which I was preparing my students were going to be relevant by the time they graduated. Whether there would even be a job market for them.

Since I couldn’t predict the future, I changed my approach from teaching or “covering” a defined set of knowledge and skills, and focused instead on trying to make my students more adaptive, more confident to face uncertainty, and more eager to try new things. As a Dean, my teachers would often come to me and say “But what about X? We didn’t get a chance to cover X this semester!”. I would tell them “So what? Don’t focus on X, or Y, or Z.” I told them to teach them enough so that they can learn it later, on their own. Make them interested enough so that they extrapolated their own learning. I told them, “You can’t teach them everything; they can’t learn everything; and even if they did, it may not be relevant by the time they get to it.”

This is the best thing we can do for our younger generation. Move away from the fixed knowledge base, and teach them instead to appreciate learning and exploring on their own. Prepare them for the unknown, the uncertain, the uncomfortable, and the unforeseeable. Focus on teaching them how to navigate the world, to be independent, to express their opinions, to be unpopular, to rebel, to demand satisfaction. To deal with unforeseen consequences. To plan ahead but also allow for the unplanned. To maintain order but allow for chaos. To be rational but allow for the irrational. To follow and learn but also to lead and teach.

Uncertainty isn’t the future anymore. It’s now.

(This story was originally published on Medium on 20 March 2020.)

the digital campus

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PREPARING TODAY’S STUDENT DESIGNER FOR THE TECHNOLOGY OF TOMORROW – AN EDUCATOR’S DILEMMA

When I was studying architecture in the mid-1990s, the design profession (and design education, by extension) was in the middle of a massive paradigm shift. CAD (Computer Aided Design) was becoming the norm in architecture firms everywhere, and colleges were struggling to figure out how to strike the right balance between ensuring that students learned vital manual drawing skills — passed down through centuries of architectural teaching — and preparing them for the digital skills needed by the professional marketplace upon graduation. Before joining architecture school, I had worked as a CAD draftsman in an architecture firm for a year, and in those days many offices had specific employees (sometimes students) who were responsible for preparing all computer-drafted drawings based on hand-drawn sketches and notes given to them by older architects who weren’t proficient in the software. Firms would manage the skill disparity by striking their own balance between older and younger designers, who had varying levels of competency in the software used at the time. The typical office space had just as many drafting tables in the studio as bulky computer workstations.

Fast forward two decades, and the profession is still trying to negotiate the balance between digital tools and manual skills. The actual physical tools may have changed, but if you ask any designer practicing today whether they value digital skills or manual skills, they will undoubtedly say that both are required, in different degrees. Where does that put people like me — design educators who are also trying to straddle the right line between these teaching these seemingly opposing skills? Given the limited time we have to prepare students for an increasingly competitive industry, where should we focus our energies in teaching? Students in Indian design schools today express a strong desire to learn digital skills, whereas the employment market is looking not only for people who are conversant with software, hardware, digital fabrication tools, prototyping, and so on, but who can also sketch and model by hand. That’s not to mention the ongoing important need for critical thinkers and problem solvers.

One of the common discussions I have with design students is managing their expectation of learning software. Savvy students know quite well that the industry will require them to be fluent in various software suites upon graduation, and they often demand that we teach them how to use the important software in the classroom. But this presents a two-pronged problem: (a) Are design schools simply software training institutes? And (b), what happens when the software (and other technologies) become obsolete by the time they graduate? Which is increasingly common these days, with the rapid, almost monthly, upgrades and innovations in technology.

The answer to the first problem is that, no, design teachers should not be software trainers. There is already a huge (and low-cost) market for that. Students paying high fees for quality design education would be better served learning software from technical training centres (or even learning it themselves online), while design colleges should focus on the aforementioned need to develop conceptual skills and critical thinking. Colleges should instead be concerned with teaching software approach rather than instruction. In other words, design teachers should avoid spending valuable class time teaching how to navigate menus of specific (perhaps soon-to-be outdated) software suites, and instead focus on general approaches to digital visualisation and prototyping. This should be independent of the brand or version of a particular software or technology.

The answer to the second problem is that, along with genericising the teaching of technological tools, design curricula should be flexible enough to allow for rapidly changing technologies. Embedding a specific software brand or suite by name in the curriculum is a mistake. In fact, assuming that the design process is dependent on that specific type of digital tool, which may not even be relevant in a few years, is misguided. An example is 3D printing, which is all the rage these days — not just in design, but in other walks of life; 3D printers were one of the first high-tech tools we purchased for our campus. But this technology undergoes new innovations almost every few months, and the applications for 3D printing increase rapidly across many disciplines and domains. So embedding a design class in the curriculum writeup that’s strictly about 3D printing, using only the technology we have at hand, is short-sighted.

Design curricula must not only be adaptive in its language, but a good design school should constantly be revisiting and revising the curricula to update against new innovations and trends in the profession. And they must manage resources, too, which is in many ways more difficult because the cost of quality equipment and infrastructure is very high. Realising that the expensive tech that was purchased last year is going to be outdated next year causes anxiety for many college administrators who are setting up and upgrading workshops and labs. The approach is to follow a more data- and research-driven process to understanding and forecasting trends in tech innovation rather than taking a knee-jerk reaction to buying the latest fashionable tools.

In the design school where I teach, we revised our curriculum and purposely removed any mention of software suites, brands, or specific technologies. The learning outcomes refer instead to generic and innovative ways to use the software and tech tools, with exploration taking priority over proficiency. Our assessment system rewards students who show initiative and ingenuity in finding the most suitable software for their particular needs and using it in innovative ways, often exceeding their own teachers’ expertise and expectations. We’ve also taken a more progressive approach to technology, and attempted — as best as possible — to train students for future technologies as well as existing. We have also worked with digital partners to provide software subscriptions to students at low cost to avoid the ethical (and pervasive) conundrum of digital piracy.

Managing these expectations — the students’ demand to be technologically dexterous and up-to-date against the constant flux of changing technology — against the desire to keep the focus of design education on critical thinking, theory, process, and problem-solving is the task of the 21st century design educator, and it’s not an easy one. But a way forward is to understand — and help students understand — that technology in any form is a tool, and is not the solution itself. No amount of cutting edge technology on its own is going to solve design problems… that has been, and always will be the domain of the intellect and talent of the designer’s mind and spirit. Just as a pencil is only useful in the hands of someone who knows how to use it skilfully, through long practice, with failures followed by success, so is any high end technological tool. It has to be used — and taught — wisely.

[A version of this article was previously published in the March 2018 issue of Silicon India magazine.]

the academics/industry gap in india

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A while ago, I was invited to speak at a conference session in Delhi conducted by CII (Confederation of Indian Industry) whose theme was Bridging the Gap Between Academics and Industry. Along with me on the panel were some important people in education from prestigious institutions, although I was the sole panelist from a design college. Their stimulating words gave me a lot to think about and my own talk reflected on their valuable insights. It was clear from the comments during and after the panel that many people from academics and industry believe that there is a wide gap between what students in higher education are taught and what the industry expects of them when they graduate, and that there’s an urgent need to narrow that gap significantly, considering India is cascading into a turbulent period of economic and social uncertainty. Admittedly, I truly don’t believe that anyone is 100% sure how exactly to prepare our students for the future when the future itself is so ambiguous.

The panel at the CII conference on”Bridging the Gap Between Academics and Industry.

What did became clear to me were two things: First, that our traditional educational systems are designed for the present situation (and arguably even the past), and that we need to significantly overhaul the entire structure and prepare students for uncertainty by making them more adaptable to new paradigms. Second, I felt that the Academics/Industry Gap is actually more a perception than reality.

To address the first issue, we need to reevaluate existing educational models from top to bottom — in the private, non-profit, and governmental sectors, and in both schooling and higher education. Society seems to demand that traditional paradigms — degrees, fixed curricula, and numerous rules and regulations — lead to academic quality, but that is clearly not the case. Requiring all new higher-ed teachers to have PhD’s, for example, is not necessarily going to improve teaching in the classroom nor produce better graduates. Such teachers may have more domain knowledge, but does that necessarily mean they are better at teaching? I don’t believe so. Look to sports and you can find numerous examples of average players becoming excellent coaches, and vice versa. Society should start to accept that many of our recognized educational models are often outmoded and are designed for a fixed set of outcomes based on known scenarios, whereas the current need is to embrace non-traditional approaches plus different ways to produce and measure quality.

And I don’t automatically think we need to look only to the West for this, by the way. India’s own rich and ancient history has numerous examples of adaptive teaching methods, so as a start we can certainly look within in our own culture for the answers.

As for the second issue, I believe that Industry (although there is hardly such a monolithic thing anymore called ‘capital-I’ Industry) has to reassess their expectations of a graduate and abandon the idea that a fresh graduate must already have a full checklist of skills and knowledge, ready to become a professional the moment they take off their graduation cap and gown. Particularly in the design disciplines education has, for centuries, been followed by years of apprenticeship where the learning continues, and where professionals have taken on the onus of continuing the education of young aspirants. In addition, there is no longer a fixed graduate profile; every employer has different expectations and requirements, so a single fixed curriculum is not going to fulfill all workplace demands. So, if the working environment is rightly considered a natural extension of learning, the ‘gap’ between academics and industry is seen as more perception than reality.

Even so, there are ways to reduce this perceived gap, and I’d like to highlight four strategies that we have been practicing in my own institution:

Industry Accountability

As I’ve said, professional firms and companies of all shapes and sizes need to consider themselves as equal partners in education rather than just ‘recipients’ of skilled and trained professionals. Employers needs to be willing to spend the time and effort to continue the training that begins in college and provide a seamless transition to workplace learning by acting as true mentors to young graduates.

Adaptive Curricula

Academic institutions should move towards designing curricula that produces graduates of diverse profiles rather than assume that all graduates in a discipline fit a fixed outline. Allowing flexibility and student choice in the curriculum via electives and open learning, and not worrying about how much there is to ‘cover’ in a given semester is important. No teacher is able to actually ‘cover’ whatever is needed anyway, so we should give students the freedom to chart their own learning pathways. Institutions should also allow more students and teachers the flexibility to adapt to wider varieties of industry collaborations which don’t necessarily coincide with academic timelines and structures.

Embedding Industry Early and Often

Institutions should rethink the traditional internship model and think of ways to include industry from Day One of a student’s college experience. The involvement of working professionals can start small and get progressively higher so that a student’s skills also grow professionally. Moving from basic industry masterclasses to intensive workshops to live industry projects and consultancies is one way to make this natural progression happen. This mitigates the culture shock of moving directly from classroom to workplace and the ensuing distress that often gets in the way of learning performance.

Value-based Education

Finally, both teachers and employers need to strive towards creating not just better professionals, but better citizens and better human beings. Curriculum and pedagogy on one side and industry practice on the other must both be infused with sensitivity towards ethics, compassion, cooperation, integrity, and honesty. Technical skills will always be important but human skills are absolutely essential towards preparing students for uncertain futures.

Going Forward

The academics/industry gap, whether perceived or real, can be bridged with just a little bit of effort and a whole lot of mindset change. The notion that education’s purpose is solely to serve up a steady supply of workers to fill standardized positions in industry is long gone, but current practices and systems in India don’t seem to reflect this. Acknowledging that our students and graduates are diverse young talents with differing abilities and different learning preferences is an important first step towards creating a more seamless integration between two worlds which actually serve the same purpose.

(This article was previously published on Medium on 22 Aug 2019)