Converting Those That Cannot Afford it Into Teachable Moments on All Sides
As I arrived to teaching much later in my professional career, my principal teaching approach is bringing real-world experiences directly into the classroom—especially this specific studio. Practicum is an ideal favorite to bring in genuine off-campus not-for-profit (and occasional on-campus) clients for all in-person studio project work.
All projects are part of a design/marketing senior-level studio. The actual course was most recently taught as a hybrid-course. The online portion dealt primarily with current professional business practices, freelance/sole-proprietorship operations, and the students being required to fully create and develop their own business model. The latter being complete with naming etymology, business analysis, branding, and full business plan proposals and estimates. The online portion also allowed the duty of progress critiques by colleagues of client and personal business work.
The face-to-face portion of the studio met once-a-week and was engineered to act as a real studio setting. Clients were brought in for kick-off/project-launch meetings and progress/final presentations. Project workload was distributed as evenly as possible across the group, every student -did not- work on every project, skill sets were evaluated at the start of the semester.
Professional client work created by D.Shonyo, K.Koschewa, J.Gilbert, S.Walker, M.Vettraino, and J.Girshner.
