Making it work – Creating opportunities, handling Restrictions

It’s a familiar story in Graphic Design education – more students each year and less time to teach them. We can feel very restricted by these pressures and the ever-increasing administrative burden they inevitably bring.

On the other hand, we have huge opportunities to expose students to a wide range of disciplines within graphic design, developing craft and creativity, challenging the way students think, helping them explore their responsibilities as designers.

This paper will focus on a module run in the 2nd year of Northumbria University’s Graphic Design degree which was designed to help staff work with both the restrictions and the opportunities afforded them. We will look at the pedagogical challenges faced by the staff team teaching the module, the obligations and ambitions they have for the cohorts they teach and the ways in which these elements have come together over the eight years the module has been running.

In the module we have prioritised several key elements:
• Teamwork,
• Collaboration with external partners,
• Tackling issues of social, physical and geographical disadvantage.

Using examples, the paper will show how the combination of these elements has enabled us to cope with some of the logistical issues faced, while creatively stretching students in ways they may not have anticipated when they joined the course.