Exploration and Practice of Reconstructing Teaching Models for Cultivating Social Responsibility in Cutting-Edge Design Courses

Abstract

In contemporary design education, there is growing emphasis on cultivating designers 'social responsibility literacy. However, domestic graduate design education still exhibits a pedagogical bias of "prioritizing technical skills over value cultivation." Furthermore, cutting-edge design courses often suffer from imbalanced content structures, monolithic training models, and the absence of social responsibility dimensions in their evaluation systems—all of which make it difficult to meet both industry development needs and societal governance requirements. To fulfill the fundamental mission of fostering virtue through education, this study leverages design ethics, project-based learning theory, and the developmental characteristics of graduate students to reconstruct a three-dimensional teaching model: "value guidance → project practice → reflective iteration." Practical teaching applications have demonstrated that this model effectively transforms students' utilitarian design perspectives, significantly enhancing graduate students' awareness of public design and their sense of social value identification. This research aims to integrate professional education with ideological and political education, thereby providing a replicable practical paradigm for reforming the educational approaches in design graduate programs and for cultivating high-caliber design professionals equipped with strong social responsibility capabilities.