A few years went by. A couple years in the Air Force, some employment in a multidisciplinary design firm, and I’m back at school to earn a masters in landscape architecture. Fortunately, my teaching experience, and design firm background found me with a number of landscape courses waived but still having to make up the credits toward my degree. Even more fortunately, knowing I wanted to teach I asked and was allowed to take masters-level courses in Education. At the time, I didn’t realize I was again stepping into in the same quandary (or maybe quagmire) I had been in years earlier in my first design studio. OMG, Education was like a foreign language. Another “profession” with its own vocabulary and seeming randomizer that generated new words every day. Part way through the first course a landscape architecture cohort, who had also decided to do this, and I went to our Education professor and told him we were going to drop out. Long story short, he convinced us to stay. He convinced us we would catch up with our classmates, and we would pass our classes. He added that our Education classmates needed our ignorance, they needed the kinds of questions we would ask that they wouldn’t. He was right on all counts. For that are both grateful.
Since then I participated in education workshops, seminars, discussions, and began generating my own presentations on teaching and learning for my landscape architecture peers. I got a teaching job while completing my MLA requirements. During this process three things began to focus my approach to learning about and doing design. My learning moments came through John Simonds’ (1961) epiphany regarding landscape design, Betty Edwards’ (1999) exercises in drawing by seeing more accurately what you are looking at, and Katherine Benzel’s (1998) student Junko Miyata’s graphic and narrative write up of her experience in the Katsura Imperial Villa Tea Garden.
Benzel, K. 1998. The Room in Context: Design Beyond Boundaries. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Edwards, B. 1999. The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain: A Course in Enhancing Creativity and Artistic Confidence. New York: Distributed by St. Martin’s Press.
Simonds, J. O. 1961. Landscape Architecture: A Manual of Site Planning and Design. New York: McGraw-Hill.