Sometimes, lesson planning and curriculum design for art education are reactive; a teacher guides students through a method of wedging clay, but most of the students’ clay still has pockets of air, so the teacher has to reassess their demonstration to find what didn’t work. This process is, essentially, iterative design.
But there are some flaws or problems that can be predicted before the lesson is ever taught, and tools that can be used to predict flaws in lesson design are valuable. Universal Design for Learning (or, UDL) is oriented around making accommodations for students before they are faced with something that’s inaccessible. Another design methodology that is particularly well suited to the art education classroom is User Experience (or, UX) design.
UX Collective’s “What does UX in education look like?”, by Alex Britez, guides the reader through possible applications of UX design in the classroom, and a reading that dives deeper into those ideas might help an art educator reflect on their own lesson design practices, teach new tools, and give names to things they already do.
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| Image courtesy of UX Collective |
