Not a Pipeline Problem, a Problem with the Pipeline: Howl Round

In September of 2021, I contributed a piece to a Howlround Series Design in a time of reckoning  titled Examining Bias When Teaching Design Students 
Below is an excerpt, you can view the whole series on Howl Round.

​At a design mentorship event earlier this year, one of the prizes was a copy of The Dramatic Imagination by Robert Edmond Jones. I had never read it myself, so I ordered a copy. I recognized many ideas from my own design education, but I kept coming up against language that was paternalistic and ableist. I couldn’t recommend this text from the 1940s to undergraduate students in 2021. And it made me wonder how much of the way I identify gifted students is based on what Jones outlines as ideal traits for the designer: “Stage designers, like musicians, are born and not made. One is aware of atmospheres or one isn't, just as one has a musical ear or one hasn't.”
I cannot imagine how harmful this statement has been. It is easy to spot an observant student, with good reading comprehension and artistic talent, who has already been nurtured and say to that student, “Perhaps you would like to be a scenic designer.” But observational skills can be taught, script analysis can be taught, and artistic eyes and ears can be nurtured and encouraged. To insist that a design student have all these things limits the number of students and the diversity of students who are welcomed into programs.

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