Designing your writing/writing your design: Art and Design Students Talk about the Process of Writing and the Process of Design

http://wac.colostate.edu/atd/visual/orr_blythman_mullin.cfm

...writing was/is still privileged as a means to analyse and explicate (Orr, Blythman, & Mullin, 2004.

...the reverse is beginning to also be true: students who have been taught to write are being asked to analyze and explicate visual documents in order to create them.

Several key issues emerged for further exploration:
- the role of peers and audience; 2D vs. 3D (page versus object);
- the students' personal relationship with writing and with art and design;
- students' understanding of the process within each area;
- teacher intervention in promoting effective writing/design processes/products.

This article looks at four of the areas of interest that emerged from their data:
1. students' personal relationship with writing/art and design,
2. the role of peers and audience,
3. engagement with process, and
4. conceptions of time.

1. students' personal relationship with writing/art and design

To art students—and probably many others—words in school belong to someone else. While, as with their art, students may have ideas for writing, they don't seem to have, as they do with art, the will to find the tools that shape those ideas.

Whereas their concepts for art seem to take shape from the materials that are themselves plastic, to them words seem static, flat, unable to be shaped. Students in A&D own their art, whereas they believe writing is a guessing game, shaping others' words to fulfil others' ends

If students could see their own visual processes (reading or creating) they might be able to "draw" from them for their writing processes. If they could understand the plasticity of language, they might be able to see words, punctuation, syntax, as tools for their "creations" not barriers. For them to do that, however, we need to revise our own reliance on words to explain words. We suggest mindfully shaping visual metaphors for our students so that the visuality and plasticity of language becomes apparent to them. We need to rethink not only how we speak about language, but how our assignments and feedback might reinforce the static image of language that students hold—the image that reinforces, for them, that words are "not tactile, not personal."

2. the role of peers and audience,
US students understand that there is an audience besides themselves when it comes to their art or their writing; at least, the majority do not think of themselves as an island.

Importance of...geting an opportunity to try out ideas with peers first in class or on-line, and this seems to play a part in their seeking and acceptance of feedback for writing.

All A&D students have an overwhelming willingness to seek feedback for their art, a sense that their tools and the product they produce are malleable and can be changed as a result of audience response; they realize their work can be interpreted differently and "have a real interest in how the intended message may be received."

...teach writing not as static, nor as an isolated, individual activity, but as a social practice that is as malleable and contextual as artistic media. Our own ways of speaking about writing and the feedback we provide might well be reviewed to see which of these views of writing they support.

3. engagement with process, and
Instructors, therefore, face a major challenge over the difference in the emotional response these students have to writing and to art and design: a sense of joy versus a sense of pain; a sense of control versus no control. Their ability to shape their medium is absent when that medium is language

...stopping points in students' writing process again indicated a disconnect from their medium—words.
I get blocked because I don't feel like writing any more.
I can't put my feelings into words.

Art is not easy for these students, but they are willing to work through their difficulty, take time out for the process to gel, or seek inspiration and feedback. Only two describe what, for those teaching with writing, may be a clue to helping students cross the barriers that have been set up between designing and writing. Just as art is a puzzle to put together, a student notes that when his writing is blocked:
I make a puzzle by extracting the nouns and descriptive words into a grammatical diagram. So instead of "earth" it just says "noun goes here." Then I rearrange the blocks until I am happy.

We suggest that there is great potential for teaching writing in the strategies students use to make their art. They first need to see writing more as a creative endeavour instead of "stupid rules." While there may be no help for those few who choose to remain islands in both areas, for the majority of students who are visual learners or learning visuals, it would be useful for them to understand the processes they employ when working in both spheres and determine for themselves how they might be able to use similar strategies not only to unblock themselves, but also to become motivated.

4. conceptions of time.
While these students seemed to know they had to cut time out for writing, they didn't actively describe their timelines and processes for creating it. On the other side, a picture emerges of student-artists attempting to control time, even if they are not always successful. They are, nonetheless, willing to exert control over their process because they value their activity and are willing to devote time to it. Time is as valuable as their art, and they work to create both, even if that means working within a short period to create the rush they need to complete their design.

Recommendations:

There are some common practices that need to be considered more frequently:

- Encourage students to use physical representations of knowledge in order to hone their skills, but also, have them write about their experiences or write up research using visual representations as springboards or accompaniments to text.

- Writing centers have long had students color code parts of their paper using marker pens to enable them to "see" the structure of their writing. The same can be used when students must learn to balance their voice with the views of others; students can color code each to see visually if the proportions are appropriate to the requirements of writing in that particular discipline.

- Teachers with an interest in writing development as an important aspect of student learning are usually keen on planning structures but are perhaps too wedded to this only in a written form. For students who operate through diagrams or story boarding, these have to be developed as design techniques for a piece of writing.

- We saw earlier that students can feel that they have a shortage of ideas for writing unlike design. We should encourage the use of the notebook as an equivalent tool to the sketchbook as a way of gathering lots of research materials, in essence the creation of a textual sketch-book (Orr and Blythman, 2002).

- responses we collected from students argues for a social practices approach when teaching writing to visually adept students.

- Instructors can set up a questionnaire or interviews similar to those in the appendix (shorter or longer) in which they ask students what their processes are for reading and then creating (maps, graphs, websites) . Ask the same about their reading, writing, composing or listening processes (depending on the class). Examine these with each student or let students examine them in small groups, and report on the comparisons among their answers. Let them collaborate about the language in which they articulated their differences; let them teach each other strategies, or point out that they already have strategies that can transfer to writing or imaging.

- Additionally instructors need to build a repertoire of visual metaphors to use when explaining writing so that we are making links between the design process and the writing process. We need to use design metaphors to explain writing processes or compare writing with design processes. For example, students need to understand that surface features are of limited importance since the surface and structural features of text interact. Instructors can refer to what are considered the technical/ surface features in design or art work and expand this vocabulary when providing feedback on student writing.

- Art and design students, and others, may be more confident with electronic and non-linear tools. Many students who are afraid of writing a paper, thesis or dissertation feel quite confident about building a website. Dufflemeyer and Ellertson's article in this issue point to ways that can be done, and advocate for opening our writing classrooms to multimodal forms of composing, but in the meanwhile, even the simple change of discourse to "building" a dissertation can increase understanding and confidence.