Walk into McNeal Hall this fall and you may chance upon CHE students painting pumpkins blue, showing off outfits fashioned from clingwrap, or drumming and tooting on assorted cans, pipes, and bottles. Welcome to Human Ecology 1200, Brad Hokanson’s unconventional colloquium in creative thinking and canny problem-solving for future designers, scientists, and other professionals. Now in its fourth year, the honors-level course exemplifies the “active learning” approach championed by Hokanson, an associate professor in the college’s renowned Department of Design, Housing, and Apparel.

“The best teaching and learning involves some element of ‘just do it,’” explains Hokanson, a trained architect and computer graphics expert who joined the faculty in 1993. “Go design something, solve a problem, view an exhibit, talk to other people, develop a role-play, write up a summary of ideas—whatever is going to take you to the next step in acquiring new knowledge and new ways of thinking.”

Studies have found that students retain about 15 percent of what they learn from lectures alone, and somewhat less than that from basic reading, Hokanson says. In contrast, modes of learning that require students to “investigate and create,” in Hokanson’s words, succeed far more often in “stimulating the mind and changing how we think, which is what learning is all about.”

Challenging students in his colloquium to create Halloween pumpkins without faces, or unloosing them in a salvage store with instructions to construct a musical instrument for $10 or less, prods them to “think outside the box,” Hokanson says. As the basis for written assignments and class discussions, students also are asked to “eat something different” (some students try new ethnic foods, others sample flowers or boiled tree branches), commute from campus to home using five different types of transportation (skateboards and scooters count), and to ask five open-ended questions of a stranger.

“If you push students beyond everyday ‘normalcy,’ get them to do things in completely unusual ways, they’ll learn there are many ways of approaching any situation,” says Hokanson. “First, that’s going to make them better students. In the long run, it’s going to help them succeed in life and to be the sorts of smart, resourceful, creative thinkers who make a real difference in the world.”

To students like Ange Tank, Hokanson creates “awesome learning environments” that exemplify the excellence of CHE’s design programs. “You really feel you develop the skills and confidence you need to figure out just about anything,” says Tank of her classes with Hokanson, including both the honors colloquium and a computer graphics class. Adds Tank, who now works as an instructional Web designer in the College of Pharmacy while finishing her final year as a CHE graphic design major, “Whatever problem comes up in my school or work, I can find a way around it—that’s a direct result of what I learned in Brad Hokanson’s classes.”

Learning laboratory
Besides the creative problem-solving colloquium, Hokanson teaches courses in computer graphics, a senior seminar on ethical issues in design, and a graduate seminar to foster teaching excellence among future faculty. His own courses often test-drive his ideas about what constitute today’s best practices in teaching and learning. More and more, he says, that means blending traditional classroom-based instruction with the technologies of the digital era.

Hokanson, who earned his Ph.D. in instructional technology, arguably is one of the University’s most ardent theorists and advocates of “e-scholarship,” the use of computers in teaching/learning, knowledge discovery, and community outreach. Preparing students to succeed in an increasingly wired world is only one reason e-scholarship matters, he says, emphasizing that is also a powerful medium of active learning.

In his own course design and in his scholarly work, Hokanson takes the position that the computer is potentially far more than a tool to “assist” the delivery of material. Used inventively, maintains Hokanson (whose expertise helped drive the recommendations of a recent CHE task force on e-scholarship), the computer offers a rich interactive and highly generative medium that actually shapes how people learn and think, much as language itself does.

Digital technology can foster creative thinking even when the course content is highly technical, Hokanson maintains. Students in his computer graphics course, go well beyond the mechanics of mastering image-editing software. In an assignment Hokanson calls “The Ex Project,” students take a photo from which they remove someone no longer in their lives, then fill the “hole” with something that explains who they removed and why. One young woman replaced a boyfriend draped all over her in the photo with an orangutan, implicitly suggesting why she dumped the guy; another replaced a dear departed dog with its replacement, but ghosted the old pet in the background by way of representing the still-painful loss.

Exercises like this one help students understand the creative potential of their digital toolkits, Hokanson says— and the power of images to tell stories that can convey or distort truths. Class discussions range into ethical issues posed by digital manipulation, as when Time magazine famously altered a photograph of O.J. Simpson to be more menacing, or when a university “diversified” an event photo by inserting people of color.

Hokanson’s design courses often use the Internet as a locus of student learning. Students in one recent course spent every third class session on a course Web site, uploading digitized images of their original designs, visiting an online gallery of others’ works presented in “slide show” fashion, and engaging in critiques and discussion. Back in the classroom, they stayed in active-learning mode, making presentations and solving problems in small groups. The “just do it” factor frequently entered in, as students were prodded in class or on the Web site to go off on their own to research open-ended design questions, and take in on- and off-line visual and text materials.

In future classes, Hokanson hopes to make the computer a more powerful medium for artistic creation. He is working on software that will allow students to print out a screen for silk printing. He also hopes to find new ways to combine visual and text materials. Recently, through a University technology-enhanced learning grant, he worked with a graduate student to create a course module centered around a book of fabric swatches. Swatches in hand, students use Web-based learning to analyze textile properties.

Pushing the envelope
With active learning at the center, even Hokanson’s most “traditional” classes push the envelope, says Regan Cunningham, who recently took Hokanson’s senior seminar on ethical issues in design. The classroom-based course was dynamic, Cunningham says, exploring ethical conundrums through discussions of the morning newspaper, provocative readings, small-group dialogues, and even games.

Thorny questions challenged students to delineate their personal and professional values. After finding that students shared a general aversion to working for a cigarette company, Hokanson asked whether they’d decline a job with a food company whose parent firm held tobacco interests. Students themselves raised issues involving censorship (debating the ethics of working for a discount chain that shunned CDs with parental warning labels) and bigotry (considering the implications of working for a firm with an unwritten rule against picturing people of color in company publications).

Students headed out, in “just do it” mode, to research a question through library research, Web sleuthing, and personal interviews. They wrote 30- page research papers, then distilled them into a communicative “product” using just 10 key sentences. Finally, they presented their work visually in poster form.

“It was a great class, lively and innovative —I can honestly say I learned more than in any other class I’ve had,” says Cunningham, who graduated in June with a major in graphic design and a minor in information technology. “And the most amazing thing was that we really drove our own learning.”

Hokanson is gratified by student appraisals like this one, which turn up often in course evaluations. “The great thing is that active learning works— when you create contexts in which students figure out things for themselves, they really do learn more,” he says.

As his senior seminar proves, classes don’t have to go entirely online to score active-learning triumphs. Observes Hokanson, “In-person learning communities can be important—the immediacy of live discussions, serendipitous encounters, things overheard, nonverbal cues, all the ways sparks can fly when people are in the same room.” Still, there’s no question, he says, that instructional technology offers “a powerful active-learning medium that we should tap to the fullest extent our particular course content allows.” KT