Laura Knight

About two weeks ago I was in the studio minding the end of year exhibition when a colleague dropped by to chat. The exhibition this year was called From There to Here and it focused on the journey of students on the Grad Dip over their year on the course. I commented that one of the things I was reflecting on after this year was how to get better at teaching from non-western perspectives.

#1 / an infographic book

The colleague showed me a book by Yang Liu called East meets West; a visual exploration of the ways that Eastern and Western thinking can sometimes be in conflict. I immediately loved the book, probably because I am an information designer and I just love how simple and straightforward it was.

I was keen to get some feedback from my students on it. That evening, I showed it to a group of them and they spent ages discussing it. What was interesting was how the Chinese students would instantly say ‘yes, that’s definitely true’ to the visuals and how that would then inspire a conversation between the students. It struck me that this book was a bit of an intercultural conversation starter. It made me wish I had known about this book earlier in the year! I have since begun to think about how this sort of approach might become a workshop for graphic students.

#2 / a training session

I also attended a brilliant training session at UAL recently on Confucian Heritage and Cultures. The session content was thoughtfully put together and delivered by a Chinese lecturer. I have taught a lot of Chinese students in my different roles. While I have had direct experience of certain practical issues, I know I have lacked any broader contextual or cultural understanding of them. As such, I often really struggle to understand how to do it better.

I have noticed (and this session was a good reminder) how many staff seem to operate on a deficit perspective (Ryan and Carroll, 2005) with regard to International Students. They seem to focus overwhelmingly on what International Students can’t do or don’t understand. This point of view frequently crept into the training session with staff ‘centering’ western intellectual traditions. It seems to me that in doing this, we often miss the opportunities and benefits of a more diverse range of experience and perspectives in the studio. I think we also tend to grossly over-estimate and the merits of a British education, frequently romanticising our own educational experiences.

For example, the tutor talked to us about the different drawing exams that Chinese students have to pass. Many of these require a high level of drawing technique and privilege ‘life-like’ representation. When she asked whether British students are taught to draw in this way, many people said no. They said things like ‘drawing here is much more creative and expressive.’ I found myself laughing at that point as it just wasn’t my experience. When I did a Foundation at the University of Lincoln, life drawing was a 5 hour class every Monday. We were taught drawing in a very classical way. Success was whether it was life-like. This type of drawing was an essential part of my university portfolio. I know this might not be everybody’s experience but I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that it’s probably a fairly common one. More so than my colleagues in the training session seemed to think anyway.

#3 / …another book

The Geography of Thought by Richard E. Nesbitt. I am not sure how I stumbled upon it but it’s about Nesbitt – a lifelong universalist with regard to the nature of human thought. A lecturer who sets out on a research-based challenge to (essentially) prove himself wrong. It was an easy and engaging read.

Methodologically speaking, it’s a bit dubious at times. His sample sizes are questionable and I am not sure they are capable of generating robust or generalisable knowledge. This is something he rarely addresses in the book. However, it introduces lots of interesting and important ideas about the social origins of the mind and throws up some interesting challenges to the questions of universalism.

For me, the most interesting idea is on the first page of the book:

“A few years back, a brilliant student from China began to work with me on questions of social psychology and reasoning. One day, early in our acquaintance, he said, “You know the difference between you and me is that I think the world is a circle and you think it is a line.”

Nesbitt illustrates this on page 33 of the book. The diagram on the left is drawn by him – a western academic. The one on the right is drawn by one of his Chinese-American students. They are the same process from two perspectives.

This diagram inspired a whole other teaching practice-related train of thought for me. I elaborate on that in a later blog as it proved to be a relevant insight to my graphic design teaching.

The dangers of dichotomies

In may ways, all three of these experiences presented the issue of intercultural understanding through a series of dichotomies. While binaries can be convenient, I recognize that they represent highly generalized ways to talk about culture.

individualism vs. collectivism

For example, there were huge sections of Geography of Thought that focused on individualism vs. collectivism as a way of exploring cultural difference. This approach is certainly not new. It was heavily emphasized in the famous study of IBM staff, later published as Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind. I became quite obsessed with this study for some time. Drawing on a body of research conducted in over seventy countries over a span of forty years, it makes a highly convincing case for mapping cultures using binary oppositions. They neatly cateogorise these oppositions, identifying 6 ‘Dimensions of National Cultures’. One of which is the individual/collective tendency of a culture. (Hofstede, G., Hofstede, G.J and Minkov, M. 2010 pp.89-133).

As neat and tidy as this all is, it’s important to acknowledge that both The Geography of Thought and Software of the Mind, are bodies of work produced by Western researchers and writers. It is safe to assume then that they are influenced by ‘Western models of explanation.’ These models, Kaiping Peng argues, tend to be all-or-nothing dichotomies that assume that a culture must be either individualistic or  collective. Peng argues – as Nesbitt does in Geography of Thought – that ‘Western formal logic that cannot tolerate contradiction, even at the risk of exaggerating certain aspects of a culture or discounting the other aspects of the culture (Peng, K & Spencer-Rodgers, J & Nian, Z. 2006 pp 247-262).

Interestingly, the book by Yang Liu presents things precisely this dichotomic way and here it is this preference for opposition in the storytelling which make it such an effective and interesting tool for intercultural discussion.

eastern vs. western

The training session presented us with a view of Confucian culture and education in China, inviting us to reflect on the similarities and differences between our system and theirs. So in a way it was another ‘us and them.’ The accidental effect of this seemed to be that people felt comfortable making normative claims about which of the approaches was better or worse – us or them. I wondered if part of that training session might be more usefully focussed to allow people to explore the ‘mutual dependencies and complementariness of both.’ (Peng, K 2006 pp 258). I don’t feel we had a chance to explore this in any depth.

choosing your frames

While dichotomies are interesting frames through which to consider the student experience, taken too far, I can see how they might be reductive and depersonalizing. In all these interactions I found myself becoming seduced by the simplicity of them and needing to remind myself that ‘the culture is not the person’ (Cortazzi & Jin, 1997:89).

A students nationality is only one part of their identity and it may, in reality, constitute a very small part. While I have found these books and training sessions an incredibly useful way to begin to consider different philosophical perspectives and how they relate to my teaching practice, I can see the danger of believing too strongly in generalizations. We might slide into the dangerous territory of ‘cultural othering’ (Leask, 2006;187) and miss the opportunities to engage with the real breadth of alternative knowledge, perspectives and experiences the students bring.

They’ve given me much to consider and I am looking forward to reading further and thinking about how this might influence my planning for teaching.

References

Cortazzi, M and Jin, L (1997) ‘ Communication for learning across cultures,’ in McNamara, D and Harris, R (eds), Overseas Students in Higher Education: Issues in Teaching and Learning. London: Routledge. pp.76-90

Fukuoka, M. (1978) The One-Straw Revolution: An Introduction to Natural Farming, Pennsylvania: Rodale Press

Hofstede, G., Hofstede, G.J and Minkov, M. (2010) Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind, Third Edition: Software of the Mind: Intercultural Cooperation and Its Importance for Survival. New York: McGraw Hill. pp.89-133

Hsu, F. L. K. (1953). Americans and Chinese: Two ways of life. New York: H. Schuman

Leask, B (2006) ‘Plagiarism, cultural diversity and metaphor: implications for academic staff development,’ Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 31(2): 183-99

Liu, Y. (2015) East meets West. Cologne: TASCHEN GmbH; Bilingual edition (25 Aug. 2015)

Nesbitt, R.E. (2005) The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently – And Why. London: Nicholas Brealey Publishing; New Edition edition (12 May 2005)

Peng, K & Spencer-Rodgers, J & Nian, Z. (2006). Naïve Dialecticism and the Tao of Chinese Thought, in, Kim, U. Yang, K., Hwang, K (eds.) Indigenous and Cultural Psychology: Understanding People in Context. New York: Springer-Verlag. pp 247-262

Shen, D. (1985). Mo Jing Luo Ji Xue (The logic of MoJing). Beijing: The Social Science Press of China.

Vilhauer meets Gadamer / 20 February

Our reading for this session was Understanding Art: The Play of Work and Spectator. This was a chapter from a book by Monica Vilhauer based on the ideas of Hans-Georg Gadamer. The text explores philosophical hermeneutics as a kind of play. It considers how we engage with, understand and play with various art works/forms.

In Gadamer’s theory,  ‘play’ can be thought of as ‘the “event” of understanding that occurs in the experience of a work of art’. Gadamer makes the case that artworks are not static objects, things that spectators passively observe without influence. He instead emphasizes the interplay between art and spectator as a form of knowing and understanding.  Art is then, an event that has the capacity to change the person experiencing it. The spectator is involved in the artwork.

He further suggests that a condition for play is that it requires at least two parties and that games usually involve some form of constraint – usually in the form of rules.

Reflecting on the reading

The text particularly resonated with me in how it linked to ideas I am currently exploring in my teaching practice. Designing teaching sessions on my course, I regularly reflect on how to facilitate ‘play.’

If we work from the assumption that ‘the central concern of Design is ‘the conception and realisation of new things’ (2), then we might reasonably argue that play is an essential activity for a designer. The ability to detach form from meaning and play with it as a purely formal object can be a useful way to generate new or surprising ideas.  Villhauer refers to this in the article as ‘the abstraction procedure of aesthetic consciousness.’

Encouraging play in teaching practice is not always straightforward. It tends to require this very rigid structure to make it happen at all. There’s always the risk you will push the structure too far and it will become completely disassociated from the idea of play at all. You might underplay it and the exercise will feel arbitrary.

I tend to find that students who are too focussed on theory and contextual issues, struggle to create surprising or interesting visual solutions. A preoccupation with process over play , viewing the task as a ‘problem to be solved’ often lead to an extreme form of monosemism.  ‘Designing to the end’ and leaving nothing for the reader to do. In this way, the audience become passive observers as opposed to engaged readers of the design.

At the other extreme, students who are very focussed on form can lack a contextual and functional understanding in their work. This can lead to polysemic communication, too open-ended or introspective, lacking any real communication. This approach is rarely valued or required in the field of graphic design.

As such, the balance of thinking and making and how we talk about those two things  is one that needs to be considered carefully. The sequence or weight of each can impact on how students think about the relationship between these aspects of practice.

Theory in practice

In Units 1 and 2, my colleague Kieran and I have experimented with sessions that challenge students to play with form, purely as a formal object. A recent example of this was a workshop where we asked students to bring an image  and randomly dissect it. They treated it as a pure form, viewing it only in terms of shapes and spaces. They removed 5 shapes from the image and then repeated that across 10 copies of the same image, giving them a collection of shapes to work with.

We then used rules-based composition exercises. These gave them a framework for experimenting and creating new versions of the image. The exercises are timed, introducing the constraints of both rule and time. By removing the thinking time and space, the student are free to focus on the rules and the composition. The outcomes of the workshop are often very surprising for the students.

The process is informed by the approach at Basel School of Design where they focus on the analytical and process-oriented aspects of the Swiss design tradition. Taking Gadamer’s theory about the conditions for play –  the two parties in this game would be the student and the image. The rules represent the contraptions within which the players operate.

There’s often a ‘test round’ where we remove all the rules. More often than not, the students find this round the hardest. They tend to reflect that they were more creative in the framework of constraints.

We provide a deliberate space in the workshop where we ask students to reflect on these experiments, to ‘read’ and reinterpret them. We also ask them to reflect on the value of the rule-based design process. In this way we create clear divisions between the ‘making’ and the ‘thinking.’

In an earlier workshop we used another different process. We pinned up all the work from the session. We gave the students two colors of sticky dots. We asked them to put one color on work that ‘communicated’ and other other on the work they found surprising in some way. Work with both dots allowed them to see how work can communicate but still feel fresh or surprising, leave something for the viewer to do. Thinking about the reading this week I realize what we were inviting them to reflect on could be conceived as the ‘interplay’ described by Gadamer. This being the pattern of movement – back and forth between the audience and the design.

Thinking Through Making

At CCW and at Kingston the mantra of the Design School was ‘Thinking Through Making.’ While I appreciate the sentiment I find the word order can be a little problematic. It seems to suggest that these processes happen in tandem which is a reality these workshops actively discourage.

As Sister Corita Kent says in her 10 Rules for Students, Teachers, and Life, “Don’t Make and Analyze at the Same Time, They’re Different Processes.’ (2) I tell my students this on the first day of the course. It’s a mantra they often repeat when reflecting on their work. On the course we take the view that making and analyzing are, and should be separate processes.

I find students can be reticent to expose themselves to conflict. Some seem to view university as the place that will give them ‘the answer.’ The idea that education will be a process in which they form a viewpoint, one that they may revise at various points can be difficult for them. The further idea that they alone are responsible for forming that viewpoint; even harder. We’ve been told for years that design is problem solver. A conclusive process. My course is often asking students to engage with design as an exploratory process –  a problem-finder or perhaps a problem- revealer. It can be a big leap.

There seems to be a circular narrative to this whole process. It’s one of me reading this piece, reflecting on it, connecting it to my teaching practice and back to my reading.  I realize I am harking back to the issue of subjectivism and it’s place in education.  I realize this is just something I am thinking about a lot right now and I tend to see it in everything. Of course… I haven’t actually attended the seminar yet. Perhaps, I read this all wrong.  I am certainly looking forward to hearing what others in my group made of it all.

References

Vilhauer, M. (2010). Gadamer’s ethics of play. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, pp.31-48.

Cross, Nigel. (1982). Designerly Ways of Knowing. Design Studies. 3. 221-227.

Crawford, M. (2015) The World Beyond Your Head: On Becomingan Individual in an Age of Distraction. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Popova, M. (2016) 10 Rules for Students, Teachers, and Life by John Cage and Sister Corita Kent. Available at: URL (Accessed: 19 Feb 2019).