Curriculum, learning and teaching
Linking graphic design projects to real life situations Keri Jolley on promoting international mindedness and project-based learning Since I arrived at Zurich International School (ZIS) six years ago, my goal has been to raise the level of the Graphic Design curriculum by integrating more project-based learning opportunities through linking projects to real situations, while learning the full Adobe Creative Suite. Along with that, there are other facets that I have found just as vital and important to foster. Some of these are utilizing the community beyond our four walls in order to broaden the scope of opportunity, vision and knowledge for our students, thus linking to the idea of ‘international mindedness.’ As international educators, we know that once students begin to interact with their neighbors, anything is possible – networking and new ideas develop and often the student’s host country seems more accessible, as many international schools are separate from their neighbors not only by the physical architecture (often relating to security measures), but also in attitude. In this article, I give examples of my approach to starting to blur this separation.
For the first project, each student was given a letter from the German alphabet, since we are in the German-speaking region of Switzerland. There are 30 letters and I had 30 students between two classes. The task was to create that letter via line, shape, space and value within a square. We created an accordion book and poster and gave it to the ZIS lower school; the two campuses are in different towns and we do not see younger children daily within our building. The librarian exhibited it in the library as a gift from the upper school students. We also gave it to the Swiss primary school across the street as a gift from our older students, who often walk past their school on the way to the bus. This has been the first time our school has reached out to the school within the community. The ‘all important’ project in any graphic design class is the logo. We took a field trip to a printing company in our town to watch our logos being printed onto t-shirts. This opportunity created a bridge between a local company and the school. For the Swiss German speakers, this was a time
Some examples of the student projects at ZIS.
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