Social learning for Visual Communication Design students – Elmarie Costandius
Social learning was incorporated into the Visual Communication Design first to third year curriculum in January 2010 in a project called Citizenship. The purpose of the project was to address social issues that stem from the colonial and apartheid past in South Africa. Experience cannot be separated from our learning, and what happened in the past still has an effect on many facets of the social psyche, like self-esteem, for instance. Our collective history therefore affects individual learning. In the project mental and bodily learning were addressed by means of theoretical discussions, community interactions and the utilization of design projects as a medium to work through sensitive issues such as stereotyping, power relations and blackness/whiteness. After the community interaction students wrote self-reflections about their experiences of discussing these sensitive issues with community members. Action Learning and Action Research (ALAR) was used as a methodological framework for the project.