Beopen+ed

Ken Robinson, an international consultant on education and professor emeritus at the University of Warwick, presents his take on the distinction between learning, education and school in his piece “Standardisation broke education. Here’s how we can fix our schools” published by the Wired earlier this year. “The movement towards personalisation is already advancing in medicine. We must move quickly in that direction in education, too”, says the author.

“We are all born with fathomless capacities, but what we make of them has everything to do with education. One role of education is to help people develop their natural talents and abilities; the other is to help them make their way in the world around them. Too often, education falls short on both counts. As we face an increasingly febrile future, it’s vital to do better. For that to happen, education has to be urgently transformed. We have the resources and the expertise, but now we need the vision and commitment.

In my book, You, Your Child and School, I make a distinction between learning, education and school. Learning is acquiring new skills and understanding; education is an organised system of learning; a school is a community of learners. All children love to learn, but many have a hard time with education and some have big problems with school.

Usually, the problem is not the learners – it’s the inherent bias of education and the enforced culture of schools. For generations, formal education has been systematically biased towards narrow forms of academic ability. The result is that it largely disregards the marvellous diversity of human talents and interests.

For the past generation especially, politicians have been smothering schools in a depressing culture of standardisation. As a result, they have been marginalising the very capabilities our children need to create a more equitable and sustainable world – by which I mean creativity, compassion citizenship and collaboration.

As far as we know, human beings are the most creative creatures ever to walk the Earth. We are endowed with deep powers of imagination and the physical capacities to realise our imaginings in complex languages, theories and beliefs, as well as in the tangible forms of technology, architecture, agriculture, the arts and the sciences and so on.

The trouble is that, in the past 300 years, we have created civilisations that have dislocated our relationships with the natural environment and that now imperil our survival as a species. We face existential challenges. We have immense capabilities to innovate, but the clock is ticking and education is the only key to unlocking these capacities – not the torpid system of testing we have now, but forms of education that celebrate and cultivate these unique powers deliberately.

Our cultures and societies are deeply interwoven. And yet, throughout the world, humanity is plagued by enmities and lethal factionalism. Education is not the cause of these problems, nor is it a panacea for them. But it must be part of the solution. To be so, schools must teach and practice the benefits of citizenship, cultural literacy and compassion. The arts and the humanities have special significance here.

And our children must learn that the human adventure can only be carried forward through complex forms of collaboration. Several years ago, I moderated an event with the Dalai Lama. At one point he was asked a question. He paused for a long time and then said, “I don’t know. I haven’t thought about that. What do you think?”

One of the world’s great teachers was perfectly happy to say, “I don’t know.” He knew that no one grasps more than a few tiny threads of the dense fabric of human knowledge. As the great cultural theorist Clifford Geertz put it, as human beings we are suspended in webs of significance that we ourselves have woven. We depend on other people’s knowledge for our survival in every way. But our education system is not based on collaboration – it’s based on competition.

The proliferating reach of digital technologies is the best recent evidence of our capacities for collaboration. Digital technologies could be the most far-reaching and consequential change in human history – a potential step change in our evolution as a species. Digital technologies are also changing the context in which we educate people, and what we’re educating them for. They can help us support teaching and make education more vibrant and more collaborative. Wikipedia is the largest compilation of human knowledge ever attempted, and it’s entirely collaborative and self-correcting.

The tools that we have now are astounding, and we’re still at a very early stage in their development. As artificial intelligence evolves and its impact grows, we’ll have to ask ourselves what it is that makes us distinctly human. What are the qualities we should be celebrating?

We have an opportunity now to rethink the whole ecosystem of education. We need to reinvent schools. There’s a growing movement in alternative education.

It’s about building schools that value the social dimension of learning and practical work; that place equal value on arts and sciences. They are dedicated to fostering the right conditions for people to learn; to making education more organic and less formulaic. They recognise that schools must foster young peoples’ natural appetites for learning; that schools themselves must be creative, compassionate, democratic and collaborative. And they must be more personalised and organic.

For decades, formal education has been focused on comparatively narrow forms of academic ability, which results in disregarding the diversity of human talents and interests. Modern educators see a solution in personalization, a teaching and learning process that addresses the strengths and needs of individual learners.

Sir Ken Robinson, the Professor Emeritus and education and creativity expert, remarks that the movement towards personalization is already advancing in medicine and education must move in that direction too. ‘We need to stir the motivation, vision, optimism and political commitment. That too is a task for education,’ he is convinced.

The Mark Zuckerberg backed educational foundation CZI has recently committed to the goal of “bringing personalized learning to every child,” and the Bush Foundation is funding schools designed to enable “mass customization” of instruction.

Personalization includes a balanced approach to progress monitoring of student progress that uses authentic assessments rather than single data points like standardized tests and ensures that every learner’s academic, emotional, and physical needs are understood and accommodated.

Aspects of personalized learning are already being implemented in schools around the world. Just to name a few, in some schools students are allowed to proceed at their own pace setting long-term goals in which time is not the driving factor. Personalized classrooms feature flexible seating arrangement that allows teachers to create learner-centered environment which provides for high levels of interaction. Among technologies educators use, there are learners profiles that let teachers to know students better by collecting data that communicates how, when, and what students can or want to learn. Modern digital textbooks feature attractive animations, integrated videos, check-your-understanding questions, pre-highlighting of key concepts, and analytics on learner usage. Some digital textbooks even customize questions to assess student performance and correspondingly adapt instruction.

Still, there are a number of educators who point out that the process of implementing personalized learning is not that trouble-free. Andrew Miller, the director of personalized learning at Singapore American School, expresses an opinion that personalized learning runs the risk of becoming a buzzword and of being both oversimplified and mischaracterized. In his similarly named article he explores myths of personalized learning.

It is obvious culture and creativity have always been powered by technology. Ken Robinson highlights that ‘digital technologies are <…> changing the context in which we educate people, and what we’re educating them for. They can help us support teaching and make education more vibrant and more collaborative.’ Unfortunately, this point is often simplified to equating personalized learning with computer- or technology-based instruction, which is by all means incorrect.

‘Many people believe that personalized learning mostly involves students using iPads and technology such as games and software to work at their own pace,’ Miller admits. ‘They may think students only watch videos from playlists or play games. And some researchers wrongly claim that personalized learning isn’t effective because of issues with technology.’

Jay Lynch, Senior Academic Research Consultant for Course Design, Development, and Academic Research (CDDAR) at Pearson, points out that there are other reasons why edtech as a means of personalization misses the point: the main one is that the wrong things are being personalized. By ‘wrong things’ he first of all implies instructional content, insisting that the learning experience has changed very little as far as instruction is concerned, notwithstanding the new implementations in modern educational technologies.

He believes that the instructional approach at the core of virtually all available learning products, be it a fancy massive open online course, or a technologically sophisticated personalized classroom, or an adaptive learning software,  is ‘largely inadequate for engendering the type of deep, transferable, and complex learning we want to impart to students. It simply doesn’t support the acquisition of the integrated set of cognitive strategies, affective dispositions, and foundational skills necessary to be a successful and flexible problem-solver, self-direct learner, and critical thinker’.

‘Current instructional content is highly balkanized and modularized, divided into small disconnected learning components and ‘objects’ that deny learners the opportunity to grasp the interconnected, meaningful, and holistic knowledge underlying complex learning.’

Current approach is good for memorizing isolated facts, while the key point, as suggested back in 2007 by M. David Merrill, Professor Emeritus at Utah State University, is that the foundation of instruction should be a collection of rich learning tasks that reflect the activities students are supposed to carry out post-instruction. Instruction should be problem-centered, combining real-life problems with supporting direct instruction.

‘We’re so focused on ensuring students can successfully recall every component needed to construct a house,’ Lynch explains, ‘ that we neglect to ask learners to actually pick up a hammer and build one. And not just once, but over and over and over again.’

Imagining an education technology that would be capable to support personalization and complex 21st century learning, Lynch describes such challenges as creating a large database of meaningful real-world tasks students may encounter, potentially involving simulations and interactive multimedia, as well as technological expertise in designing and collecting performance assessment data that is seamlessly linked to such tasks.

Apart from real-life tasks that support deep, meaningful, and complex learning and valid performance-based assessments, personalized learning, according to Lynch, should include collaboration as well. This idea is supported by Andrew Miller who agrees that students must master collaborative competencies along with other competencies focused on content and success skills. Though personalized learning does focus on the individual student, it is impossible for learners to meet collaborative competencies alone. ‘As students find their passions,’ says Miller, ‘they discover they share passions and interests with others in the classroom and form affinity groups to implement group projects and learning experiences’.

More to that, personalization is not a model of teaching where students determine everything. Miller is convinced that the teacher plays a critical role in personalized learning. According to him, teachers ‘support student collaboration and scaffold appropriate skills’ as well as ‘serve as a sort of coach, supporting students in reflecting on their choices ‘, these tasks being the critical elements of education that technology cannot provide.

To sum it up, it is crucial to understand that personalization should be looked upon as an approach to learning rather than a set program and is much more multifaceted to be simplified to edtech or mere individual pacing.

There’s been much talk lately about whether or not a practicing designer needs formal education. So is formal design education a must or a derelict?

Are the existing formal design courses up-to-date and is it at all possible to keep pace with the rapidly developing trends? Are there any alternatives to the expensive design education? With all the design books, conferences, and distance-learning websites that offer virtual educational opportunities, is it possible to compile your portfolio and ‘sell’ it to potential employers without a degree?

The opinion that before you step into profession you have to forget everything you learned in school is not new. Douglas Davis, a former adjunct professor at New York University in the M.S. in Integrated Marketing program, current HOW Design university contributor, is sure that perpetually shifting landscape in the field of design makes it impossible to teach everything in school because ‘as soon as one convergence starts, the search for the next competitive edge begins’. Recognizing new trends in the industry, writing a new course, getting it department approved, sending it to a university senate curriculum committee, making changes, having it approved, and then offering that course can take up to a year or more. Further still, the change happens much faster than the time it takes to go from freshman to first day.

No doubt, today’s computer programs will soon be outdated and familiar design processes will be reimagined, so it is only natural that one is skeptical about universities claiming their graduating students will be fully prepared to work on a professional design. That is why, advocates of formal education point out, you can never underestimate the value of learning how to learn. The well-known author and the co-chair of the MFA Design program at the School of Visual Arts (SVA) in New York Steven Heller believes, ‘formal education teaches one to learn, and only a few privileged self-starters can achieve this, be it from books or osmosis, without guidance’. Design schools provide a place to learn how to observe, think critically, and solve problems creatively. New York City College of Technology graduate, Kate Ling offers her view that, ‘School’s job here is to teach the constant and then prep the student to have the changes.’

There are many practicing designers who believe your design education begins the day you start a job.  Practice is the key. It is obvious that in the field of design, your portfolio is everything. No matter if you have got a degree or not, it is the best way to access your creativity. If you are able to build a portfolio that shows your abilities and makes you stand out enough on your own, independent of college courses, it  works fine for many clients who look for real-world experience.

However, working on your design portfolio may be more efficient in design school where you
focus solely on soaking in design skills and techniques without having to accommodate to real-world restrictions such as the stress of clients’ concerns and the pressures of work deadlines and budgets.

Jordan DeVos, designer and strategist who used to work in Central Saint Martins – University of the Arts London, is certain that a foundation to a designer’s mindset shouldn’t begin with restrictions, design school being a time and space where client whims don’t derail ideas and budgets don’t hinder creativity.

Design school also lets you work with a broader spectrum of styles and, what is especially important, the portfolio will be critiqued and discussed under the tutelage of professional designers who set briefs for students, visit as guest lecturers, and teach as professors. This is another advantage of formal education: professional mentorship and creative community are a generous resource that isn’t instantly available to a new designer in the industry. ‘Nothing can really take the place of immersion in an educational environment which is then combined with experience in the workplace,’ says Heller.

There are also certain practical benefits about the formal education that can boost your career. During the years of study it gives you access to some resources, such as letterpress facilities, computer programs, visiting lecturers, and photography studios, which might be expensive to obtain otherwise and which are certainly crucial when creating a professional portfolio. After graduation, design education might be a competitive edge as it might assure future employers that the candidate is experienced in working with teams, in mastering skills, in meeting deadlines, and accomplishing goals, which in its turn might influence their hiring decision or help remove the glass ceiling.

This is not always the case, so these benefits might not compensate the high tuition costs, with yearly expenditures being higher than what a designer can make two years after graduation.

The final product – the design work itself – is the ultimate credential, and degree is not essential for that. There is an opposite opinion, however, not only among design educators but among the so-called self-taught designers as well.

Steven Heller, who never graduated with a design degree, admits that though he used to think design education was a colossal waste of time, he has come to the conclusion that good instincts and talent are not enough in the profession. Not enough basic knowledge can result in reinventing a wheel over and over, and even constant practice in the workplace might be insufficient if you practice all wrong. ‘Passion is useful, but justifying decisions to others solely on the basis of ‘It feels good’ extends only so far before one is labelled a dithering nabob of emotional excess’, says Heller.

‘Formal education does not, however, replace instinct and passion with rote and reflexive methods,’ he goes on. ‘What it does is provide tools for harnessing those enigmatic traits. Formal education imparts standards of competency’.

Matteo Bologna, the founding partner and creative director of Mucca Design and former board member of AIGA/NY, says: ‘I didn’t go to design school but wish I had. Making a success of yourself is very tough without having someone to teach you how not to make mistakes’.

So the question is: are there any alternatives to formal education that can provide its benefits, such as professional mentorship and creative community, as well as offer real-world experience, without draining one’s budget?

The radical solution by British design graduate Stacie Woolsey has proved it is possible. Priced out of further education, she approached practicing designers she admired, asked each of them to set her design briefs – an idea she describes as “freelance learning” – and completed all four briefs over 18 months of self-directed study. Woolsey didn’t feel that she could burden the designers with every question, so she started approaching industry professionals her age across a variety of fields and asked them to be mentors, thus building her own network of peers – one of the benefits of attending an established institution – turning to them for project-related advice and support. “Whenever I was taking a portfolio around, no one asked what qualification I got or what grade I got. It was all about the work,” Woolsey sums up. Now she plans to replicate her model for a group of students who similarly cannot afford formal education.

Nevertheless, given all the above, it is difficult not to agree with Ellen Shapiro, principal of Visual Language LLC in Irvington, NY, who justly remarks, if the need to go to work and earn money weren’t an issue, if tuition fees had been magically paid, wouldn’t many self-taught designers have jumped at the chance to spend time in classes with great teachers and immerse themselves in art and culture, form and structure?

Talks and disputes about the quality of modern architecture education have been going on for a couple of years already.

A large section of the profession thinks that educators are failing at our sole task: to train students for practice. Patrik Schumacher, Zaha Hadid Architects principal and a guest professor at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard as well as the head of the Architectural Association’s Design Research Laboratory, criticized the existing approach to architecture schooling in his Facebook post entitled “13 theses on the crisis of architectural academia”.

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For many years, fashion, perhaps more than any other creative sphere, has been biased with narrow ideas of who should be included in the industry. Even today, the industry has a lot of work to do when it comes to inclusivity and diversity — race, gender, body size, or disability. And although this seems to be the-chicken-and-the-egg situation, there are many reasons to believe that to break the obsolete societal norms within the industry, we need to start not from the runways or editorial spreads, but from the fashion education as the true birthplace of the thinking and practices of the next generation, which shapes the future of the industry.

Dr. Ben Barry, former Chair and Associate Professor of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion at the Ryerson School of Fashion, in Toronto and new Dean of Fashion at Parsons School of Design in New York City, has rightfully noted that typically, when talking about inclusion in fashion, we talk about welcoming or inviting groups who have been excluded, in. However, he goes on, this has to be changed, for in many ways, this approach assumes that they are invited into a place that operates on values and principles and practices that are not theirs.

According to Barry, in fashion education “we try to teach one way of thinking about and practicing fashion rather than valuing the diverse ways of knowing fashion and practicing fashion,” and this needs to be reformed.  From the USA and Canada, where Barry comes from, to the UK and EU, programming has largely remained unchanged, offering the same fundamental courses including pattern making and creation, construction, business management, and styling. Not only much of what is taught centres on European fashion, tailoring and designs, only rarely and marginally touching on other forms of dress; the same can be said of the business side of fashion, including supply chain management, labour practices and commerce. The debates about the white and Western-cehtric canon has been ongoing in many creative disciplines, but in fashion schools students also have to deal with a culture that praises specific types of bodies.

Not often students are taught about the different range and types of individuals, including plus-size bodies and disabled bodies; generally the marginalized groups remain excluded from the fashion education system. For instance, in 2016, Nayyara Chue, a fashion design student at Parsons School of Design in New York City, petitioned to the school that she would be unable to finish her collection, as they didn’t have plus-size mannequins. Izzy Camilleri, the owner and designer behind IZ Adaptive, confesses that having been taught to design clothes in a traditional way she found herself unprepared to the numerous limitations disabled people face around clothing. She explains that making adaptive clothing is so much more than just designing, pattern making, and drafting, for on top of that, it has to do with learning to understand the issues that people with physical disabilities face.

Students of colour are similarly alienated by fashion institutions. Last year, many prestigious and influential design schools and universities were facing accusations of racism, despite pledging support of Black Lives Matter on social media.

According to data from Hesa, the UK’s higher education statistics authority, and the National Center for Education Statistics in the US, despite diversity, equality and inclusion policies, student and staff recruitment in UK and US higher education largely remains white. While research has proved that same race teachers positively affect student attainment levels and academic progress, only 6% of full-time faculty in US universities were Black in autumn 2018, compared to 73% of white staff. In the UK, the proportion was 2%.  “We perform race equality; we have wonderful policies, great legislations, but nothing changes because fundamentally the structures remain unchanged,” says Heidi Safia Mirza, professor of race, faith and culture at Goldsmiths, University of London and author of Dismantling Race in Higher Education.

Apart from the lack of diversity in terms of race and ethnicity, students and alumni accuse fashion schools of nepotism and classism, which goes hand in hand with discrimination. They claim that wealthy, predominantly white, students with connections have an apparent advantage over those from lower-income communities, many of whom are people of color. According to Angela Bacskocky, a Textile and Apparel Merchandising and Management professor and program coordinator at Virginia State University, Black graduates are often overlooked if they don’t have the right contacts in the industry, which proves how essential in internships focused on inclusion for minorities are. “These students don’t want a hand out, they want to be given the chance to learn and to be trained and succeed,” she says.

This is echoed by Kimberly Jenkins, assistant professor of fashion studies at Ryerson University, a noted fashion scholar and creator of a groundbreaking class called ‘Fashion and Race’ that ran in 2016-2019 at Parsons: “There are countless Black millennials and Gen Z creatives trying to study fashion, but academic deans and professors are making the experience difficult — dismissing their designs, blocking them out of internships that could transform their lives, denying them mentorships, empathy and support. So there’s this whole generation of black students, graduating by the skin of their teeth or dropping out altogether. It’s a small pool of Black survivors from the fashion education system who may not have the same resources or Rolodex as their white peers.”

Fashion institutions globally are aware of these issues. Though it is impossible to change the whole system in an instant, plenty of schools are slowly starting to implement the fundamentals of diversity and inclusion into their curriculum.

Aiming to decolonize its programming, Parsons has widened its curriculum by including African garment construction and pattern-making strategies in its BFA fashion design course. The school’s fashion students are also taught about taking responsibility for the system in which their collections are being produced, including labour practices, consumption and after life. The appointment of Barry, who helped transform everything from curriculum to hiring practices to prioritize inclusion, decolonization and sustainability at Ryerson University, as Dean of Fashion also proves the school’s intention to shape and introduce new fashion norms.

The University of Arts, London, revalidates its courses every four years to revisit the curriculum under the lense of topics including decolonisation, emerging industry themes and new technologies. In autumn 2020, the institution launched the Decolonising Arts Institute seeking to “challenge colonial and imperial legacies and drive social, cultural and institutional change” through interdisciplinary collaborations, research-based projects and seminars.

At New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT), the Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion organises a Diversity Ambassador training programme for their faculty, which includes four mandatory sessions. Diversity Ambassadors are then tasked to encourage and support diversity initiatives throughout the campus.

The fashion industry landscape has been undergoing a drastic shift and fashion education, being vital to implementing real change, should follow suit. Ensuring diverse voices are in positions of power will enable to move towards fashion education that does not exclusively center whiteness or thinness or gender normativity but encourages the new generation of talents to express themselves freely.

If you make up your mind to study a creative subject at a university, you will most probably get your share of family members arguing that this kind of a degree will not secure you a job that comes with a decent wage. Despite the work of Sir Ken Robinson and many others, there is a long-held assumption that creativity is not as valuable as STEM subjects these days. In the meantime, the statistics show that creative industries contribute significantly to the economy, which makes one believe that the landscape of what an artist is and does to live a creative life changes.

Although many of us think that “true” artists have to pretend that orbits of art and business never touch, in fact, whether you are a commercial banker or a conceptual artist, we all have to deal with the market. History shows, that despite the popular misconception, artists in all times had to be entrepreneurial, being fundamentally responsible for earning a living. Today, as the career path of artist is changing, public funding for the arts has declined and funding for individual artists is especially difficult to find, artists are self-employed, building their own brands and businesses, and defining themselves what their creative career should look like. The digital age has created unprecedented access and opportunities for artists to reach their audience directly, challenging traditional training and education practices and career expectations. According to 2016 NEA Study, Creativity Connects: Trends and Conditions Affecting U.S. Artists, the population of artists is growing and diversifying, which also means change in the norms about who is considered an artist. Other findings reveal that substantial numbers of artists now work in interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary ways and find work as artists in non-arts contexts.

At the same time, the study confirmed that artist-training programs are not adequately teaching creative students the non-arts skills they need to support their work (business practices, entrepreneurship, and marketing) nor how to effectively apply their creative skills in a range of contexts.

This is echoed by the report by CRE Research for Creative and Cultural Skills (CC Skills) and Arts Council England (ACE), which reveals that 33% of creative businesses identified a skills gap, with the most common gaps being in business marketing and communication skills (53%), and general problem-solving skills (48%). 44% of businesses identified a fundraising skills gap.

This makes the industry’s experts and leaders express their concern about whether higher education institutions are adequately preparing students for careers in art and design. With 66% of recent art school graduates carrying substantial debt as the cost of art degrees increases, students expect their institutions to prepare them with entrepreneurial skills to find or establish creative careers and teach them how to live creative lives. The shift for artist’s independence and a considerable change in the way artists pursue their creative career mean that the conventional approach adopted in education of creatives — the “just focus on your art as if the money part does not exist” approach – should give way to new paradigms.

While the incredible success of the UK’s art and cultural sector, which brings  hundreds billion pounds to the country’s economy, has resulted in a desperate need for managerial skills in creative industry, only a few arts and design schools and career service departments are taking note, offering courses in creative and professional practice as well as entrepreneurship. For example, in Australia, UNSW Art & Design has rethought its design degree, encouraging students to be entrepreneurial in their thinking. The university even offers a start-up accelerator that provides art and design students opportunities to incubate new business ideas.

In the meantime, only 34% of recent art school alumni believe their institution helped them develop entrepreneurial skills during the years of their education. Another survey initiated by US’s Strategic National Arts Alumni Project (SNAAP) shows that 71% of arts graduates indicated managerial skills were “Very” or “Somewhat important” to their profession or work life but only 26% of alumni reported their institution helped them develop entrepreneurial skills “Some” or “Very much.” In total, the difference between these responses was 45%, leaving a substantial gap between the reported need for managerial skills and the number of alumni who feel they attained them at their institution.

According to the research by Alec Dudson, founder of Intern Magazine, nine out of ten creative students say they do not even receive any insight into how to price their work, which leads to them being exploited early in the career, either as a freelancer or working in-house. Dudson points it out that only few art and design programmes have a ‘professional practice’ module embedded and even if they do, it seldom runs across each of the three years. In cases where there is no module-level provision, career departments and employability teams are left to pick up the slack, while being restricted to sign-up sessions and ‘employability weeks’.

In addition to developing artistic techniques, contemporary artists have to master managerial, financial, and organizational skills that are essential to manage the business side of their creative practice, early on in their art school education. The fundamental list of skills includes business and career planning tools, strategies to market and sell their work, basic budgeting and financial management, legal requirements for protecting creative works, communication and negotiation skills, and networking tools to succeed in the digital world.

Holding both an MBA and an MFA in painting, Amy Whitaker, Assistant Professor at NYU Steinhardt School of Culture and an author outside of academia, believes that teaching business to artist should be, however, broader than merely teaching them how to market their work. Her approach comprises presenting business as a set of structural tools and building blocks that anyone can use in service of their larger, non-business lives. She encourages creative students to embrace business not as “an identity or a belief system, but a skill — like writing or calculating or drawing.” “Like any other medium — wood, oil paint, steel — capitalism has strengths and weaknesses,” she writes. “It is only by understanding those possibilities and limitations that you can use the medium well.”

To thrive in their creative career, artists do not have to become business people but they do need to understand business. This means that art schools and design education institutions must move towards a mode of teaching that properly trains their graduates to navigate the creative industry effectively.

Cultural norms these days are changing quicker than some of us could keep up with. Even the study of such a seemingly stable discipline as art history has turned out to be controversial. Back in January, Yale University announced it would eliminate its popular survey course “Introduction to Art History: Renaissance to the Present,” in response to student complaints that its curriculum promoted an idealized Western “canon” — a product of an white, straight, European and male cadre of artists — at the expense of other narratives. This was followed by heated debate both in mainstream and social media: should universities teach traditional art history surveys or not?

The decades-old Yale’s art history survey course, covering the evolution of art from 1300 to the present time, has been one of the department’s quintessential classes and most popular offerings. This spring, however, it was taught for the last time. As Art history department chair and the course’s instructor Tim  Barringer explained, the course was “problematic,” because it put European art on a pedestal, at the expense of other artistic traditions “equally deserving of study.”

The last, 2020 edition of the course was taught with an array of modifications. This year, the emphasis was placed on the relationship between European art and other world traditions. The class considered art in relation to “questions of gender, class and ‘race’” and discussed its involvement with such issues as Western capitalism and climate change. The 300 students of the course were also invited to write an essay nominating a work of art that has been left out of the course’s curriculum or its textbook.

According to Yale Daily News, instead of this singular survey class, the Art History Department will offer a range of others, such as “Art and Politics,” “Global Craft,” “The Silk Road” and “Sacred Places.” Barringer added that in two or three years, his department will offer a substitute class to “Introduction to Art History.” But the new class “will be a course equal in status to the other 100-level courses, not the introduction to our discipline claiming to be the mainstream with everything else pushed to the margins,” Barringer said.

New introductory courses will be added in the next few years, but they will not be billed as a comprehensive survey. Wanting to deflect accusations of iconoclasm, Barringer — himself a specialist in European art — presented the move as “expansive rather than reductive,” positioning the changes as part of an effort “to offer Yale undergraduates a range of introductory courses that do justice to the diversity of our faculty’s research, of Yale’s collections, and of the student body itself.”

The news elicited a maelstrom of opinions online, causing particular unrest among conservatives who perceive the change as a disservice to students looking for a broad overview course, rather than more specialized offerings. A headline in the conservative journal Commentary read “Yale’s Art Department Commits Suicide.” The New York Post labeled it ‘PC idiocy’, while the renowned critic James Panero in his article in the Spectator simply likened Yale’s art-history department head to Joseph Stalin.

Those opposed to the new development argue that the history of art reflects the history of the world. No matter if we like it or not, the Renaissance was “intertwined with the rise of modern banking, a time when power-hungry and wealthy patrons used art for self-glorification”, and colonialism. However, they warn art historians against erasing the past with its glories and warts, for this will only leave future generations of students ignorant. Failing to understand the evolution of art, The New York Post writes, the students won’t be able to criticize it. Nor will they be able to appreciate other artistic traditions and customs, for they will have nothing to compare these to.

The conservative media also make a point that although Yale claims the introductory course is being eliminated in response to student uneasiness, the interest in the course among undergraduates skyrocketed following the news that this will be the last time it is taught. During the school’s shopping period, when students sit in on potential courses before officially enrolling, more than 400 people attended the semester’s “Introduction to Art History” class, though the course is capped at 300 due to space constraints. This fact is considered to serve as a proof that the decision to drop the course in fact comes from the top, not the students.

However, other experts rightfully note that the debate whether the curriculum should be reshaped in response to the overall the “globalization” of art history or not has been going on for decades within every art history program in the country.

Dushko Petrovich, Professor at Boston University and Rhode Island School of Design and lecturer in painting/printmaking at Yale, points it out that although art history maintained an “overwhelmingly European focus” since it had been established in Europe in the middle of the 19th century, the earliest survey texts were not focused exclusively on the West. He refers to the essay “Origins of the Art History Survey Text” by Mitchell Schwarzer, Professor of Visual Studies at California College of the Arts, and a historian of architecture, landscape, and urbanism. According to Schwarzer, many of the discipline’s foundational tomes were decidedly global. Franz Kugler’s Handbook of Art History, published in Germany in 1842, declared itself the first comprehensive book on the subject and had geographic span to match. Debuting a year later, Karl Schnaase’s eight-volume History of the Fine Arts argued that belief systems inherited across cultures were key to understanding any civilization’s artworks, and Anton Heinrich Springer’s detail-oriented studies emphasized the inclusion of all peoples as an organizing principle.

However, art from beyond the West – Africa, Asia, Oceania, and the Americas – were presented in the books as Schwarzer put it, as “foundation stones for the development of higher forms of artistic expression in Europe.” Wishing to establish hierarchies of achievement among nations, early art historians settled on ancient Greece and medieval Germany as the highest points on this vast timeline. The connection between classical and Renaissance culture laid the foundation for the subsequent high point: modern Europe. After this, Schwarzer writes, “non-European art was almost completely excluded from the later and crucial stages of art historical development.”

What we see happening today is in fact an attempt to rethink this traditional approach to art history and re-educate ourselves. Due to the civil rights and the women’s movements and the subsequent shift in students demographics, art history as discipline is moving on too. In 1995, Mark Miller Graham, a historian of Mesoamerican art, wrote in “Rethinking the Introductory Art History Survey” issue of Art Journal, “I don’t think that there is now any justification for confining the introductory courses in art history to the art of the West.”

Petrovich welcomes the shift that is ongoing in Yale and the universities in the country. He passes an opinion that thematic courses (such as Yale’s four new aforementioned offerings) “reach across geography and chronology without any claim of comprehensiveness or canonicity”, thus doing a “fair job of summarizing the variations that are possible with this approach, where ideas, materials, trade routes, or social uses of art can all be used to narrate an introduction to the field.”

He also mentions that as few faculty have the expertise to teach a truly global class on their own, a common solution will most likely be “team-teaching,” with several voices replacing the “old man tells you everything you need to know” model of teaching, as critic and former art historian Aruna D’Souza put it.

Denying the influence of Western art would surely mean dismissing its great truth and beauty. Still, the truth is there has never been just one story of the history of art, but rather a host of narratives surrounding the history of engagement with art, architecture, images and objects across time and place. There is every reason to believe that and the art history surveys that we will see in the future will most likely offer students a variety of voices that will educate them on the topics the generations of their predecessors were ignorant of.

Educators would like to believe that their classroom is a place for students to put away their usual routines and mundane thoughts and settle into the joy of learning. The sad-but-true reality, however, is students being carried away from the educational content with distractions of all kinds. With modern life bringing new opportunities to get distracted by every day, is that possible to fight distraction?

Today, higher education instructors are teaching in an atmosphere that could be described as the “age of distraction”, or a “culture of distraction”. A typical classroom in a university or college is literally fraught with opportunities for distractions that challenge learners’ attention and focus and influence their abilities to process course information, more often than not in a negative way.

Our cognitive processing capacity is limited, which is especially noticeable when difficult content is presented through poor instruction or when peers distract us from the learning process. Larger part of the discussion surrounding distracted students these days tends to focus on the “technology in the classroom” debate. Those who are opposed to the use of laptops and phones in the classroom often argue that today’s students get more distracted than their predecessors from the times when devices were not present in the education process. However, according to James M. Lang, Professor of English at Assumption University in Worcester, MA, and the author of the book Distracted: Why Students Can’t Focus and What You Can Do About It, the history is not so straightforward in this regard. In his book, he not only gives an overview of philosophers and writers complaining about the distractibility of their minds going back as far as Aristotle but also considers the work of biologists and psychologists who explain why we have our distractible minds.

To cut it short, “our devices did not create our distractible brains; our brains have always been distractible”. What is indeed changed is that our devices have become especially effective at drawing our attention away from learning of whatever else cognitive activity. The explanation lies in the fact that our brains are very attentive to novelty, and our phones offer us “an endless buffet of novelty,” from the weather and directions to social media accounts and email.

Still, technology is just one of the many classroom distractions that might hamper students’ engagement. A recent study reveals that certain instructor and peer behaviors were equally distracting and had similar negative influences on students’ cognitive load. The participants of the research claimed that they were often distracted because of incompetence, offensiveness or poor class management of the instructor. The examples include instances where teachers said or did something that had irritated or demotivated them, when Power Point slides were flicked through in too fast a pace or when an instructor played music in the background during a group project. They also found distracting their peers misbehaviours – such as asking questions that seemed completely unrelated to the class material presented in class that day, fellow-students coming in after the class has begun or even talking too loudly during the lecture. What is even more interesting, students were easily able to recall specific days, events, and people who they found distracting. The ease with which they could recall these instances speaks to the level of distraction that occurred – it was memorable for students even when students could not recall important course content.

This finding, together with the idea of the human brain as an eminently distractible organ, suggests that a battle with possible distractions that interfere with learning would be imminently a losing one. Instead, Lang advises, educators should focus on cultivating and sustaining attention in the classroom. “Attention is an achievement, not something we should take for granted,” he writes. “Since learning depends upon attention, it should have a prominent place in the way in which we think about our courses and classrooms.”

The study Peers and Instructors as Sources of Distraction from a Cognitive Load Perspective echoes this opinion revealing that students are more easily distracted by technology when overwhelmed by information (or when the information is presented by the instructor in a confusing way), the class is too easy, or the instructor is not involved or relating to students. It makes it hard to escape a conclusion that inadequate teaching and lecture skills, ineffective presentations, as well as going off topic, irrelevant self-disclosing or using humor, seem to be the pressing topic that should be addressed by those wishing to cultivate attention in the class.

One of the strategies for sustaining attention that some teachers intuitively employ is putting structure to any classroom session, as playwrights do in the form of acts and scenes and intermissions. Such “pattern teaching”, a term introduced by Dr. Christine Tulley, Professor of English at The University of Findlay to describe a modular classroom experience in which the instructor deliberately shifts between different modes of engagement (active and passive; individual and group; speaking, writing, and thinking), might really help hold the attention of students over an extended period of time.

The global switch to remote learning as a response to coronavirus pandemic has brought a new dimension to the task of staying focused doing cognitive work, with more instruction delivered virtually or in a hybrid format. When learning comes mediated through screens, fighting distraction can be more challenging, especially when the course content is difficult to process. The core challenge remains the same: our readily distracted brain is tempted to escape from the learning session, and during a Zoom session in a home environment switching for another task could be done with a single click.

Even if the educator is mixing teaching strategies, the generic suite of teaching activities remains more or less the same. Eventually, they become routine enough, so that students check in to class – in person or online – physically, but their minds are somewhere else. To avoid routine and familiarity deadening the attention, educators deploy what Lang calls “signature attention activities” to break the monotony and “wake students from their educational sleepwalking”.

The very word ‘distraction’ has Latin roots: dis  stands for apart, while trahere  means to drag. There are numerous things in the world – from devices close at hand to concerns and fears about the global economic and political upheavals – that can pull our mind in many different directions. In this diverse environment, the classroom could be a perfect opportunity to push worries an anxieties aside in order to focus on something fascinating. Mastery of knowledge or search for solutions could offer us a welcome rest from the kaleidoscope of the modern world’s distractions.

The new reality is that this year with the pandemic serving as a catalyst for many processes in higher education has forced the sector’s leaders acknowledge – the traditional analog on-campus degree-focused learning model is seriously challenged. However, the future of higher education goes far beyond following the major general trends of digitalization and blended learning.

Experts believe that the current crisis is likely to be remembered as a critical turning point between the “time before” to the “time after,” when digital, online, career-focused learning became the fulcrum of competition between institutions. The future of higher education will see the rise of postsecondary alternatives, such as “massively open online courses” (MOOCs) and industry-driven certification programs.

Ben Nelson, CEO of the Minerva Project, a global college in which students live in residential settings in one of four international cities (San Francisco, Berlin, London and Seoul) and take all courses online, expects a rise in public-private partnerships.

To remain financially sustainable, universities of the future will shift towards leveraging innovative financing models such as public-private partnerships – and private equity investments. A public-private partnership, which typically comes with financial sponsorship as well as industry alignment, allows cost reduction of course overheads, and better outcomes for students because of a closer contact with industry. The future of higher education also involves offering services to industry, including consultancy and delivery of co-developed curricula.

Today already, we see how private companies increasingly drive the digital transformation of higher education. According to investment intelligence firm HolonIQ, the first half of 2020 was the second-largest half year for global edtech investment – at $4.5 billion, much of which is focused on higher education and its intersection with the workforce.

Looking at universities 10 years from now, Nelson predicts emergence of learning ecosystems created by governments, higher education institutions and the private sector, which will extend beyond the traditional university campus and three- or four-year course. An early example of this is the Hong Kong-based readtogether.hk forum, a consortium of over 60 educational organisations, publishers, media, and entertainment industry professionals. It provides more than 900 free educational assets, including videos, books, assessment tools, and counselling services.

Some promising postsecondary alternatives that mark the general disrupting trends have been gaining ground over the past several years. One of the most successful alternatives to the traditional 4-year college model is Lambda School, an online school that trains students to become web developers or data scientists offering them a 9-month full-time program or an 18-month part-time program. It first became popular with its pioneering use of income share agreements (ISAs) to offer students a way to enroll and learn the necessary skills for a successful career without paying tuition upfront. Instead, payments are only made after the student becomes employed and earns above a certain level of income. It should be noted that Lambda School does manage to successfully place its graduates in well-paying jobs at top tier companies.

Another promising alternative is Praxis, a one-year program that includes six months of hands on skill building followed by at least six months of time building skills and a track record in a job. Rather than offering a degree, Praxis is focused on building skills and gaining real-world experience that result in a starting point for a successful career. Students can either pay upfront or defer payment until after they have landed a job, and Praxis will even return the cost of tuition if a graduate is unable to find a job within 6 months.

In spite of the diversity of educational models in higher education, Peter Cohen, president of the University of Phoenix, envisions a grimmer picture of a “society of monoculture education,” where national governments dictate what is to be learned. He emphasizes that these days we see the sector self-homogenizing. “You look at most curricula at most universities – they’re exactly the same,” he says. “The fundamental approaches, the sequences of courses are not only the same, they’re also curated the same.” Cohen’s hope is that a decade from now a growing number of institutions “will stand against those trends, will have very distinct educational philosophies with a well-thought-through curriculum of extraordinarily high academic rigor that will focus on actual learning outcomes.”

Speaking of learning outcomes, experts predict that continuous skilling beyond degrees will play a big role in the university of the future. Harvard Business Review provides data showcasing that while students invest their time and money into a higher education with a primary goal of getting a good job, seeing a degree of a reputed institution as a guarantee, employers need practical skills, not just knowledge and titles. Cohen confirms that more than 85% percent of students, a large share of which are working adults, come to the university in order to get a better career. That is why he expects the universities of the future to be better aligned to what industry is looking for – “the sort of bursts of learning that allow people to get those promotions and new jobs that they need.” With careers changing over time due to the rapidly changing technology and society, the idea that you go to school once when you’re young and you have the skills you need for life appears to be long gone, he explains.

The future of higher education will most definitely see a shift away from the flawed logic of “certifying somebody to get a job”. According to Minerva’s Nelson, “none of our formal education trained us for the context situations and challenges that we deal with every single day.” Instead, universities will be focused on training their students for more systematic thinking and equipping them with a unique skill of answering this moment, i.e. being ready to encounter a novel situation.

We can only guess what the future of higher education will be like in 5 to 10 years from now. But one thing we know for sure. Many universities are taking the challenges brought along with the pandemic as an opportunity to innovate and rethink their strategies to become the university of the future the society needs. But those that do not embrace change and hope to revert to traditional ways when the crisis is over are will definitely be left behind.

Across the world, coronavirus has fundamentally changed the student experience. It has also raised a number of questions concerning what universities should offer and to whom. It is obvious that COVID-19 will leave a lasting imprint on the higher education that won’t “go back to normal” as we knew it, pre-pandemic. But the truth is the crisis has just accelerated some disruptive trends of the sector, and even without it, the future of higher education was never going to look like its past. Let us imagine what higher education will be like in 2025-2030.

The first trend that comes to mind when one thinks of the university of the future is of course digitalization of learning environment. The reality showcases that to succeed today, universities have to embrace innovation in education and have strategies to best respond to the latest digital trends with potential roles in teaching, such as augmented reality and artificial intelligence (AI). As the COVID-19 crisis struck, online learning became increasingly mainstream, with nearly every institution moving their programs online, after decades of slow and steady adoption.

Today, we already see the ‘digital divide’ existing among universities. Top private universities have better IT infrastructure and higher IT support staff ratio for each faculty compared to budget-starved public universities. In addition, online courses require educational support on the ground: instructional designers, trainers, and coaches to ensure student learning and course completion.  There is every reason to believe that this divide will be more apparent in the future, as institutions that do not try to maximize their tech-related are not likely to survive.

All experts in education agree that digitalized learning environments becoming the norm implies that higher education of the future will be based on blended learning. Ben Nelson and Diana El-Azar from the Minerva Project, a leading educational innovator, describe the future of higher education as “a mixture of in-person, location-based programmes, experiential teaching, and the flexibility of both synchronous and asynchronous virtual learning.” The model they propose suggests students living together on campus, but still taking part in virtual classrooms.

Hybrid teaching models support student-centricity, provide for a personalized and adaptive learning experience and enhance the cost-effectiveness of large programs. Such models imply that courses and lectures that require little personalization or human interaction can be recorded as multi-media presentations, to be watched by students at their own pace and place, or even delivered to very large audiences at low cost by a non-university instructor or technology platform (e.g. an online education provider like Coursera). Such courses can be commoditized without sacrificing social interaction as one of the important benefits of the face-to-face classroom, which would free resources to commit to research-based teaching, personalized problem solving, and mentorship. For students, that would mean having online classes at their own pace and at much cheaper cost. They would use precious time they spend on campus for all types of activities that require face-to-face engagements. Some years ago, experts predicted that massive open online courses (MOOCs), such as Coursera, Udacity, and edX, would kill traditional education (“just as digital technologies killed off the jobs of telephone operators and travel agents”). However, the history proves that certain campus-based activities, such as social networking, group assignments, field-based projects, and global learning expeditions, can enhance the student’s learning experience.

The third disruptive trend is the transition from a degree-based talent pipeline to a skills-based talent pipeline. The nature of jobs is changing, and students need to be able to update their skills throughout their careers. Recent surveys show that students prioritize employability when selecting universities, however, the idea that a college degree singularly prepares students for decades of work has long been outdated. Since many future jobs are not yet defined, universities must equip their students to be lifelong learners who can acquire new skills and give them broad, cross-disciplinary problem-solving skills and entrepreneurial mindsets. Overall demand for continuous education and corporate training is growing.  Scott Pulsipher, the president of Western Governors University, a nonprofit, online, competency-based university, points it out that COVID-19 has created sudden demand for mid-career reskilling and upskilling at unprecedented scale. “In the future, degrees will continue to hold value, not because of the degree credential, but because a degree is composed of many skills and competencies that are valued by employers”, he says.

Connected to that is another major trend – digital credentialing, described as “a rapid shift from static educational records and transcripts, previously an extremely analog process that centered around degrees, to online, digital credentials focused on certificates and certifications that summarize achievement, skills or competency”. In a digital economy where continuous upskilling is needed to keep pace with technological advances and skills outdate in no time at all, universities will move beyond bachelor’s degrees as their primary product, toward more nimble, lower-priced, digital “credentialized packages”. This process is central to achieving the goal of greater education/workforce alignment, which hinges on integrating college and employer HR systems.

However, Nelson and El-Azar emphasize that in the university of the future investment in student-centric learning outcomes will be more important than technological innovation. No technology can improve poor teaching – on the contrary, it can only be made worse by “distractions from the digital world.” Instead, institutions must improve student learning outcomes by updating their curricula and pedagogy, and technological solutions can help in this process. For example, digital learning platforms can measure talk time per student, allowing a professor to evaluate participation objectively.

Change is hard. But with the ongoing crisis accelerating the processes that would otherwise have taken decades to be fully established in institutions of higher education, the university of the future will hopefully be more student-centered, flexible and resilient.