Process doesn’t get you extra credit (my academic mantra card)

Yes, we are still looking for academic mantras (for more info and the regularly up-dated list of examples see here).

In the meantime, here is the card I have been working on – commenting on numerous students’ tendency of surface learning and their lack of understanding of the learning process to grasp that some work is process work, development work, work in progress, that needs to be completed if they want to end up with a better result. No, I’m not going to mark each draft that you write or each sketch that you make, because I know that if you go through these stages your final work will be better than if you don’t!

So, here my academic mantra:

Process doesn’t get you extra credit

… but it will make you a better artist

… but it will make you a better designer

… but it will make you a better teacher

… but it will make you a better writer

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I decided to emboss the four “…but it will…” sentences as a border first (you can’t really see it on these pictures, because there is no ink on them), and then set the ‘Process’ and ‘extra’ with wood type, hand inked in a number of colours. The rest of the text I then set with lead type to fit into the gaps (in a lovely magenta colour).

This will probably become the centre piece of my exhibition in May, displaying 25 of them in a 5 x 5 square, showing off the different colours. I have also kept a lot of the work in progress to exhibit alongside, possibly annotated, to make visible how much process work is in even a little card like this.