Abstract:

As education is evolving year by year and the need for personalizing the educational process is occurring for many reasons, one of them being the variety of approaches, methods, and possibilities that stand in front of us.

Opportunities, the existence of technology, science, and art manifesting in every field as inspiration, aspiration, or connection demands us to personalize teaching and learning as specific processes in order to respond to the contemporary need of having a diverse portfolio of skills and to act in different circumstances by discovering new ways that involve courage and determination.

One of the most important aspects of developing personalized learning is understanding the needs of the student (as an individual as well as a collective), their personalities, and their skills in order to improve their knowledge through methods and ways of developing projects. As part of design-based communication, we encourage students to manifest their beliefs, fears, brave approaches, and ideas, with the teaching staff monitoring the whole project, nurturing a safe space of experimentation and experience.

Art and Design universities, such as ours, demand a lot of creativity and diversity, implying that we personalize learning and processes by establishing the purpose: as mentors, we try to find out every superpower that our students have. Some of them are very creative; some of them are initiating logical discourses; some of them need to use drawing as a means of visual communication, as a trace of their mood, feelings, and thoughts at that moment; some of them are afraid of even starting a project; some of them are not sure of working in groups. Observing such a variety of behavioral patterns in our students, we decided that it’s not our purpose to align all of them to some so-called “standards” because such standards don’t fully apply nowadays. We encourage them to manifest their true selves, to improve skills that they apparently lack as we strongly suggest they build up on their true skills in order to find their real superpowers.

By superpowers, we mean traits and skills that are so likely to define the students' approach on every matter, that thing that makes them different, the element of uncommonness that individually appears in every one of them. Students need to be understood and thought by personalizing information and methods to their own “powers” and, as a result, they become superpowers. Different superpowers attract people to gather in teams, every member proving their value and uniqueness and managing to put together a perfect combination.

Keywords:

Superpowers, personalized, educational processes, connection, diversity, purpose, individual, uniqueness, manifesting true self.