2018-2019
Education Guide
The Journey STUDENTS DISCOVERING T H E I R B E S T S E LV E S
T H R O U G H E N G A G E M E N T, R E L AT I O N S H I P S A N D C R E AT I V I T Y
A C U S T O M P U B L I C AT I O N P R O D U C E D B Y
M O F F LY M E D I A
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Education By Design Constructive, open-ended and iterative, design thinking is an educational philosophy that encourages teachers and students to be creative problem-solvers.
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hen I was a child newly emigrated to Los Angeles, I learned English by watching television, but I desperately wanted to learn to read. I would watch my mother and sister happily immerse themselves in books. I was intrigued by the letters that looked like mysterious black marks and felt cheated only to have pictures by which I could make sense of a story. I would glare at a page imagining I could force those marks to come into focus by sheer dint of will. Writing was also a challenge. My mother would try to teach me in the way she had learned in India, but to no avail. I would spend my afternoons picking berries and stain the sidewalk with a sprawling chain of purply loops (much to the chagrin and annoyance of our BY DR. MEERA V I S WA N AT H A N landlady) pretending that I was writing. Teachers HEAD OF SCHOOL sighed as I struggled to T H E E T H E L W A L K E R S C H O O L
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produce neat and decipherable words. When I studied Japanese in college and had to learn to write both Chinese characters and the Japanese syllabaries, I imagined it would be a new beginning. Sadly, my writing was still poor. Fortunately, computers came along and I was saved by technology that allowed me to communicate neatly and clearly. Since I was young, I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of marks, or signs that carry so much weight and possibility, whose significance can only be understood tautologically. Recently, I had the pleasure of team-teaching a course on South Asian history and culture. In studying ancient Indus Valley civilization, we explored the topological mathematics of pulli kolam, the geometric designs defined by grids of dots. These designs were created to adorn and sanctify the space between the street and the home. To this day, Hindu women from all over India decorate and make sacred the entrance to their homes with this type of design, the origins of which go back thousands of years. What do we mean by the term design? The word signifies so much, and carries within its definition the notion of signs that bear meaning. Design is also at the heart of an educational institution. Teachers and students are designers alike, crafting together the educational process. Today, we hear more and more about design
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Design is at the heart of an educational institution. Teachers and students are designers alike, crafting together the educational process.
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thinking, or the process of adopting and adapting creative strategies from the world of design to solve real-world problems. Design thinking is constructive, open-ended and iterative. It is creative and playful in the most profound sense of play. It does not separate content from meaning, and the aesthetic and the functional are not understood to be antithetical. Eschewing simple dualism and binaries, design thinking is a “both/and” approach. Self-generative and organic, it takes note of repetition and pattern, selection and arrangement, allowing for both spatial and temporal progression. As it becomes apparent how replete with meaning sign and design are, we need to consider the idea of designation. Normally we understand this word to be a form of naming. We designate a particular tree in the forest by naming it a maple or a pine. We designate whom we want to represent us in government by voting. We designate our heirs by naming them in a will. There is a weightiness in designation. But the act of naming or pointing, though it might seem straightforward and simple, is, in fact, a profound philosophical assertion. It is not merely by naming that we single out the presence of something or someone. By naming it, we at the same time are attributing importance and significance to it.
In medieval Europe, a philosophical debate ensued between universalism and nominalism. The universalists claimed that names were more than just names; they represented Neoplatonic categories of ideals whose realizations in the phenomenal world were simply imperfect manifestations. Thus, a table in the phenomenal world of existence could be wood or metal, round or square, low or high, but the full sense of table-ness could only be fully realized in the noumenal realm of ideals. For the nominalists, names were simply names without metaphysical implications. Abstractions were not “real” in the way material objects were real. But then we need to ask what names allow us to do. In Zen Buddhism, we learn dharma (or truth) cannot be named or explained with words. Instead, truth is represented indirectly by pointing to the full moon. This is to remind us that just as we use our index fingers to point, so too language itself is only indexical. It cannot truly represent something; it can only point to something; it can only indicate it. As teachers, we cannot show the true meaning of a thing or its fundamental significance. We can only point to it. Our relationship to truth is always an indirect one. Like the index for a book, our function as instructors is to help provide an organizational
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grid that will help students search out particular elements and their relationships to one another. The act of pointing or naming a thing, person or action gives it prominence. The act focuses our attention. It is an implicit mandate to pay attention, not in general terms, but in specific ways. It is a narrowing of our general scanning of the world at large to this thing, individual or process at this place and/or this time. Learning invariably entails a filtering and narrowing of the larger complex of stimuli in which we organize what we perceive through naming and the identification of patterns of those same named objects and things. Accordingly, designation represents a heightened form of naming or pointing. The act of designation is always an underscoring; value is being invoked, assessed and assigned. In more traditional educational systems, it was the instructor’s role to designate what would be studied and why. But when we approach education through design thinking, the act of designation becomes much more dynamic and fluid. It becomes a conjoint act, uniting teachers and students in the question of what it means to designate a particular problem to solve or field of inquiry to pursue. Thus, designation is the fulfillment of design, whereby we take
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the intention, plan, creation or ornament and understand its full relevance and value for a specific set of purposes that serve to not only express creativity and solve problems, but also to reaffirm our own place and value in this world. Designation is the placing of design in its fullest context, temporally, spatially and symbolically in which meaning and value are not only invoked, but also shared to provide common ground. To be educated, then, is to understand how sign, design and designation are bound together, mirroring the conjoining of cognition and creation. So why does any of this matter to educators in schools? Because sign, design and designation are core metaphors for teachers and administrators. They offer us a way to think about what we do and how we do it that is consonant with the horizonal nature of education, linking what we know and understand with that which we do not yet know or understand, but recognize is possible. Signs can be both qualitative and quantitative in nature. They require interpretation and unpacking. When we learn to create as well as to recognize pattern and design, we can better understand and reconstruct the world around us aesthetically and functionally, as poets and engineers, and makers of new worlds.