Joshua Korenblat

Teaching Philosophy
jbkcreate.com (teaching web site)

I believe in the Renaissance and Victorian models of education, where students learn to think and
work in an interdisciplinary way. In Florence, Renaissance humanists convened meetings to discuss the
relationship between science, poetry, and art; a Victorian-era artist, meanwhile, had to study and
understand aspects of science, music, and literature.
A unifying world-view informed the practice of thinkers who could excel at a single craft, from
Leonardo and Michelangelo to George Eliot and Charles Darwin. Such transferable critical thinking skills
have become increasingly relevant today, given advances in technology that have made the abundant
world accessible from home.
Here, the elements of graphic design work like an international language that transcends verbal
boundaries. Aristotles rules for rhetoric, logic, emotion, and credibility, apply to even the most modern
of design experiences. For instance, an interactive appeals to a users need for credibility by allowing the
user to test an idea for him or herself, or to personalize an experience that might otherwise seem to lack
that memorable context.
Creativity, the process of arriving at a solution when multiple solutions exist, is crucial for students to
practice today. With keen scaffolding, guidance, and assessment methods, students can learn a reliable
process that works for persuasive communication.
At any level, an effective teacher must not merely master subject area knowledge. A teacher must
also see the world through the eyes of each student, and then communicate and compose lessons that
maximize individual learning potential. I structure my classes in a thematic way, first by asking an
essential question. Then, I plan backward by determining the cumulative project, student learning
objectives, and how I will assess student growth in their revisions and portfolios. I select a core text and
related material relevant to the essential question, and supplement that text with readings and reference
materials to provoke discussion and inquiry. During this process, I scaffold my lessons so that students
build practical skills essential to producing persuasive work for the cumulative project.
As a teacher of graphic design, writing, and art, I ascribe to the constructivist philosophy of
educational psychologist Jean Piaget, who advocates learning by invention. Students exist at the center of
the learning process, guided by a mentor. Here, students learn by failure: in other words, outcomes do
not match their expectations; for their next task, students make accommodations and change their
mental model to realize their expectations. By freeing failure from its negative associations, students
begin to feel less inhibited, a key part of creative flow. Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi coined the
psychological term flow, a timeless place unmoored from self-consciousness where ones skills are
adequate to cope with the challenges at hand.
This classroom environment also frees students from judging the initial act of creationreserving
judgments essential role for a later stage, while protecting the possibility for creative surprise early in
the process. Once students have generated many possibilities, they will find some ideas that inspire
them, which they will use like building blocks in an architecture project: sorting, sequencing, and
creating hierarchies. At the early stages of the creative process, I ask students to imagine questions their

audience might ask, and to develop techniques that help answer those questions while remaining flexible
to an unfolding creative process.
When the foundation of a project begins to settle after an agile, user and reader-centered process of
feedback and refinement utilizing user and reader experience surveys, students can eventually resolve
details and refine the work to a more final level. Only then are they ready for a final critique. Betty
Flowers, a professor at the University of Texas-Austin, developed this working process for writing; she
calls it Madperson, Genius, Architect, Carpenter, and Judge, but it works equally well for graphic
designers.
I measure student outcomes through detailed, written critiques. All writing must be judged by its
intent, and all criticism must be framed in specific, observational terms to motivate the student; vague
judgments such as success and failure inhibit creative thinking. I ensure intrinsic motivation by
including incremental assignments calibrated to match skill level to the task at hand. Here, students feel
prepared for the challenges they face and then work with flow, poised and curious between the opposing,
detrimental poles of boredom and anxiety.
For most work, I request revisions and allow students to consider possibilities. Students engage in
creative workshops that prepare them for the final cumulative assessment, which could be a final
revision or a new creation. I encourage students to summarize the reviewed work in one or two
sentences before engaging in a detailed critique. This summary conveys the single powerful effect of the
work, its intent and lasting mood. In this way, students structure their critiques just as I structure my
curriculum: they begin at the end.
To paraphrase Henry David Thoreau from his essay, "Walking," my students do not simply acquire
knowledge; they learn to understand the world, and all of its inhabitants, with a sympathy and
intelligence cultivated by a liberal arts education. Once the reader or user of an experience is affected
emotionally by a work, then he or she is ready to apprehend it intellectually. Artful communication
transforms concepts once considered mundane into wondrous new forms, and presents this body of
knowledge with a lucid light. In my classes, students find their voice and hone their craft with clarity and
humanity.