Fridays are special days for me, from 2 till 6 pm I, with a group of people, run a class called Typography II at UBA (Universidad de Buenos Aires). It is a year-long course where Graphic Design students learn book & magazine design, so it’s a very interesting process that we all, students & teachers signed up for.
Today starts our year, there’s usually about 150 students divided in 5 groups of 30 with 2 teachers or a teacher and an assistant each, and the staff completes with 1 JTP (-jefe de trabajos prácticos- chief for practical works), 1 head of Typo II, and the head of the course.
This is the kind of experience that always gives you a lot more than what you can expect: it empowers your vision to new approaches, gives you the possibility of understanding other points of view, and one great thing is that it allows you to interact in a very different -not competitive- way with other designers/teachers, people that most times are in the same frequency in terms of design.
It’s pouring rain, so we’ll see how many show up.
I would love to be a student in this kind of a course. At Pellissippi State Technical Community College where I teach (and where you were once a student) we have class sizes of 7-18, which is great for one-on-one instruction. Still, sometimes I’d like to have the energy and bustle of a larger enrollment. I’ve not heard of any American typography courses with 150 students. I recently talked to David Madden who teaches creative writing at LSU in one of these monster courses, and it sounds quite well-organized and even theatrical.
Are you on semesters? If your course runs for a calendar year it makes me think you are on quarters. Either way, a year-lond Typography II course is a great opportunity for your students, particularly if they intend to get into editorial design. My university training didn’t prepare me at all for the typographic details of book design, so I teach as much as I can to my students. You can see PDFs of their work at http://opendoordesign.edublogs.org/downloads/ under “Gutenberg Book Design.”