Cross-discipline Collaboration and Experiential Learning to Engage Creativity in Design Students in Rural Southern Utah

Teaching at a regional, public university in a town of 38,000 in rural southern Utah has its challenges. The isolated nature of campus makes it hard to encourage students to get out and visit museums and design studios, or to talk with a diverse range of designers. We have seen this confine the ideas that students have about design, both in their understanding of the possibilities for careers in design and in their approaches to design thinking. In encouraging creative thinking from our students, we have found that some of the most effective solutions come from experiential learning opportunities like field trips and cross-discipline collaboration. One such example is a co-taught class for Art and English students led by the writers of this abstract, a design professor and an American literature professor. In this presentation, we will unpack several case studies where our co-taught efforts led students to be more engaged with their artistic and humanistic projects. Our presentation will focus on the following pedagogically experimental projects: our class trip to Zion National Park through the Art in the Park grant-funded program; using wayfinding in our rural, mountain town to think about design concepts such as accessible design; and the very nature of our co-taught class, which allowed us to integrate ideas from separate disciplines to encourage different kinds of creativity in our students. These experiential learning opportunities encouraged new ways of thinking about design, solidified concepts for students, and encouraged them to explore different ways of creative problem solving.