Shanice Welsh - English and Design’s interdisciplinary links - Hong Kong

Hi and welcome back to the leading language and literature podcast with me Chris Jordan. In this episode, I'm speaking with Shanice Walsh. This is a director of teaching, learning in curriculum here in Hong Kong, and an active share of good teaching practice on the likes of X, where she posts under the handle @EDU_bicreation. She is an experienced middle-years program teacher and has done lots of work to integrate the framework into her own department's output, but also across the school as a whole. My chat with her is the third conversation in the series of discussions designed to learn more about secondary subjects and their possible interdisciplinary links with English. My intrigue in having these chats is seeing whether there are possibilities for connections across subjects that are at least shared in passing, drawing class, or actually and more excitingly, the basis of complex interdisciplinary units. We discuss the product's processes or texts that are at the heart of studying design, the deep concepts that an expert in design uses to make meaning from these phenomena, the potential links that design an English share from a conceptual or disciplinary point of view, and lastly, possible projects that students could work on to better understand both subjects simultaneously. Thanks so much to Shanice, who speaks with an excellent clarity, which speaks to both experience within the disciplinary planning as well as deep expertise in her subject. If you'd like to be kept up to date on when chat like this happens, feel free to subscribe to the podcast and follow me on LinkedIn and X at Chris Jordan HK. Additionally, if you would like to start on learning how to prioritise your Middle-Ears English curriculum, head to the bottom of this podcast show notes or the top of my stream on X to find a beta copy of my fourth common book, Make Middle-Ears English Matter. You can read as much as you want and even highlight elements that you like, dislike or find confusing to help make it better. Okay, Shanice, as an expert in design, what is an example of a product, process or text that you look at, whether it's in school with the kids or just out and about in your actual life that you can deeply understand as an expert, you can see the deep structures of it and things like that. In English, it'd be like if I was reading a novel or listening to a speech or reading an essay or something, I can see the deep structures and evaluate it. For you in design, what would a product, process or text be? So I predominantly teach digital design, so that's like a specialism within design. We're always analysing products as part of our research process, so we analyse things like product packaging, animations, websites or apps, even social media campaigns, there's more of a modern product that we'd analyse, but the theory is pretty much the same regardless of what the product is. I see, and then, so you said digital design is within design, I appreciate you're probably not as much of an expert about the other areas of design, but how much overlap would you imagine there is with the likes of sort of like foods, technology and resistant materials and things like that? They are very different food especially, you're not really designing much in food, even though it is part of our faculty, I think that one struggles a little bit following the NYP design rubric, but product design does have some overlap, that'll make obviously more physical products like things made from woods, metals, plastics, things like chairs, lamps, desktides, all kinds of things. So, yeah, when we do analysis, we do have some comment and topics between us, but I think for digital design, it's a bit like old school graphic design, it's more about the visuals, like it's visual communication that you're teaching and analysing. So if you went to the UK or if you went to the US or even here in Hong Kong, like if you were out and about and you saw like marketing or you saw, whether it's like poster or moving image or digital, like that's the sort of like text or like product that you'd be able to deconstruct, like when you're doing that, what are the big concepts that you're using to make meaning when looking at this product? I feel like what are the ideas do you think are, like always relevant, no matter whether it is like a poster on a wall or a billboard on the side of a building or like a digital kind of campaign? As an example in English, I'd argue that I could never be reading or writing something without considering the concepts of purpose, context, style, structure, for example. So what are the deep lion kind of organising ideas or concepts in digital design for you? So we actually do purpose quite a lot. That's one of the themes all the way through, whether that's in the NYP or the BTEC. So just figuring out why something exists. So when you get a design brief, like what's the angle, what's the purpose? So if it's like an animation, you look at three purposes, maybe it's to educate, is it to entertain, is it to advertise something, even though the outcome is an animation. One that's always common is hierarchy, and that's not actually part of the NYP, it's not a concept on all of it, but we always talk about hierarchy because it's visual communication. We kind of, it's visual hierarchy, where things laid out on that product, where's the text placed, the sizing of the text matters, how can you encourage the viewer to use their eye and go to a certain area first and then second and then last. And then we do communication quite a lot, what message are you trying to communicate with whatever the digital product is. And then target audience, so like who we aim and get at, because it'll be different, like if it's a social media campaign, it's usually like younger adults or teenagers compared to maybe packaging, might get older adults depending on the product. The hierarchy thing, is that like hierarchy in terms of like what's the most obvious thing that we see when we're like regarding it, is that what it means, the order, yeah, I see. So like the stratification of things we know is first. Yeah, so like say it's a poster, you have to think like we use this pyramid model and digital design, where we like think about all the content that needs to go on the poster, like if it's written event, it'd be the title, the date, the location, the website. And then it's like you put it in the pyramid and the kind of understands that the stuff at the top of the pyramid, you need to show that first, how do you show it first, maybe it has a bolder form or it's bigger or it's in the centre of the page. And it's like that's how we explain it really, hierarchy. What's the, like I'm going to ask you quite a tricky question here, what's the difference between purpose and message, like is there, I understand there's probably a certain degree of overlap, but like in your mind, how do you distinguish the two? Depends on the product, so when we talk about like product packaging, say they're designing like card packaging for product, the purposes might not always be linked to a message. So a purpose of product packaging could be just to protect the item that's inside. So obviously like there's no kind of message in terms of that, but you still use like communication on the packaging to inform the person about something related to the product. So I think that's how it differs, it depends on what the outcome is. I see. And so what I heard was like purpose, the idea that you might have, I don't know, to educate or to advertise or something like that. And then hierarchy, then message, and then always the last one, sorry, audience. Audience, sorry, yeah, so audience, yeah, that's quite an important one. Any more apart from that, like typically like I've found in these conversations that does tend to be like four, five, six, but is there any more that? So we've got purpose, hierarchy, communication, audience, aesthetic, because it's a really important one for us, because obviously we're a visual subject in digital design, so you have to think that's sort of like color theory, styles, so like graphic styles, like illustration versus photography, versus like collage, so all of these types of keywords, I guess they use when they're analysing. So, okay, so purpose, hierarchy, communication, audience, and aesthetics, that is like uncannily similar to English really, like you've got purpose in both, hierarchy is quite similar to structure. I would argue based on what you said, obviously it's not in terms of, it's not always in terms of prominence, it can be, there's obviously different organising principles in English, but then aesthetics is similar to style in some ways, audience is very similar to context. What is your style, like in English, for style, and what does that kind of mean? Style of writing, or? Yeah, it kind of depends, so it's like English is quite hard, because it's almost like a mile wide and an inch deep sometimes, so you can have a novel, but even within the novel there's different styles of novel, like there's different genres within the novel, and then even within that it's kind of like, do you have one narrator, do you have an unreliable narrator, do you have multiple, there's like quite a few strands in terms of style, but then we also do outside of literature, like with any NYP, there's a lot of encouragement to do multimedia texts, so you do find ourselves borrowing a little bit from digital design in terms of like looking at adverts or looking at moving image stuff and that, so like style is quite a broad church, but then it's understanding why you would choose that style in conjunction with the purpose, like if you're trying to entertain someone, the type of the style of language you use is obviously like very different in terms of like the tone I suppose and the type of register, like the formality and this kind of thing, the only one it sounds like we don't have in common, well I think for us like purpose would be, would include communication or message I think like sometimes there are just practical purposes to language, but then other times there is more sort of like a message or a lesson to be taught, that's quite interesting then, so it's like, there's like a hit rate of, it's not surprising I suppose, like digital design is probably an interesting cross section between like English or language subjects and also the arts, in terms of like it's a spectacle, but it also kind of has those like language elements to it, what have you ever like come across any projects or interdisciplinary units or anything like that that incorporates the likes of English and design, or is there any kind of ideas that come to mind with regard to yeah, what the two subjects could do to help kids to understand the cross section of concepts between them? I think we do use a lot of text in digital design, obviously we put copy on all the products, but in real life like in industry, not in a school setting, if when you are a digital design and you get given that copy by a copywriter, so copywriter, sorry, the copywriter would they be, is that literally their whole job, like what happens with them, what's the beginning and the end of the day look like for them if they're working on a new project? So they'll get briefed as well alongside the graphic designer, they'll go away and like write the copy to go onto the product and then the graphic designer will design it and use their copy, so even if it's like a magazine, obviously you get given the copy, but editorial design is something quite common in digital design, websites, so I can a school setting, the students are doing the copy writing job as well as the digital design job, so there is crossover, they are using those English language skills, they're just not graded on that part, I guess in the NYP or in the BTEC, you know, so they're never, they're never actually grazed against like the copy that they put on, it's purely on like the aesthetics of it. Yeah, it'll be like what style the fun is, is it legible, have you considered the audience if it's like for elderly people, have you used a larger fun, especially like on website design, so we've actually started now because we're not graded on the copy using AI when we do things like website design, because traditionally there's this thing called Laura Mipson, that digital designers use, you could just generate, it's like Latin text, and you would normally just throw that into your design just to show how it would look and it doesn't actually make any sense, but then yeah, a copy writer would populate it then with the actual copy. This is quite an open and short idea, then really like I think it's, if you kind of simulate it, you probably do this anyway in class actually, but you could simulate it in quite a industry sort of level where you could sort of say like, right, this is the brief, and using what you've learned in English this year and obviously be really what's the word, like explicit about what's expected from an English standpoint, and digital design standpoint, this is what we want you to create, we, I think we did something similar, like two or three years ago, but it was more with, it was with, like individuals and societies, yeah, there was a business one and an English one, but they were, and they were creating things which it was, it was essentially like an advertising campaign, but for memory, I definitely think like, so the English side of it, like the language, the copy side of it was relatively good, the research, the sort of business, sort of, and if it was very good, I do remember the aesthetics of it being slightly lacking. So you need like a trio, right, when you do an idea almost, there's a lot of crossover with digital design and business actually, they have to look at like branding and logos, but they don't know how to execute it. Right. So I guess like if you merged English, business and digital design, you'd have pretty good products at the end of that. That's true. So like in theory, like a good product or a good project or a good interdisciplinary unit could be like really explicit sort of reference to if this was a real sort of agency or company or whatever, then you know, we would have the copyright as we would have the designers, whether you get the kids sort of doing all of it or whether you sort of say like you to, well, decide amongst yourselves who's in charge of the copy, who's in charge, and you've got to, you know, communicate with one another and stuff, that's quite a, that is quite a good idea. Yeah. I think frame and stuff in like the situation of industry, I always try to do that in lessons anyway for design, just like getting them prepared for the real world. And how sort of like, how broad could it be in terms of product? So like the obvious one and maybe the cliche one is advertising posts that are advertising like a, the term escapes me now, but basically like a poster that you would see on the, on the underground or like the train station or something like that. What are the products that they work on in digital design? Would it be the actual product sort of like packaging itself and this kind of thing? Yeah, so we've started to try and make it as like modern and like futuristic as possible. So like we do posters sometimes, but we've moved more to social media campaigns now. So Instagram stories, for example, that is like quite a nice project and it includes a lot of English in there. So they'll design like four or five Instagram story screens, but they have to work in a sequence and at the end they have to think about what their call to action is. So it's kind of like a user journey as someone's clicking through their stories on Instagram. So like they're getting informed about something and on the last screen they'll have like a swipe up to donate or a swipe up to no more and that's called a call to action, but I'm sure that's pretty similar to like narrative writing maybe in English. Yeah, yeah, he's structuring it in a way where you're kind of captivated and then you capture their attention at the end, yeah, I think so. That'd be quite good. That's a revelation to me that like this sort of, well, it kind of makes sense to me that the copyrighter is a separate person from the designer, but in school, I always assume that they were also being marked on the copy that they did, so it's really interesting that they're not. It does make sense that they're not, but that is a good opportunity to bring the two things. Yeah, we do like try to teach them a lot of stuff like when they're coming up with slogans and things and we'll like teach them a process to come up with like creative copy, like using idioms and like illiteration, you know, like when they're doing the advertisements, but it would be so much stronger if we obviously merged with English and like use some of English teachers to teach that stuff in a bit more depth. I see. Yeah. Okay. That's quite interesting. Okay. All that remains for me to say then is, yeah, thank you very much for your time today, Cheney. And sharing your, your wisdom with me. Thank you. Thanks for having me. [BLANK_AUDIO]