May 2, 2026 | 7 minute read
Teaching Design to Students Who Are Afraid of Being Seen kicked back a second time with a revise and resubmit
My paper Teaching Design to Students Who Are Afraid of Being Seen: Is Established Design Pedagogy Incompatible with Today’s Design Students? was kicked back a second time from Design Studies as Revise and Resubmit. My initial reaction was frustration; upon reflection, it's actually been a helpful process.
Only one reviewer still had concerns, and these are listed below, along with my responses.
The more fundamental issue is that the paper's analytical voice — as distinct from the framing of section headings — continues to accept the instructor's account as an essentially accurate description of the students it describes. The positionality statement acknowledges the author's subjectivity and critical stance toward design education, but the discussion section does not fully leverage this reflexive awareness to interrogate the faculty accounts with the same analytical rigour applied elsewhere. The discussion does introduce a useful observation — that instructors "inadvertently and implicitly assign blame to the students themselves" — and the inclusion of Chad's self-aware reflection on this dynamic is well-chosen. These moments point toward the kind of critical reading the paper is capable of, and the author should extend this interpretive approach more consistently throughout the findings.
I appreciate the continued emphasis on this point, and have further addressed this; the reference to the inclusion of Chad’s self-aware reflection is particularly valuable for me, as it offers an example of the style of analytic rigor that was lacking. I’ve revised each of the sections more thoroughly, analyzing the instructor’s language in more detail and engaging with what they say through a more critical lens. I’ve also made it clear throughout the document that assertions of student behavior are coming from the faculty’s statements, not from my interpretation or tacit acceptance of their words.
In the rebuttal, the author declines to engage with the argument that studio pedagogy may function — and may be intended to function — as a selective environment, on the grounds that participants did not describe or allude to this perspective. This response, while understandable, is methodologically circular and does not adequately address the theoretical substance of the challenge. The fact that interview participants did not articulate a defence of studio's selectivity does not mean that such a defence is absent from the broader field, nor does it relieve the paper of the obligation to engage with it as a theoretical counter-position.
To be clear, the reviewer is not suggesting that the author must endorse this view. The argument that studio pedagogy's intensity and competitive culture is a deliberate and professionally necessary crucible — and that lowering its threshold risks producing designers inadequately prepared for the demands of practice — is a position held by a significant number of experienced practitioners and educators, even if it is rarely articulated in peer-reviewed literature for obvious reasons of political sensitivity. Ward's (1990) paper, which the author has now cited, explicitly calls for a "radical transformation" of design education on equity grounds; this implies the existence of the opposing conservative position, which Ward was arguing against. If the paper's translational framework is to be a credible contribution to the field rather than a document addressed only to those already persuaded, it must acknowledge this debate and situate its own argument within it. Even a paragraph that names the counter-position, explains why the paper does not adopt it, and grounds that decision in the values and evidence it presents would suffice. The current text simply proceeds as though the inclusionary premise is uncontested, which leaves the framework resting on an assumption that a significant portion of its practitioner audience will not share.
The author's rebuttal draws an analogy to the rhetorical conception of design as a liberal art — "design should be known by all, but does not need to be practiced by many" — which is an interesting framing but actually reinforces rather than resolves the concern. If design practice is inherently a disciplinary pursuit for a self-selecting subset, then the paper's argument for making studio accessible to all who enter design programmes requires explicit justification, not assertion. The author is encouraged to engage with this tension briefly but directly.
There is a fair argument to be made that faculty could simply remove students who are not performing (or at an administrative level, these students might never be accepted into the program to begin with). No instructors in the study mentioned this as an approach. I’ve now made both points clear—that the argument exists, and that it was not an approach used. Similarly, the argument could be made that design studio is supposed to be hard, primarily to maintain a certain caliber of practitioner skill. No instructors described their need to gatekeep the profession, and I’ve made this clear as well.
The author's decision not to engage with architectural education scholarship is noted and the reasoning — that participants were not architects and that architecture has distinct Beaux-Arts roots — is partially persuasive. However, the claim that architectural studio has roots sufficiently distinct from industrial or graphic design studio to warrant exclusion from the literature review is stronger in assertion than in evidence. The Bauhaus connection the paper itself foregrounds is common to all these disciplines. This is not a condition of acceptance, but the author may wish to add a brief acknowledgement that studio pedagogy in architecture has its own critical literature that is not directly addressed here, rather than implying that the exclusion is principled rather than practical.
I agree; I’ve added this to the Notes section.
The revised abstract now omits the phrase "fear of being seen" from its summary of the findings, replacing it with a more neutral characterisation. While this reflects the epistemological adjustment discussed above, it may inadvertently weaken the paper's contribution in terms of its most memorable and distinctive framing. The author should consider whether a version of this language can be retained in a form that is appropriately attributed to instructor perception rather than presented as objective description.
I agree; I am making a purposeful and strong statement in the title of the work, and removing the reference in the abstract is working against this. I have introduced this idea back into the text, emphasizing that what is surprising is the consistent use of language used by faculty.
What most of this has highlighted is that the reviewer is looking for me to treat the words from the participants as the empirical data, not the content of the words. This is aligned with discourse analysis, but doesn't necessarily leave room to bring the participants' perspectives to life; it actually presents their words from a deficit perspective, shifting entirely away from their views that students might not be performing. I found myself blaming the faculty, which isn't exactly right. However, it's a fair comment and it is about a topic that I'm slowly getting used to—what is in bounds, and out of bounds, for analytic exploration. Reviewers seem okay with a certain level of theoretical leap, but it's ambiguous. Anyway; the process of revising was more fun than tedious.