These images reflect part of my iteration process. I started this project with a running list of words, feelings, and emotions that were evoked after reading the essay. The image on the right, is the original poster, for this piece which I then redesigned.

Heather Corcoran’s: Growing Studio Citizenship:

“I believe that learning is an optimistic act of self-construction. As an educator, it is my privilege to build environments where learning can happen, and to facilitate the process, 
but it is the students who are in charge of their growth.

This poster draws on the form of the dandelion to describe a learning ecosystem. The petals (called ligules) house educational structures—studios, disciplines, institutions. At the center, students begin with the hard work of locating and refining their particular voices. They practice generating written and spoken language, typography, visual elements, images, textures, narratives, and systems. Their own stories, identities and cultures are always in view. In the design process, iteration never ends: at first, it’s to make the experiments more divergent and varied; later it’s so that a singular piece can be transformed through the refinement of details. And yet projects are relatively short-lived, one quickly replaced by the next. The resulting trail of work is meant to help students discern how they want to make things in the future. It is my job to help them consider that. 

Their studio mates are finding their own voices, too. It becomes each student’s responsibility to help others along their growth paths. Studio citizenship is a life skill. As the students inch to the outer ligules of the dandelion, they learn how their work can be in dialogue with other people, fields, and goals, and also remain their own. They can traverse their own campus with its many intersecting disciplines of creation, analysis, and evaluation, the St. Louis region built on structural and historical complexity, and then, national and global creative platforms. Eventually, in whatever form it has become, their work is a catalyst for larger critical and creative inquiry in the world”.