Frictions and Futures for Digital Higher Education

This talk will describe some of the dominant narratives and imaginaries currently shaping the future of higher education teaching. In critiquing these it will also explore creative, participative and perhaps preferable alternatives. Working toward an understanding of the digital frictions and imagined futures shaping universities, the talk will bounce off a set of speculative scenarios as it considers how – as teachers – we can actively shape the landscape of our future higher education.

In framing an argument, I will build on the Manifesto for Teaching Online, the Near Future Teaching project and other elements of the research programme of the Centre for Research in Digital Education at Edinburgh University.

More information about our keynote speaker Dr. Siân Bayne can be found on her website.
https://sianbayne.net

Notes from the keynote provided by Dr. Bayne:

DEL keynote references, September 2022 – Google Docs

Design Educators Conversing with Health Educators on Lessons Learned from Teaching Online for More Than a Decade

Gloria Gomez (OceanBrowser & University of Sydney)
Areli Avendaño (Deconstructing the Status Quo & RMIT)

ABSTRACT
This panel will bring together health educators (from medicine and midwifery) and art and designer educators (from communication design, industrial design, design and technology, interaction design and education, and set design) to dialogue on benefits, challenges and opportunities of teaching online. The medical and midwifery panelists have been teaching online for more than a decade in which a component of their programmes are delivered using blended collaborative approaches. Students only come to campus for practical, tutorial courses or residential week. In those programmes, students study from where they work in rural or urban areas. To promote engagement, enhance feedback, and address isolation, they have developed approaches in which students partner with educators. Engagement and feedback is promoted thru synchronous discussions on the modules and student-led collaborative assignments. Almost overnight during the pandemic, some design educators participating in the panel were forced to change from zero to fully teaching online, while others went from 5% or 10% to fully teaching online. Online distance education requires design, planning, development that our health educators had time to evolve and reflect upon over a long period of time. As stated in the call DEL 2022, “a radically digital architecture of online and hyflex spaces of learning” is needed for teaching online in a manner that students feel engaged and not isolated. During the height of the pandemic, teaching fully online was an “unanticipated trend for art and design”. Our design education panelists will share challenges and opportunities identified during the implementations of their online deliveries, as they were forced to adapt to teaching online. We will learn about addressing challenges and identifying opportunities for research and grow. Two panelists were completely new to teaching online. These situations will be familiar to many at DEL 2022. Our health education panelists have advancing this trend for 10 plus years through the implementation of blended delivery or collaborative development models. The articles titled “Using small tutorial groups within a blended Bachelor of Midwifery programme” provides a good introduction their delivery model (Kensington et al., 2017). While the article titled “Educating the next generation – The University if Sydney’s Discipline of Ophthalmology at Save Sight Institute” provides an overview of their flexible e-learning postgraduate programmes (Grigg et al., 2018, pp. 57 – 61).

THE CONVERSATION will be sparked by three DEL 2022 questions: – How is your field advancing access, equity, and inclusion within digital spaces? – How is your programme considering priorities and premiums of learning architectures, both physical and digital, codifying contested zones of privilege and access to innovation in digitally engaged learning? – What do you think are the practices and process for inclusive teaching and culturally responsive pedagogy that may forge new paradigms of participation and empowerment in learning?

THE DISCUSSION will be enriched by the “Manifesto for Teaching Online”(Bayne et al. 2020) and “Dissolving the Dichotomies Between Online and Campus#Based Teaching: A Collective Response to the Manifesto for Teaching Online” (MacKenzie et al. 2021).

Between worlds | hybrid pedagogy of art and design

Barak Pelman (Bezalel Academy of arts and design Jerusalem)
Nitzan Cohen (Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Nitzan)
Darryl Clifton (Camberwell College of Arts UAL)
Chelsi Cocking (MIT Media Lab)
Merav Salomon (Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design Jerusalem)

ABSTRACT
In the last two years, an international group of educators in arts, design and architecture have been meeting regularly to discuss the effects of COVID-19 on art and design pedagogy. Led by the Bezalel Art and Design Teaching Center and the Bezalel international office, this group discussed new ways to theorise and practice art and design education in light of recent advances in CAD, CAM, and communication technologies, significant cultural shifts and social restrictions. Drawing on recent sociomaterial orientations in education research, the group developed a novel perspective of contemporary art and design learning processes. This perspective conceives art and design learning environments as complex ecologies of hybrid sociomaterial and digital interactions that extend beyond academic campuses’ areas. Different kinds of agents take part in these interactions: There are physical agents, digital agents, and hybrids of both. They include the students themselves as well as the components that comprise their physical, virtual, and social environments; the physical and the virtual spaces they occupy, the physical and virtual artefacts they iteratively create, the software and the hardware they use, and the physical and the virtual modes of communication they employ with their peers and instructors. This panel will explore the implications of this perspective on art and design education through four workshops delivered by representatives from four high profile institutions of art and design higher education institutions around the world.

The Public Disorientation Unit

Jaygo Bloom (The British School of Creative Arts, Sao Paulo)

ABSTRACT
As a result of the widescale move towards online teaching it is noticeable that parts of our sector have become more productive and adaptive, there has been a disruption of institutional structures that were based on outdated models, on hierarchy and these are now shifting towards ‘heterarchy’, a model that respects relative autonomy but is integrated with internal cooperation and shared culture. Collectively our students and staff are seizing this opportunity as a means to reshape how education is facilitated and as a result students are gaining a greater sense of ownership over their own learning, gaining greater ownership over the manner in which they model risk and facilitate their own education.

Quest2Learn: An Accessible Platform for Lab Science Education

Chinat Yu (Johns Hopkins University)
Elizabeth Aufzien (Johns Hopkins University)
Hakeoung Hannah Lee (University of Texas at Austin)
Jeffery Ji Zhou (Johns Hopkins University)
Siddharth Ananth (Johns Hopkins University)

ABSTRACT
Developing confidence in a lab environment requires ample opportunities to practice lab skills; a textbook or even a video tutorial is not always sufficient to ensure students can use equipment and perform procedures correctly. The pandemic has highlighted the lack of viable existing solutions to enable students from all backgrounds to learn lab sciences as it has accelerated the trend towards online and HyFlex spaces of learning. Many state-of-the-art applications require expensive setups like a VR headset, and the traditional video and text-based solutions are not an adequate substitute for hands-on experience. During the last year, we developed prototype lab modules that are available in beta for Apple and Android devices. This ensures that our solution is accessible to many students and communities. It also addresses the inequities of educational resources in the US and around the world by putting lab experiments within the reach of students anywhere. We have been able to integrate our lab modules into Introductory Biology and Biochemistry laboratory courses at a large private University. We tested two different designs of our AR system (dynamic and scenic) with over 100 students who had varying levels of prior experience with lab sciences. Our main findings were that students with little-to-no lab experience preferred the scenic AR modules over the dynamic ones, as they found the dynamic modules and the high degree of freedom to be overwhelming. More experienced students also tended to favor the more guided scenic AR modules, but some expressed a preference for dynamic modules due to the added challenge and immersion. In light of these findings, we believe that student learning, at any level, can be improved if they first receive a highly constrained step-by-step tutorial learning module followed by a more interactive playground learning module. Such a system of procedural education is substantiated by the two-stage theory of mental model construction, and we plan to test this hypothesis further in the near future.

Bridging Divides: Finnish and American Art + Design Innovation Exchange

claudia roeschmann (Texas State University)
Karoliina Niemelä (Oulu University of Applied Sciences)

ABSTRACT
This panel including faculty and students from a Finnish and a U.S. university will provide insights to the planning, execution and outcome of a virtual study abroad during the pandemic when all international travel was cancelled on campus due to Covid-19. The “”Finnish and American Art + Design Innovation Exchange””, a project with the intent to increase collaboration between American and Finnish students, promotes innovation and entrepreneurship, and exposes Finnish students to American art and culture. The kick-off for the exchange program was a two-day virtual workshop, five weeks into the semester, that engaged 42 students in collaborative projects and allowed them to reflect on cultural differences throughout the processes of framing a challenge, working through the problem, and implementing a solution. The cross- cultural collaboration projects focused on global change through art and design innovation. Students were guided on embracing inclusivity, diversity and different perspectives through these processes – while also overcoming barriers such as language and time zone constraints. The panel will showcase the different global perspectives of the mega trends that students worked on. It will bring forward the students’ perspective from each country, and their respective experiences engaging in a virtual study abroad. It will address the importance of developing cultural sensitivities and adapting to globalization, while being pushed out of comfort zones and building confidence, while also sharing best practices in hybrid model teaching in international and local contexts. This project has highlighted the best aspects of the remote teaching model that we were all forced to jump in, and showcases how students have embraced remote teaching over the past two years because of Covid-19 restrictions. Traditional study abroad programs improve critical thinking skills and help build students’ confidence while world views expand and experiential learning takes place – it’s time to bridge all divides and take more study abroad programs virtual to empower all students to gain these skills and learn globally.

Leveling-Up Access to Education Through Twitch: Democratizing Education Through Gaming Platforms and Theories

Daniel Drak (Parsons School of Design)

ABSTRACT
The dramatic rise of streaming owes much of its success to the fact that communities were forced online during the pandemic. These trends benefited platforms such as Twitch whose user base rose dramatically at that time. Suddenly, streaming and digital platforms supplemented in-person activities, and individuals were quick to experiment with these technologies as an extension of their personal and professional lives, teachers amongst them. Drawing from the accessible nature of such platforms as a way for individuals to engage in learning in the same way they engage similarly in entertainment provides a host of opportunities for teachers and students alike. With ease of access to such platforms, we can further promote access to learners while cultivating communities of care and exploration. At the same time, these platforms can often be a lightning rod for trolls and negative online behavior, of which online communities must practice resilience and vigilance when it comes to their safety and the protection of online safe spaces. This case study will shed light on one professor’s attempts to cultivate online learning opportunities that could both complement and supplement in-person learning activities. This will be discussed in two ways: 1) through the adaptation of traditional curriculum to an online environment that re-imagines modalities of student participation to the benefit of diverse students and learning styles, and 2) through an open-access approach to post secondary-level education that could be accessed by learners who may not have access to institutions, thus democratizing materials and curriculum. Learners will be invited to participate in a Twitch- based information series that introduces design to those less familiar with its breadth and depth established with the idea of exciting individuals about possibilities within design and through design. This content was previously offered as part of a course developed by the session host that introduced students to the multifaceted nature of design and has served as a catalyst for many students to pursue further opportunities in design.

Cripping Online Learning Spaces through the
Disruption of Universal Designs

Eunkyung Hwang (Penn State)

ABSTRACT
The rapid adoption of digital and the growth of the hyflex learning community in art and design education during the COVID-19 pandemic has increased accessibility for students with disabilities and has partially bridged the disability divide in learning. In particular, online learning platforms and websites of educational institutions have extended their universal designs, accommodating a wide range of students’ needs and abilities to construct a more inclusive learning environment for both people with and without disabilities. However, as their offline counterparts do, many of these universal designs in online learning offer merely a baseline for equitable learning; they rarely center the learning experiences of students with disabilities. According to critical accessibility studies, we should critically interrogate educational institutions’ Americans with Disabilities Act Standards for Accessible Design compliance-centered access. Centering disability justice in our learning spaces, we should further extend meaningful accessibilities that can interpret “relation between bodies” in spaces (Hamraie, 2018, p. 456). This presentation explores the importance of centering “crip time” (Kafer, 2013, p. 26) and disability aesthetics in online learning spaces. Based on my reflection on my virtual art museum education experiences and explorations of other online learning spaces, I will analyze ableist epistemology that are deeply ingrained in our online education praxis. I will further highlight the need for disrupting universal designs in current online learning spaces, with the goal of transforming those spaces into something designed mainly for people with disabilities. This presentation can also show how the increasing visibility and public belonging of disability aesthetics in online learning spaces can dismantle normative constructions of accessibility in remote learning. Ultimately, I will claim this disruption can move us towards addressing digital inequality between non-disabled people and people with disabilities.

Mapping Artists’ Responses to Violence Against Women: Building Community and Culturally Responsive Pedagogy

Lauren Stetz (Penn State)

ABSTRACT
In response to the global #MeToo movement, which addressed the violence against women (VAW) that many women endure in silence, this presentation examines how the transnational mapping of artists’ narratives and their artworks can foster community and develop culturally responsive pedagogy. Through a participatory action research study of 24 artists located in digital spaces, such as Facebook and Instagram, this research explores localized nuances of violence against women, as demonstrated through culture, history, and politics. Notably, this study questions how artists’ visual narratives and qualitative interviews can aid in the development of transnational coalitions, highlighting the critical need role of community for trauma survivors. This presentation provides a model for engagement with digital art activism, providing pedagogical pathways toward empowerment.

Un+Contact to Re+Connect: Bridging Divides between Communities, People, and Spaces through Museum Programming

Ye Sul Park (Penn State)

ABSTRACT
As informal learning institutions, art museums have played a crucial role in knowledge production by engaging communities from different backgrounds in art projects that promote diversity, inclusion, and equity. However, the ongoing global pandemic has affected every aspect of individual lives and societal landscapes, not only disconnecting institutional collaborations between museums and other organizations, but also isolating marginalized communities. In this case study session, I introduce several projects of the *c-lab at the Coreana Museum of Art in South Korea to discuss how digitally engaged art museum programming can help bridge divides between institutions, communities, as well as virtual and physical spaces. Focusing on its fourth programming in 2020, *c-lab 4.0, I will discuss how this research-initiative attempts to create interdisciplinary and democratic learning communities to envision further inter-institutional collaborations between higher education and art museums. *c-lab 4.0 explored entangled structures of contemporary social relationships under the title, Un+Contact, as the pandemic normalized contactless lifestyles and promoted communications in the hyperconnected virtual space. Through public programs that engaged a wide range of audiences across physical and virtual spaces, *c-lab 4.0 illuminated the blurred boundaries between virtuality and reality through artistic lenses and attempted to explore the potential of digital technologies for new modes of communications and learning in the post-pandemic era. This presentation investigates the implications of art museum programming to imagine more equitable and inclusive learning experiences in higher education.

Professor as Coach -Teaching Beyond the Classroom

Judy Oskam (Texas State University)

ABSTRACT
Many university professors bridge the digital divide by sharing their expertise as coaches, consultants, and speakers. Faculty teach and reach audiences via online courses, monthly coaching programs, podcasts, Clubhouse meeting rooms, regular blogs and newsletters. It’s common for faculty to consult with clients, organizations and other universities. In order to reach the public, many faculty are encouraged to engage with key audiences. Some faculty reach readers, listeners and viewers through podcasts, webinars, books, subscription programs and online platforms. Faculty are also finding new spaces and strategies for inclusive teaching and coaching. This session will present examples of academic faculty who are working to establish their public brand to expand their reach and educate the public they serve.
Interaction
How do faculty engage with their audiences, beyond the classroom? How does the role of faculty need to change to reach the public? How do faculty define inclusive teaching and coaching? Tips and examples.

Labor-based Contract Grading: A Case Study of
Inclusion in a Design Research Course

Cynthia Lawson Jaramillo (Parsons School of Design)

ABSTRACT
While university administrators are eager to “reopen the campus,” undergraduate students seem to be resisting a “back to normal” impulse that many educators associate with on-campus teaching. Instead, these learners, most of whom experienced at least one full year (in high school and/or university) of remote teaching and learning, continue to need faculty to meet them where they are – both socio-emotionally as well as in their diversities as learners. Furthermore, since the summer of 2020, many U.S.-based universities have become host to increased calls for anti-racist curricula and systemic changes towards racial justice. What strategies do faculty need to deploy to effectively bridge this particular historical moment in higher education? How do we meet the demands of administrators that aspire to that 2019 “normalcy” while supporting students who insist on hybridity; and both during a time in which masks, continued Covid-19 testing, and other policies potentially and continuously remind both faculty and students about their lived trauma? How do the structures that have guided university teaching for decades need to change to address equity, inclusion, and social justice goals? This case study details the deployment of a labor-based contract grading rubric in a required undergraduate design research class. The rubric is a pared down version of one first construed in 2019 by scholar of teaching and anti-racism Dr. Asao B. Inoue. Initially established with the intention of assessing writing… [in] socially just ways [that] may provide a way to address the violence and discord seen in the world today,” Dr. Inoue’s rubric is an excellent match to the continued, and even heightened, divides of access, equity, and inclusion in higher education. Furthermore, the adapted version documented in this case study afforded great clarity, to students and faculty, on how to thrive in the course despite ongoing life challenges (especially related to the Covid-19 pandemic and mental health.)
The decision to change the grading rubric to a seemingly radical approach was intended to meet students where they may be – as students and as young adults in this point in history, and with a principal goal in effectively supporting a diversity of learners (as there are multiple paths towards any given grade) – one bridge of inclusion to be designed into a semester-long class. The presentation will discuss the specifics of adapting the rubric to a design research course, its framing in the syllabus, the opportunities & challenges it afforded throughout a 15-week university semester, and students’ feedback about it (as captured in end-of- semester anonymous course evaluations as well as interspersed in-classroom anecdotal documentation.

Embodied Data: Experiential Approaches to Teaching Creative Coding

Kimberly Lyle (Penn State)

ABSTRACT
I work with first-year digital art and design students that come into the classroom with very different skill levels depending on the privilege of their earlier educational experiences. The pandemic intensified this with the transition to online learning. While I previously used informal and one-on-one time with students to bridge this deficit, online learning left little space for these interactions. This was especially true when teaching a unit on creative coding, as the learning curve is steep and the logic-based material can be intimidating. This led me to ask: How can I bridge the gap between students with advanced technical skills and those learning them for the first time in an online space? Might incorporating the body when teaching traditionally ‘mind’ focused technical skills like coding create a shared point of entry? Could embodying these algorithmic concepts make the material more accessible to a wider range of learning styles? Coding is traditionally disembodied and virtual by nature. To bridge student gaps in skill sets and learning styles, I began to rethink how learning might happen outside the confines of the Zoom grid and classroom architecture. I designed exercises and a project that translated algorithmic thinking into bodily movement, lived experience, and manual data collection. This presentation will focus specifically on the Data Self-Portrait Pattern project and several smaller exercises that reinforced programming skills. This project asked students to manually collect data for a week on an everyday action they performed. Students then used code to translate their data into a pattern of related shapes and colors. Example datasets included the number of times a student was unable to taste food due to COVID-19, the intensity of emotions felt when communicating with a significant other over the phone, and the number of times a student was unable to hold eye contact because of shyness. Grounded in embodied experience, students became experts of their concepts. This paved the way for more confidence when learning the technical skills required to communicate their data visually. It also challenged those with strong technical skills to consider the meaning of the work they were creating. It’s important to acknowledge that experiential learning is not new. It has been extensively researched in the areas of psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, Buddhist studies, and cognitive science for its positive effects. Especially for students with diverse learning styles or invisible disabilities such as autism spectrum disorder (ASD). However, it is rarely implemented in Western classrooms. bell hooks is one of the most notable advocates. In her book “Teaching to Transgress”, she encourages educators to make our bodies visible in the classroom as one way to deconstruct how power has been distributed in the institutionalized spaces of higher education. I hope to encourage a conversation around the many ways this might be possible in hybrid and online art and design education.

Can a Joint Online Project Between ITESO and Parsons Students Help Challenge Design for Sustainability?

Raz Godelnik (Parsons School of Design)
Jared Jiménez Rodríguez (ITESO, Universidad Jesuita de Guadalajara)

ABSTRACT
The need to make design more diverse and equitable has never been greater with the growing recognition of how current design methods and frameworks support rather than challenge existing systems of power. This is also the case when it comes to design for sustainability (DfS), which for the most part is still grounded in mental models reinforcing neoliberal economic thinking. As a result, DfS supports what we consider as “sustainability-as-usual,” i.e. sustainability solutions that are still dominated by shareholder capitalism and thus generate mostly incremental results that do little to help the historically disadvantaged.
Struggling with these questions and challenges in our own courses, we were wondering if getting students to collaborate with students from another university in another country could be helpful. In other words, we wanted to see if getting students from different universities and cultural settings to work together on a sustainable design project could result in outcomes that move beyond sustainability-as-usual. Inspired by the vision of Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) to help create a different type of learning environment, one that is more equitable and collaborative, we created a joint project that brought together design students from ITESO (Mexico) and Parsons (USA). Entitled “Sustainable Design for the 2020s” the joint project aimed at building on the growing digital savviness of the students, which was the result of a forced shift into online learning during the pandemic. It was our hope that the mastery of digital tools has made students more comfortable with online work and collaboration, helping make collaboration with students outside their class and university a pretty seamless task. The project itself brought together 24 students from ITESO and 18 students from Parsons, which were divided into small teams with one student from Parsons and one or two from ITESO. The teams were asked to address sustainability challenges from diverse points of view, considering not only the process of developing and designing sustainable solutions but also the context of these solutions, both local and global. With these considerations in mind, teams were tasked to identify a systematic and critical sustainability problem, research three approaches that are currently used to solve the problem and offer their own solution. Teams were asked to propose solutions that offer meaningful change, not incremental one, and consider among other things how social justice, inclusion, and equity considerations are embedded in their proposal. The delivery of this two-months long project was a recorded presentation that provide an overview of their work, including their research and proposed solution. The case study will present the results of the joint project. One question that we look into is whether the collaborative work has met our expectations and generated work that challenges the status quo in substantive ways. We will examine the value of diverse points of view situated in different cultures and local settings when it comes to addressing global sustainability issues. Last but not least, we will share insights on
the effectiveness of online collaboration.

No Bridge Too Far: A Framework for Navigating the New Normal in Preservice Teaching and Learning

Debrah Sickler-Voigt (Middle Tennessee State University)
Paige Medlock (Middle Tennessee State University)

ABSTRACT
The purpose of this session is to address new challenges and opportunities in digital learning that have emerged in training pre-service and early career art teachers. In the past few years, changes have occurred in both the preK-12 art classroom as well as the university art education curriculum and practices that prepare teachers for their classroom instruction. Gaps exist; some are new and some have amplified. With these gaps, participants will learn how the presenters have taken the attitude there is no bridge too far nor fears too big when applying creative and innovative approaches to teaching and learning. The now familiar concept that arts professionals are engaged in a new normal can feel daunting and overwhelming; however, when arts professionals see education as organic and full of potential and see change and choice as normal and that these experiences are shared, we as arts professionals find common ground and renewed energy. When arts professionals identify divides and name fears we begin to dismantle and remove them. When arts professionals embrace opportunities rather than focus on limitations, and learn to seek new solutions, ask questions, consider options, and advocate for needs, we discover new pathways. In teaching the art education pre-service curriculum, the presenters have experienced and responded to the variety of gaps and changes using a comprehensive choice-based structure and creative problem-solving. Participants will learn from the presenters’ models of teaching classes in a variety of formats from in-person to online, hybrid/blended, practicum observations and participation, and residency placements as student teachers. Technologies employed range from basic supplies and traditional equipment to borrowed devices, personal assistive technology, handheld devices, interactive platforms, video recorded reflections, live meeting participations, and many more. Participants will identify how the presenters have found that allowing flexibility among available technologies and seeking non-traditional forms of professional development, as well as incorporating authentic modes of care, the art and design classroom environment can foster and facilitate teaching and learning that bridges divides, develops empathy, and increases creative opportunities. To conclude the session, participants are invited to share their experiences and questions and identify takeaways to promote and sustain digitally engaged learning experiences and apply them to their unique teaching situations.