New work

I put a few new images of things I'm working on for my show at Tiger Strikes Asteroid up on my site. Hope they amuse you...

Back to writing about teaching

Now that I'm teaching this large lecture class with a handful of other people, it seems I am getting a lot to think about and will try to use this blog as the place to put it...

Today we were talking to our huge section of about 180 students about research. We had done a poll at the first class meeting and found that huge majority thought research was an important part of art and design practice, but in another question we saw that they were not necessarily so comfortable doing it. So we asked them why they didn't feel comfortable in class today and the answers came back in high school, research was a highly prescriptive process and that it relied heavily on secondary sources and received wisdom.

We kind of expected this - and that's why we were about to launch a project that addressed observational research tactics - but my colleague, Sneha Patel of Tyler's Architecture program - made this really interesting observation at that moment. She pointed out that the students seemed to be hampered by the interface of research.

This struck me as really important, as if I had been confusing the substance with the means of recognizing that substance...as if there suddenly was some sort of wall between information and informed. Observation seemed like a useful way to pull down that wall, and to stand in direct relation to the thing you're trying to understand.

Of course, primary sources are that sort of thing, too, and they may be the only available way to 'observe'' someone or something remote in time or space, but I thought that image - of a wall - was a keeper...



Screen Testing

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by: TylerFoundation