Chair Communication Design Curriculum Committee 2016–2021

In the fall of 2016, I was elected chairperson of the Graphic Design Department’s Curriculum Committee, taking over from Jan Kubasiewicz. Since then our committee has successfully changed our department’s name from Graphic Design to Communication Design to better reflect our evolving curriculum and the professional field.

Our second big priority was to rethink the senior year curriculum. Based on student feedback and the rapidly widening field of design we believed students needed more customizable and focused courses their senior year. We proposed and implemented a more agile and modular system of 1.5 credit courses. The proposed Advanced Projects courses allowed students to develop two portfolio projects in areas of personal interest, and to choose different focuses and faculty based on industry expertise. These courses allow students to customize their portfolios with specialized knowledge in specific topics and give the department flexibility to hire top industry professionals to teach the shorter courses. These courses were successfully added to the curriculum in the spring of 2019, after a year of consultations with the registrar, curriculum committee, and academic affairs.

In Spring of 2019 the Communication Design experienced a surge in incoming Sophomores and needed to add a fourth section to our 6-credit Sophomore Studio course. As a result, we needed to hire many new adjunct faculty to staff the course. To help manage, monitor, and mentor the new faculty, we proposed and implemented a co-teaching structure. We paired new adjuncts with our full-time faculty, scheduling them to teach the same projects on the same day. Team faculty give group lectures and collaborate on critiques and in-class activities. This strategy of team teaching proved effective, enabling faculty to co-teach and share their strengths with the entire class, not just one section, as well as providing a more equitable experience for students from lectures, to critiques, to grading. In the spring of 2020 we expanded this strategy throughout the department and developed a block schedule. This new schedule aligned all course sections on the same day and time. In addition to providing a more equitable experience for students, this format (especially during our rapid move to remote teaching) unburdened faculty from rewriting entire syllabi and preparing new lectures weekly. By team teaching, three to four faculty members are able to work together with a single schedule. As a mother of a four and six-year-old when the pandemic started (and still goes on) this allowed us to carry the load for each other when needed.