Making a Case for Design-Based Learning

In the last five years I have served on several national committees concerned with the contribution arts education makes to achieving the goals of education reform in K-12 classrooms. As a university graphic design educator and the only designer on those committees, I frequently must represent the issues and concerns of many design educators and professionals, including architects, industrial design-ers, planners, landscape architects, and interior designers. I am continually struck by the perceptions that leaders in art education hold about design and the missed opportunities to promote design as a bridge between fine arts and other areas of the curriculum, such as science, mathematics, social studies, and language arts. As someone who holds two degrees in art education, as well as one in design, I am equally concerned by the lack of design instruction in the preparation of K-12 art teachers. It is especially curious given the pervasive assumption that design is a sub-discipline of art, the frequency with which art education and design programs reside in the same aca-demic unit in US colleges, and the exploding number of applications by high school seniors to college design programs. In a series of articles for Arts Education Policy Review I hope to acquaint art educators with some of the thirty-year history of design education in K-12 classrooms, show its relationships to the goals of education reform, illustrate its success as a strategy for integrating curricula, and discuss its potential for curbing marginalization of the arts in schools. In each case, I will argue that the inclusion of de-sign education in the preparation of teachers and administrators, within and outside the arts, offers additional strategies for improving teaching and learning. The reform research and classroom examples that I use come largely from a two-year study by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA)