Below is a blog post from the ELIA Symposium, where I have been selected as a student delegate. ELIA is a conference that invites educators and representatives from art and design institutions from around the world, and is being held at Emily Carr this year.
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Where to start… Well, ‘wow’ just about sums it up.
Today was a meeting of minds, and was as inspiring as it was exhausting. After listening to Dr. Ron Burnett discuss the profound changes digital technologies have evoked in education, and the new “explosion of informal learning opportunities” available to us, I began to wrap my brain around the fact that he was actually talking about my education. I wasn’t just a bystander in this conversation, and as he asked us to consider his word of the day, “customization”, I was immediately drawn into this amazing dialogue and was pinching myself to see if this opportunity was real or imagined.
Douglas Coupland continued the conversation, and allowed us a peek into his creative process – one that combines a critical eye on an “age of too much memory”, with a certain amount of nostalgia. His ideas were met and discussed by Dr. Burnett, and a conversation of whether or not contributing change to biological circumstances sets too many limits on how that change is understood.
This formed the basis of a series of conversations at my table, where representatives from Maryland to Rotterdam discussed the changing role of an arts education in today’s world. We began to discuss whether learners of today are learning differently, and whether new disciplines needed to be invented as graduates are offered up into a world that is constantly changing.
What was most interesting, is how unique everyone’s perspectives were, but how everyone agreed that this present course that each individual institution was on would benefit from an overhaul. On one side of the table is an institution with 50,000 undergraduates, and on the other, a university with only 200 students. Yet the main idea was consistent throughout – they all agreed that teaching people to collaborate was most important to an education that could weather the storm.
From a design student perspective, this is not new to me, but is in fact the norm. At Emily Carr, we are taught to see through many different lenses, to be compassionate listeners, and to me empathetic to the situations of others. The technology that existed when I began my journey at Emily Carr is now, three years later, obsolete, but the skills I have obtained are timeless and will carry me forward.
If I could humbly offer a piece of advice to the educators and representatives I met today, it would be this:
If we are expected to embrace change, teach us to adapt.
If we are expected to lead change, teach us to be leaders.
If we expected to be successful, teach us to be life-long learners.
Bree Galbraith
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