Teaching design to people who already know things.

There's a specific kind of anxiety that comes with standing in front of a room of graduate students when you're an undergraduate. Nobody says anything about it directly. You don't bring it up, they don't bring it up, and the session just starts. But it's there, at least on my end, this low hum of awareness that the people I'm about to facilitate a discussion with have more formal credentials than I do, are paying a significant amount of money to be in this program, and in some cases have been working in design longer than I've been studying it.

I've been a CA and tutor and TA across a few different courses this year, but the graduate visual design class is the one I keep thinking about. Partly because of that dynamic, and partly because of what it forced me to confront about what I actually know versus what I've just gotten comfortable performing.

Teaching is a strange mirror. You think you understand something until you have to explain it, and then you find out pretty quickly where your understanding is solid and where it's more like a confident approximation. I'd been doing design for a few years, had opinions, had a process, had enough experience to feel relatively sure of myself. And then someone would ask a question, not a hostile question, just a genuine one, and I'd have to locate exactly what I believed and why, and sometimes that was clarifying and sometimes it was just uncomfortable. Both were useful. The uncomfortable ones maybe more so.

The power dynamic is genuinely strange when you sit with it. I had real authority in that room, over grading, over how the session ran, over what got taken seriously as a contribution. And yet by almost any external measure the students I was teaching had more standing in the field than I did. I've been thinking about what that asymmetry actually teaches you, and I think it's something about how authority works in general, how it's always at least partially a construction, something you either inhabit or you don't, and that the inhabiting is its own skill separate from whatever expertise you're supposed to have. That's a design question as much as anything else. So much of interaction design is about the relationship between a system and the people inside it, who gets to act and who gets acted upon. The classroom is just a smaller, more legible version of that.

I don't want to oversell the insight here. A lot of it was just figuring out week to week how to be useful to people whose needs I didn't always fully understand. But somewhere in that process I got more honest about the edges of what I know, which I think is maybe the most valuable thing a year of teaching gave me. And it made me more curious about the other side of it, what it would actually feel like to be the one in the program, to be learning at that level, to have the time and structure to go deeper on the questions I keep circling. I don't have a clean answer to that yet. But I think about it.