Learning through a Collaborative Project: A Case Study in Visual Communication
Heather Corcoran
In 2000, a report was released by the National Assessment of Educational Progress indicating that 47 percent of twelfth graders were below basic achievement levels in science. In addition, 39 percent of eighth graders and 34 percent of fourth graders were below basic levels.1
University City High School, located just west of the city of St. Louis in the vicinity of Washington University, is no stranger to the challenges of science education. Chemistry teacher Daniel Lane reports, “While almost all students take four years of science at University City High School, many do so without a clear understanding of the role of science in an increasingly technological society.” Dan finds the students more difficult to engage each year.
The Partnership
In the fall of 2004, Dan Lane and I developed a joint classroom project with two educational goals: First, we wanted to see if visual studies, specifically in communication, could provide high school chemistry students with a legitimate way to learn chemistry. Second, we wanted to explore the potential of undergraduates to teach, mentor, and motivate high school students.
The Assignment
The assignment was to create a series of posters about individual elements of the periodic table, their role in daily life, and their economic and social impact on the globe. Posters were to include at least one image and two levels of text.
University City High School
All three sections of Dan’s chemistry course—approximately fifty students— participated in this project. Their role was to develop poster content, gather imagery, and make schematic sketches for the design of their posters.
Washington University
I recruited three teams of undergraduate seniors from my own visual communications program. These seniors would mentor the high school students on research and the development of visual ideas; then they would work as designers to build and refine the posters visually.
The high school and college students worked together during three class periods. Most of the chemistry students had no formal experience in design or visual communications. The undergraduates were challenged to translate their own visual training into themes that the chemistry students would find relevant for the project and could apply to their own learning in chemistry and beyond. Among these was the idea of hierarchy—what was the most important thing about the element that each poster should communicate? That lead can kill? That tantalum is mined in the Congo to make cell phones?
Another teaching theme was the power of a piece of text or an image. Does a fruit-filled letter K say potassium? A red, upside down fish say that mercury is toxic?
The chemistry students submitted their texts, images, and sketches to the undergraduate seniors, who then built and refined the posters digitally in two open lab sessions. Each senior designed approximately four posters under my supervision. I challenged the seniors to think compositionally, and consider how the posters could relate to each visually. This was unlike most of their work as design students because there were elements and content that they could not control or eliminate. I was surprised to find that this limitation allowed many of the students to work more quickly and freely, an approach that I wish they would incorporate into the early stages of many more of their projects.
The Learning
The resulting co-designed and co-authored posters were reviewed by both groups of students, as well as Dan and myself. For purposes of grading and assessment, we considered the quality and delivery of their concepts and the clarity of the visual form.
But, of course, the posters are simply artifacts. In the end, the chemistry and design learning that led to their construction is more significant, and, unfortunately, more difficult to assess. However, in qualitative terms, Dan and I observed the following:
University City High School
Dan saw an increased level of engagement from his students on this project, compared to other projects in his course. The students were able to make connections between chemistry and the objects and experiences in their own lives (krypton and Superman; silicon and computer chips). They got to work in a visual context, which was new for many of them. And they got to work with students who were just a few years older than they are, and represent their next developmental step. For a high school student, an undergraduate may feel like a more relevant teacher than someone who is older and more experienced.
The undergraduates had to step outside themselves and the bubble of their campus life. At the same time, it was easy for them to relate to the high school students; after all, they had been high schoolers themselves a mere four years before.
The undergraduates also learned about design from this project. In the sessions they spent with the high school students, they were challenged to explain what design and communication are and to evaluate sketches. These are issues that the undergraduates grapple with on a daily basis; by teaching others, they affirmed their own visual knowledge, as well as their verbal communication skills. The principle of learning by teaching is not uncommon, of course; I believe that many design educators, myself included, teach partially to become better designers. We learn about composition and content and color and narrative by talking about it day after day to our students.
The act of teaching is like the process of design in many ways. Educators fashion experiences for targeted audiences. Undergraduates who participated in this project learned about functional communication to a particular demographic in a way that was new for them.
And, finally, each undergraduate designed four posters. This part of the project was an important study in composition, contrast, image, and typography, with pre-imposed limitations. The students were less concerned about designing the perfect poster than they were about melding the various predetermined elements together in the best way that they could. This freed the seniors to take more risks, try things quickly, and move on. It is a principle that I hope that they will now be able to apply to their own work with more regularity.
What’s Next?
This model of collaboration between high school and college education proved effective in many ways. If high school education is about gathering, processing, analyzing, and communicating information, then this project introduced visual communications as a complement to writing a paper, crunching numbers for a lab report, or making a presentation. It was offered not as a topic in and of itself, but to enhance a previously defined subject area and educational priority. The project had the added benefit of providing the high school students with mentors.
For the university, this project gave undergraduates a rare teaching experience in a high school classroom, as well as an opportunity do visual design as part of a partnership.
This model can be applied to other academic subjects in the future (history, literature, math) through partnerships between design educators and high school teachers. However, given public education’s current emphasis on learning assessment, it will be necessary to develop an appropriate quantitative assessment tool for subject-specific learning on visual communications projects like the chemistry posters. In the spirit of Meredith Davis and others focused on K–12 design, positive quantitative learning results would reinforce the real value of visual problem solving in secondary education and fuel the creation of new design partnerships between universities and high schools.
Notes
1. Basic achievement is defined as the level that “denotes partial mastery of prerequisite knowledge and skills that are fundamental for proficient work at each grade” in the National Center for Education Statistics’ Nation’s Report Card, Science Highlights 2000.