Nilson concludes by arguing that graphics will benefit the overall organization of the course by serving as a troubleshooting process for their course. For example, once instructors try to visually represent their outcomes they may see gaps, illogical sequencing or some other problem: “In charting an outcomes map, they have pinpointed gaps and transpositions in their initial sequencing of student learning objectives” (87).
Nilson’s work in this book may seem coyingly logical or simple. However, she has done the complicated task of uniting the concepts of curriculum design, cognitive science, and education. This text allows for the discussion on this concept to continue to develop beyond organization design, to question more specifically teaching documents as design objects.
I have found an increasing amount of composition scholars asking questions around design and pedagogy, even if not explicitly connecting the two. Jody Shipka’s Toward a Composition Made Whole is one example of a growing population of scholars concerned with the ways new technology creates opportunities for multimodal texts inside the classroom. In this text, Shipka ends with an argument that calls for expansion past alphabetic text:
We must find ways to underscore for students what has always been the case that communicative practices are multimodal and that people are rarely, if ever, just writing or making meaning with words on a page. To this end, courses must be designed in ways that ask students to consider how literate activity demands of them the ability to negotiate a streaming interplay of words as well as images, spatial arrangements, sounds, scents, textures, and movements (Shipka, 138).
While Shipka focuses here on class content and communicative practices, I believe that her argument readily applies to the relationship between design and pedagogy because of the interplay of literacies exemplified through our materials. Are we thinking about our teaching materials and the “interplay” between our words, image, and spatial arrangements? Are we thinking of the literate activity required of teachers within the 21st century? If we expect to teach students these literacies, then, as Cheryl Ball says, “we should practice what we preach” starting with our traditional documents, which often serve as students first exposure to university course or the academy or composition.
I believe the relationship between design and pedagogy, and thus syllabi design, is an important topic of inquiry because design is our pedagogy made material. This materiality, often undervalued, invisible, or neglected, nevertheless makes arguments about what we (institutions, departments, teachers) value, and what we think students should value in their writing, others writing inside and outside of our walls.
The syllabus is not a simple document. A syllabus does not serve a mere institutional function, but a pedagogical one. So much of the function of a syllbus is found within implicit rhetorical arguments made with design choices about what and how students are “supposed” to learn. Not only is the syllabus a pedagogical tool, it is a cultural artifact that shows what institutions, departments, and teachers value, what ideologies they ascribe to, what they believe about the way(s) students should and should not learn. For all the important rhetorical maneuvering of this document, as a new teacher I have received very little information on why the syllabus includes the things it does. What is the purpose of a syllabus? What is left out of the syllabus and why? What does our syllabi tell us about the values of our field? What does it tell us about how institutions, departments, teachers, students should assess/learn? What events historically, culturally, made them this way? These questions are extremely important for future research, teaching, and designing.