Your friendly neighborhood train travel enthusiast, somewhere in Mongolia.
My name is Rachel McDonald. I’m a designer, educator, Louisiana native, and exploration enthusiast.
I teach graphic design courses as a tenure-track Assistant Professor of Digital Arts and Media at Louisiana State University Shreveport. I earned an MFA in Design and Visual Communications from the University of Florida, where I also taught design to undergraduate students. I’ve also worked as an Instructional Assistant Professor of Graphic Design at Illinois State University in Normal, Illinois, and remotely for Shanghai Normal University in Shanghai, China.
I’m obsessed with using design as a tool for social impact.
I credit my drive to use design as a transformative tool to my time teaching young learners abroad. In 2014, I moved to South Korea to teach English, where I also worked as a freelance graphic designer. Since English proficiency in South Korea can impact later education opportunities and employability, many students spend extra time outside regular school hours furthering their studies. I quickly noticed a gap between students and resources and the correlation between English ability and family income. This gap between students and education is something that I realized is problematic for students in areas like my hometown, where many students grow up below the poverty line and need help to strike a balance between learning and living.
This realization drives me as a designer and feeds my desire to solve more extensive societal issues. During graduate school, I became obsessed with chipping away at “wicked problems” via human-centered design methods. Among the topics explored thus far are afterschool programming for children at libraries, resources and information dissemination for the homeless, speculative literacy programs for elementary students, and informative pieces on the importance of educational equity for K-12 students surviving below the poverty line.