In addition to sitting in on 17 weeks of Advanced Graphic Design 1 at Valencia Community College and playing as co-instructor for the class I am responsible for creating the syllabus for a design course. The internship requires 150 hours and the classroom only affords approximately 60 of those hours. To ensure I receive a comprehensive internship experience I have arranged with my faculty adviser at SCAD to make up those missing hours be generating a full course syllabus.
I met this past week with a couple contacts at Florida Hospital College of Health Sciences. FHCHS is a nursing and allied health education facility on the campus of Florida Hospital which also offers several masters programs. I was able to connect with Yvette Saliba who’s an instructor and the director of the Center for Academic Achievement. We were connected through a design colleague who also works at the college. He recognized an opportunity after hearing our two related needs: my need to create a design-related course curriculum and their need to educate their faculty on basic design principles which will in turn help them guide and critique their students work beyond the content to include the form. After briefly talking on the phone it seemed as though that the arrangement would definitely be mutually beneficial.
I met Yvette and her colleague Stephanie for lunch. I shared with them about myself, the SCAD MFA program, my current teaching internship and my responsibilities which provided us the opportunity to collaborate. They proceeded to tell me about a grant they had received which had afforded them to build and equip a decently sized Mac computer lab and sound recording booth. Their goal for the lab was to give the students the tools to create professional and polished looking projects. They saw the need as students were required to create posters and audio and video presentations for multiple classes which would often end up in national presentations. While the content of the students work was outstanding the supporting visuals were continually sub par and below the colleges standards. Yvette and Stephanie made it clear that one class was not going to solve all their problems, but they wanted to shift the culture and begin to set expectations. By creating a series of workshop seminars for the faculty, the goal will be to educate the instructors within their fields to be more design minded. It will be a design course for the non-designer. By teaching them key principles and sharing methods to critically analyze students work they will be more equipped and confident to challenge the students to produce a higher level of work.
In order to give the students access to quality technical training in the labs that would remain current with technology I recommended that they purchase an online training license such as Lynda.com. In addition, I strongly urged them to hire a qualified lab assistant who would be able to answer questions as the students would without doubt meet hurdles and road blocks.
Moving forward, I plan on asking for a list of the courses and projects that are currently challenging the students to use the labs. If possible I would also like to see any past student submissions to get a better feel for what they are faced with. I then plan on creating a general outline for the course material and discussing it with Yvette. I want to touch base with her along the way to ensure that it is meeting their needs and hopefully exceed their expectations. While they initially asked for a single power packed session of an hour or two, I’m committed to creating a multi-session seminar that can build upon the previous sessions.
I’m excited about the opportunity of creating this curriculum from scratch. I imagine it to be a lot of work—but I’m sure it will be even more than I expect!