The Collegiate Teaching Practicum prepares graduate students to be effective educators while fostering a community of shared ideas. Designed to support graduate students while they are teaching in RISD’s Wintersession, the course is a practicum in which participants discuss practical and theoretical concerns related to collegiate teaching and learning. As a forum, the course provides a space for group reflection on teaching experiences and challenges, in addition to developing effective learning and assessment strategies. Through class discussions and break out groups students will explore diverse topics, identify and define classroom challenges, and develop strategies for course management and learning outcomes. Students will have an opportunity to share and apply knowledge of student learning and an awareness of student diversity to their discipline-focused art and design instruction.

Topics in Pedagogy at The New School University is a required, non-credit seminar for all graduate students who are Teaching Assistants or Teaching Fellows and have not had any formal pedagogical training. The purpose of the seminar is to provide a context and to reflect critically on the practice of teaching, to introduce you to pedagogical concepts, and to assist you in developing your teaching skills. It also provides a place for you to be supported as new teachers, to ask questions about teaching and hear from other new instructors about their experience.

In the Teaching Practicum at SUNY Purchase we talk about the theory and practice of teaching. We make a connections between teaching art and our practice as artists, reaching beyond the pragmatic fact of making a living.  The class is divided into week-by-week topics, helping each other improve the way we deliver material to our students. We will use theory as a framework to discuss how teaching benefits us as artists and the potential education has for transforming our students and the culture we live in. The class moves chronologically through the preparation of a course each student will teach in the following semester, starting with a syllabus and ending with assessment. Each topic has a reading assignment, a class discussion of ideas, and then usually a week when selected individuals share their methods. Each student keeps a journal in which they record observations about the teaching methods of the professors they observe as well as responses to the reading questions. The dialogue we develop together about teaching is the most important aspect of this class.

In Learning Through Design at Parsons School of Design we investigate how design thinking is, or might be, embedded k-12 education.Upon entering elementary school, most children experience the conventional separation between academic learning and the arts that will mark most of their future educational and career experiences. This course is based on the premise that design thinking in education from K through 12th grade is fundamental for the cognitive development of children. The term 'design pedagogy' implies not merely vocational design training, but rather the use of design thinking as an intellectual process that through visual learning, hands-on experiences, creative play and research-based methods, can help children comprehend not just art and design, but also a variety of humanities and science-based subjects.