Design offers an aesthetic and intellectual arena:  faculty “find” themselves inside design, and once they create the design, there is a different kind of ownership. A Design sensibility embraces change, new variables, and evolution in the classroom. TEA works with faculty to imagine how concepts taken from Nature can be incorporated into their teaching. 

TEA’s approach to Design brings together a number of different educational strands: uncovering and leveraging student capacity; attention to students’ affective domain; surfacing Student Voices to assess and refine classroom practice; facilitating productive space for faculty to rethink and redesign the classroom. Design fosters intentionality and fresh eyes in the service of bringing new ideas and approaches into the classroom and across campus. 

Supporting faculty to leverage Design is only half of the work. We also train faculty to teach Design  principles to students, so that they become designers of their own education. Students, as a result of spending thirteen years in school before arriving at community college, are--whether they know it or not--educational experts. The classes and programs in which we have been developing these principles are primarily composed of at risk students, first to college students, and students of color. They thrive inside a Design approach because their learned passivity is erased and replaced by the opportunity to be authors of their own experience. 

What can be designed: syllabi, experiences, digital spaces, your handouts, the classroom, the campus, the wider community.

 We can see how DESIGN and SPACES intersect with each other. 

A colorful syllabus