Teaching Design to Students Who Are Afraid of Being Seen kicked back with a revise and resubmit

Reviewer 1

Short and sweet. The manuscript needs to engage more thoroughly with the established body of work published in Design Studies. Authors are encouraged to incorporate and build upon this literature, demonstrating how their paper advances the field and contributes new knowledge to the journal’s scholarly conversation.

Reviewer 2

Also short, and while I appreciate the noted value in the output, not a lot actionable here. The seven contradictions are compelling and have helped humanise students and their studio learning. The conceptual framework with various parameters mapped against the contradiction look like valuable tools for design pedagogy. The framework could though, benefit from 'evidence-backed' strategies that can further help faculty members with precedent. This can be added to "future scope".

Reviewer 3

Overview

This manuscript addresses a question of genuine relevance to design education: whether the inherited conventions of studio pedagogy remain tenable for contemporary students. Drawing on interviews with 25 design instructors across the United States, the paper identifies seven contradictions between what studio demands and what students appear willing or able to do, and proposes a translational framework that distinguishes pedagogical intent from instructional form. The paper is readable and the central framework has practical utility. However, significant conceptual and methodological concerns limit the work in its current form.

The faculty-centred analytical lens is the paper's most distinctive contribution. Existing scholarship on studio critique tends to foreground the student experience; interviewing instructors offers a productive counterpoint that is underrepresented in the literature. The translational framework in Table 2, particularly the effort to separate underlying pedagogical goals from the rituals through which they are conventionally achieved, is the paper's most substantive intellectual offering and will be of genuine use to educators engaged in curriculum reform.

Major Concerns

The paper's theoretical foundations are underdeveloped. True. Schon's reflective practitioner model is invoked but never analytically engaged, and True, but not really "relying" on it; it's a single reference. But the point is taken. the decision to rely substantively on Haidt's The Anxious Generation — a popular account that has faced substantial peer-reviewed methodological criticism — sits uncomfortably alongside what is otherwise a scholarly ChatGPT clue 1: no one says "register" register. The causal relationship between social media, anxiety, and studio disengagement requires more rigorous grounding than popular literature can provide.

This section is probably the biggest miss for me, the thing I need to work on the most. Methodologically, the integration of reflexive thematic analysis and discourse analysis is not adequately explained. These frameworks carry different epistemological commitments, and the paper does not account for how tensions between them were resolved in practice. More consequentially, the paper treats faculty perception as essentially transparent evidence about student psychology, when a discourse analytic lens should be attending to what such accounts accomplish — how they position students, how they construct faculty authority, and what institutional interests they serve. Participant statements such as "the youth are broken" or characterisations of students as ChatGPT clue 2: infantilisedinfantilised are reproduced with apparent ChatGPT clue 3: authorial endorsementauthorial endorsement rather than subjected to critical interpretation.

This first part is another miss. I have taken the "blame the kids today" and presented it literally.The deficit framing that structures the paper also requires more honest interrogation. Students are consistently characterised by what they cannot do — they cannot share incomplete work, cannot tolerate ambiguity, cannot sustain focus — and while the authors acknowledge these as rational responses to contemporary conditions, the underlying argumentative logic still positions students as the problem to which pedagogy must adapt. The paper would benefit from a more direct engagement with the question of who studio pedagogy was historically designed for, and whether its inherited rituals were ever as universal in their effectiveness as the paper implies.

ChatGPT clue 4: this title screams LLMA Fundamental Question the Paper Does Not Ask

This is super interesting and super weird. It never occured to me, because it really wasn't the focus of the work, but I've been writing all about it and so it would make a lot of sense here.The most significant conceptual gap in this manuscript is its unexamined assumption that studio pedagogy ought to be made accessible to all students who enter design programmes. This assumption is stated implicitly throughout, but it deserves to be argued explicitly — because a strong and intellectually serious counterargument exists, and the paper does not acknowledge it.

Studio pedagogy, particularly as it has been practiced in architecture and cognate disciplines, has never been designed as a universally inclusive model. Its intensity, its demand for public risk-taking, its tolerance of ambiguity, and its culture of sustained, competitive making ChatGPT clue 5: they are not this, they are thatare not incidental features: they are ChatGPT clue 6: the mechanism through whichthe mechanism through which the discipline has historically identified and cultivated practitioners capable of sustaining the extraordinary demands of professional practice. Professions such as architectural design, fashion design and industrial design, are characterised by long hours, high-stakes public exposure, iterative failure, and the capacity to receive severe criticism and return to the drawing board. Experienced practitioners and studio leaders frequently observe that the current generation of students, shaped by protective educational environments and risk-averse institutional cultures, are arriving unprepared for the professional conditions they will actually face. ChatGPT clue 7: it's not this, it's thatFrom this perspective, the studio environment is not the problem — it is the preparation.

There is a meaningful argument, which the paper neither makes nor refutes, that studio pedagogy functions ChatGPT clue 8: preciselyprecisely as a selective environment: ChatGPT clue 9: LOL. Crucible.a crucible in which those with the disposition, resilience, and appetite for the profession are cultivated, and from which those without those qualities are, not cruelly, but practically, redirected. If this argument is correct, then the paper's proposed translation — making studio safer, more scaffolded, less exposed — does not preserve the pedagogy's intent while changing its form. It fundamentally alters what the pedagogy is for. The paper should engage directly with this position. Ignoring it leaves the framework resting on an undefended premise about design education's inclusionary obligations that, however sympathetically motivated, is empirically and professionally contestable.

Minor Concerns

I don't know about this. I think there are too many quotes; I don't know if this one is one to remove.Several participant quotations, particularly Alycia's extended passage in the discussion, are reproduced at a length that displaces rather than supports the analytical argument. True.The opening reference to Kanye West and Rihanna as cultural context is underdeveloped and incongruous with the scholarly tone of the paper. The literature review would also benefit from engagement with Eh... I was trying to stay away from Bauhaus..scholarship on studio pedagogy in architectural education, which has its own substantial critical tradition and would be familiar to a significant portion of this journal's readership.

Reviewer 6

The manuscript addresses a highly relevant issue in contemporary design education: the potential misalignment between traditional studio pedagogy and the learning characteristics of current students. Studio-based learning—rooted historically in Bauhaus traditions and practices such as critique, public making, and risk-taking—remains central to design education. However, the paper argues that social, technological, and educational changes have altered students' expectations and capacities to engage with these practices.

The topic is particularly timely in light of increasing attention to student mental health, digital culture, social media exposure, and changing higher-education conditions. The study's focus on the tension between inherited pedagogical models and contemporary student behaviors therefore represents an important contribution to discussions on design pedagogy. This is true, but a little in a different direction than I intended..However, the paper would benefit from a stronger engagement with recent literature on studio pedagogy reform and hybrid learning environments, particularly research emerging after the COVID-19 pandemic.v

There is a coherence between objectives and results and it demonstrates strong qualitative research foundations. True.The analytical procedure could be described in greater depth. For instance, the process through which initial codes were generated and aggregated into the seven contradictions remains somewhat unclear.

The framework table summarizing pedagogical translation strategies is a major strength, as it synthesizes complex findings into an actionable conceptual model. True... one always has to kill ones babies :( Yet, the manuscript occasionally becomes overly narrative, particularly in the findings section where extended quotations dominate the discussion.

Suggestions:

These are very helpful._Expand the literature review to include more recent work on post-pandemic studio teaching, hybrid learning, and digital studio practices.

_Clarify how this research advances existing debates about studio pedagogy transformation rather than simply confirming known challenges.

_ Acknowledge more explicitly that the study captures instructor perceptions rather than student experiences and suggest future research incorporating student perspectives or classroom observation.

_Provide clearer articulation of the research questions early in the introduction.

_Provide a clearer description of the coding process, including examples of how interview statements were categorized.

_Discuss potential researcher bias and positionality, particularly given the interpretive nature of the analysis.

_Reduce the length of some interview quotations and provide more analytical interpretation between excerpts.

Summary: The manuscript has strong potential impact in design education research. It contributes to the field in three main ways:

1. It empirically documents instructors' perceptions of changing student engagement in studio learning.

2. It identifies seven systemic tensions between pedagogy and student experience.

3. It proposes a framework for translating studio pedagogical goals into new instructional forms.

These contributions are relevant for design educators, curriculum developers, and researchers exploring the future of studio-based learning.