Before I went on hiatus from teaching due to my sickness, I was teaching a magazine design class called Visions. The purpose of the class was to create a magazine with the same name. The text below is the transcript from a lecture that I gave in that class. I had realized at the time that the students needed a bit more guidance in understanding what I wanted to do with the class. The transcript was written in one sitting. I had gone back and do minor editing on the written text.
One of the things that I have been trying to do in the last several classes has been to guide you through this process of conceptualizing what the final outcome of our magazine is going to be. Over the last couple of weeks I have been doing this without overtly stating my intent. We have definitely made progress in a direction toward our goal. And most of you have very successfully participated in furthering that process. But, somehow, I have been wondering if I should more overtly state what the intention this class is. It is very well known to many people in my life that I often do not successfully make the case for my intentions explicitly clear. However, in the cases where I do attempt to state that intention, somehow it always ends up getting misconstrued.
So this is why I want to take the time to have this conversation with you. I have been noticing that there have been some confusions as to what my intentions are for all of you.
All of us in this class have this understanding, coming in, that our objective is to create this magazine that will be put into production. What I have tried to do is completely contradictory to other classes that I have conducted. In those cases, when I have given out specific assignments, I have provided with them given rules that needed to be followed. In those cases I do have certain expectations of what I want the students to produce. In all cases, I would have left those expectations open enough so that there are room for the students to create their own expectations of what the outcome of the assignments would be. What I kept noticing was that the students would end up needing more information about what they are expected to do. They want to be given examples to see how they can specifically execute those works.
In this class I began with a different approach. If you remember, I began the class by showing you some examples of different concepts of a magazine to get the conversations going. But from that moment on, I made it a point to leave open the final conception of the magazine to all of you.
