We Took an IDEO Course Together

Design Thinking as Professional Development in Florida International University’s Writing Program

Authors

Keywords:

design thinking, generative failure, Professional Development, Collaboration, Curriculum,, Hispanic-Serving Institutions

Abstract

In Summer 2019, six writing program faculty at Florida International University took a free, five-week online course on design thinking offered by IDEO and +Acumen. By the end of the course, we seriously questioned the elitist underpinnings of design thinking and recognized that practicing it at a Hispanic-Serving Institution with predominantly working-class students would require greater thoughtfulness about our local context than was present in the course materials. However, we also found that this shared learning experience had been worthwhile and that the ideate, test, and fail-fast mindset of design thinking could have useful pedagogical and administrative implications. To put it another way, through this course, we prototyped a writing program reconceived as an ongoing, collaborative design thinking process. In this article, we trace our experiences in and reactions to the course. Then we turn to how the experience of the course has informed our subsequent research, teaching, and administrative work. Finally, we close with a brief reflection on our work as a humble, incremental approach to design thinking and the value we found in sustained, reflective collaboration.

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Author Biographies

Luke Thominet, Florida International University

Luke Thominet is an Assistant Professor of Writing and Rhetoric in the English Department at Florida International University. His work examines rhetorics of health and medicine, user experience in video game development, and applications of design thinking to pedagogy and academic program development. His research has appeared in Patient Education and Counseling, Technical Communication Quarterly, Communication Design Quarterly, and the Journal of Technical and Business Communication, and in the edited collections Effective Teaching of Technical Communication, Keywords in Design Thinking, and User Experience as Innovative Academic Practice.

Vytautas Malesh, Florida International University

Vytautas Malesh is an Assistant Teaching Professor of Writing and Rhetoric in the English Department at Florida International University. He teaches first-year composition, technical and business writing, writing studies, rhetorical theory and practice, writing and new media, and writing for the web. He has previously worked as a professional copywriter and editor. His teaching focuses on the intersection of technology, culture, and writing, and on helping students to professionalize rhetoric and writing in the workplace.

Michael Sohan, Florida International University

Michael Sohan is an Associate Teaching Professor of Writing and Rhetoric in the English Department at Florida International University. He teaches first-year composition, technical and professional writing, and professional editing. He is the chair of the professional and technical writing committee, technical editor of the FIUURJ, the FIU undergraduate research journal, and mentors dual enrollment instructors and adjuncts. He previously worked in sales and communications at multiple corporations and businesses based in the Midwest.

Vanessa Sohan, Florida International University

Vanessa Kraemer Sohan is an Associate Professor of Writing and Rhetoric in the English Department at Florida International University, where she also serves as Associate Director of the Interdisciplinary and Liberal Studies programs. Her research and teaching focus on translingual and transmodal approaches to literacy practice, feminist historiography, and material rhetorics. Her book, Lives, Letters, and Quilts: Women and Everyday Rhetorics of Resistance (University of Alabama Press, 2020), provides case studies of women activists and artists. Her scholarship has appeared in College English, Pedagogy, JAC, the Journal of College Literacy and Learning, the Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics, and various edited collections.

Paul Feigenbaum, Florida International University

Paul Feigenbaum is an Associate Professor of Writing and Rhetoric of Writing in the English Department at Florida International University and co-editor of the Community Literacy Journal. He recently completed a three-year position directing Project THINC: Teaching Humanities in the New Context, a Mellon-funded grant to facilitate curricular development and scholarship for Humanities faculty at FIU. His research, teaching, and engagement interests include community literacy, generative failure, and transdisciplinary problem-solving. His scholarship has appeared in journals including Pedagogy, College English, and Reflections. His book Collaborative Imagination: Earning Activism through Literacy Education was published by Southern Illinois University Press.

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Published

2024-02-05

How to Cite

Thominet, L., Malesh, V., Sohan, M., Sohan, V., & Feigenbaum, P. (2024). We Took an IDEO Course Together: Design Thinking as Professional Development in Florida International University’s Writing Program. Programmatic Perspectives, 14(2). Retrieved from https://programmaticperspectives.cptsc.org/index.php/jpp/article/view/49

Issue

Vol. 14 No. 2 (2023): Programmatic Perspectives

Section

Program Showcases

License

Copyright (c) 2023 Luke Thominet, Vytautas Malesh, Michael Sohan, Vanessa Sohan, Paul Feigenbaum

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.