School Survey: 2004 – In-Depth Answers from Students and Teachers

The annual Metropolis survey on the state of design education yields a great deal of instructive, useful information that, due to space limitations, doesn’t make it into the magazine; the 2004 Metropolis School Survey is no exception. Below are six downloadable PDF files with detailed responses about different aspects of collaboration, submitted to the survey by both students and teachers. When necessary, they have been edited for clarity.

Teachers, look over these answers for ideas and approaches shared by your colleagues; students, see how your generation feels about their courses of study. And all: Take cues from each other about means and ways to make collaborative learning part of the design education process.

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School Survey: 2004 – Teachers Define Collaboration
Someone said, “Underlying all collaborative learning is a distinctive set of assumptions about what is teaching, what is learning, and what the nature of knowledge is.” With this in mind, we asked teachers to define collaboration in 50 words or less.

School Survey: 2004 – Students Describe Collaboration Projects
We asked students to describe in 50 words or less an interdepartmental collaborative project that they worked on in the past year (or in the last year they attended school). Was it a fruitful and effective collaboration? Why or why not?

School Survey: 2004 – Teachers Describe Collaboration Projects
We asked teachers to describe in 50 words or less an interdepartmental collaborative project that their students engaged in this past year. Was it a fruitful and effective collaboration? Why or why not?

School Survey: 2004 -Teachers’ Collaboration Methods, Motivations, and Barriers
Teachers explain which methods of collaborative learning they used in the past year, what their motivations for collaborating were, and with which departments they collaborated. Finally, we asked what they felt were the academic barriers to collaboration.

School Survey: 2004 – Students Describe Their Non-Academic Collaborators
We asked students which non-design academic departments they collaborated with in the past year.

School Survey: 2004 – Teachers’ Comments on the Survey
We asked teachers if they had any comments on the subject matter covered in Metropolis’s School Survey: 2004. Of course they did.