About the conference

DEL (Digitally Engaged Learning) is an international conference exploring and evolving digitally engaged teaching and learning in art and design Higher Education. By ‘digitally engaged’, we are referring to practices that are actively with, about or located in digital tools and spaces. DEL is a place for creative and critical making, where you will find objects, artefacts, experimental technologies and performances alongside presentations and workshops. We welcome teachers, technicians, instructional designers, artists, makers, researchers, art historians, digital humanities scholars, and others across all creative disciplines. There are opportunities to test, share and discuss emerging forms of pedagogy, art and design practice, and research. Participants are invited to submit to the open access, peer reviewed Spark Journal, which promotes new thinking around teaching and learning in the creative disciplines.

DEL is a partnership with The New School, Teaching and Learning Exchange at University of the Arts London (UAL), Penn State University and Texas State University. DEL 2019 will be hosted by the School of Art + Design at Texas State University in San Marcos, Texas.

Teaching Futures

2019 marks the centennial of the Bauhaus movement. Foundational to many of our institutions of art and design, what will these next 100 years hold for the teaching and learning we make? Education is a speculation on the future, based on the past and producing the present. What is known meeting what is unknown. Innovations in technology are built on speculations of the future enacted in the present. In the creative disciplines we design, question and imagine digital futures and the future of digital through making and teaching. Finding synthesis in these futures can impact our conceptions of curriculum, impact our teaching, and transform our creative practices.

We sought proposals from teachers, technicians, instructional designers, artists, makers, researchers, art historians, digital humanities scholars, and others across all creative disciplines addressing these “Teaching Futures” that may align with one of the following tracks:

• The early years (Weimar): experimentation. This could include a variety of experiments and innovations in curriculum, pedagogy, teaching, and learning. What do we learn through experiments? How are our classrooms in fact labs of experimentation? What methods (scientific?) do we use to establish our hypothesis and yield findings?
• The second phase (Dessau): art/design and industry/technology. Where are the intersections between these terms? How does the academy host industry? Wherein lie the opportunities and challenges for the industry inside learning spaces? What role does technology have in these teaching futures?
• The third phase (Berlin): expansion to the world. The individual, their community, their systems, the world – how does teaching and learning happen at each and between these scales? Does reimagining the next 100 years in art/design education necessitate a global framework of imagination?
• Any other teaching futures you would like to explore.

Webinar

On February 28th, 2019, the DEL conference chairs hosted an online panel session to discuss the history of DEL, this year’s theme of “Teaching Futures,” and engaged with participants in enriching discussions both through the video and the chat panel.

Topics explored include:

• The growing and expanding DEL audience
• The importance of teaching students to negotiate a digital environment and respond to the future
• Exploring what teaching what the future could be
• Using technology is creating opportunities and changing meaning making
• Working in multidisciplinary collaboration

If you want to view the video including the time-stamped chat responses, you can watch it in the panel session room. After you enter the session room, click the purple arrow icon in the lower right to open the chat and read through the comments alongside the video.

Conference fee

Conference Chairs

Aaron Knochel

Penn State University

Cynthia Lawson Jaramillo

The New School

Claudia Roeschmann

Texas State University

David White

University of the Arts London

Contact us

For any information regarding the 2019 conference, please contact Claudia Roeschmann roeschmann@txstate.edu