Bringing Human-Centered Design to Graduate Academy

How do you teach TAs to meet the needs of increasingly diverse student populations? This January, teaching assistants turned to Human-Centered Design (HCD) for answers.

The Graduate Academy for College Teaching is a pre-semester orientation program organized by the Center for Innovation in Teaching and Learning (CITL) that helps prepare new teaching assistants (TAs) for their classroom responsibilities through a mix of Zoom meetings, online materials, and in-person sessions across the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign campus.

Among the program's offerings this January, Postdoc Research Fellow, Dr. Carrie James, and Engineering Education Lead, Dr. Alexander Pagano, from Siebel Center for Design, introduced TAs to HCD principles as tools for responsive teaching and as tools to apply to engineering design.

Empathy as a Teaching Framework

Dr. Carrie James led "Developing Responsive & Empathetic Teaching Practices Through HCD," a session that challenged TAs to deeply consider their diverse student populations. "Our students bring a multitude of lived experiences and diverse cultural heritages with them into the classroom," James explained.

Attendees praised James's ability to facilitate "active engagement on Zoom," and appreciated seeing "real life video depicting an actual invention to address a need." One participant noted that "the instructor was very passionate about the topic," while another appreciated how the HCD taxonomy was incorporated into the session.

Engineering Meets Design Thinking

Dr. Alexander Pagano took a different approach with "Exploring Human-Centered Engineering at the Siebel Center for Design," combining interactive activities with a tour of the center's facilities. The session connected design thinking theory to real-world engineering challenges, emphasizing that “Human-Centered Engineering Design is Engineering Design,” and offering TAs practical insights they can bring back to their own classrooms.

Participants particularly enjoyed the interactive format of the session. 

Cross-Disciplinary Impact

The sessions drew TAs from a wide range of departments, including but not limited to: Computer Science, Psychology, Architecture, Anthropology, Art and Design, Integrative Biology, and Advertising. This diversity underscores the universal applicability of human-centered design principles across disciplines.

By introducing HCD frameworks during the Graduate Academy, James and Pagano helped new TAs develop a crucial mindset for their teaching careers: the ability to design learning experiences that respond to students' actual needs, backgrounds, and perspectives. As these TAs step into classrooms across campus, they carry with them not just pedagogical techniques, but a design-thinking approach that positions empathy and responsiveness at the center of effective teaching.