Hack

The Communications Studies program is a recent addition to Saint Joseph’s University, first becoming a minor in 2009, a major in 2011, and achieving departmental status in June 2012. In the program’s short existence, however, it has seen tremendous student demand. In the first official year of our new department, 2012–2013, we had a fast growing major and limited faculty and resources. With over 250 students enrolled, we had only three tenure-track faculty to serve this student population and one (marvelous) classroom (see table 2.1).

The university administration was slow-paced with regard to the allocation of resources and facilities. During this time, the university administration asked us repeatedly (1) to raise our course caps (all of our courses were capped at seventeen) and (2) to teach in existing (less than ideal; see figures 2.8 and 2.9) classrooms and labs, which we resisted.

Meanwhile, faculty in my department entered into almost daily conversations about what we valued pedagogically. Our pedagogical values necessitated arguments for small class sizes and studio-type teaching environments. We repeatedly returned to these pedagogical arguments, in reports, in meetings, in conversations, in emails—anytime we needed to advocate for resources that would help us to best teach communication studies in theory and practice. These repeated ideas and approaches became the basis for what we call our design philosophy—our particular ideas about the purpose of built environments and what they should accomplish. Written in plain English with minimal jargon, the statement reflects our shared beliefs and specific objectives regarding teaching spaces. Our design philosophy became a tool to effectively interface with a variety of stakeholders, from administration to facilities to IT. It became a tool to guide our process of production; at times, it served as our creed, or manifesto.

A design philosophy is akin to a philosophy of teaching, a genre with which many teachers and scholars of computers and writing are familiar. The design of curriculum, syllabi, even lesson plans and activities is often informed by these philosophical statements. Many teachers craft public statements of teaching, the purpose of which is to explain our personal pedagogical attitudes, values, and approaches to a variety of stakeholders including search committees, departments, administrators, colleagues, and even ourselves, as we reflect on what shapes and guides our own practice in the classroom. The design philosophy, as we see it, is different in that it is a collective department document that guides a process of production in order to effect change.

In the spirit of “Hacking Spaces” (Walls, Schopieray, and DeVoss 2009), we view design philosophies as tools for “hacking” our classrooms. In this article, the authors take a hacktivist approach to analyzing instructional spaces. Taking their cues from The New Hacker’s Dictionary, they situate a hacker as one who enjoys the intellectual challenge of creatively overcoming or circumventing limitations. By offering a five-part analytical framework, Walls et al. help teachers identify how spaces can be hacked to better support their pedagogical goals and values as well as “hack slow-moving institutional structures” (272). A design philosophy operates similarly to this analytical framework; it is another kind of tool for departments to make local arguments to hack instructional space design.

Although individual teachers or collective departments might not see themselves as designers (or hackers, for that matter), there are inevitably things we each want to change at our institutions. A design philosophy can set those changes in motion. According to social scientist Herbert Simon (1981), “Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones” (129). A design philosophy is just that: a proactive statement that reflects the goals and intentions of the department. Design philosophies are forward-focused documents for change. They provide departments with a tool for negotiating change and are in and of themselves change agents.