Prof. G.V Sreekumar teaches Typoghraphy at IDC School of Design.

He says the following about teaching Typoghraphy:

My students at IDC come from various backgrounds, Fine Arts, Graphic Design, Architecture, Engineering, Fashion Design, Interior Design and so on.
Many of them hear the term "Typography" for the first time and for many of them, the "font world" starts and ends with ................grrrrrrrrrr........Arial!

As a teacher, I try my best to introduce them to the new world of letterforms, a world I believe is beautiful and colourful and so fascinating that one lifetime is by no means enough even to study the surface.
Slowly they begin to understand the beauty of the world beyond Arial and then they begin to enjoy it.

I make attempts to introduce them to well-designed fonts (many of them my favourites!) like Univers, Helvetica, Meta, Franklin Gothic, Griffith Gothic, Rotis, Eurostyle, Trajan, Stone Sans and Serif, Berkeley, Berling, Palatino, Optima and so on...

They work with many beautiful fonts in their life in IDC that when they pass out from here and practice design, they don't get stuck with only Arial and Verdana.

The course teaches them the importance of going deep into the content, understanding the meaning in the real sense, getting into the context, creating and understanding the whole picture and then going through the design process.

Students learn the importance of type and their impact on the overall design solution.

The assignments are designed to take the students from one simple task, slowly moving on to more and more complex issues.

I start with one letterform, then move on to a word, a sentence, a paragraph, a page, a poster, a book and so on...

I get around 3 modules of 4 days each in one semester.

Most of the work gets done at the end of each module so that the students are not burdened with too much homework (and too many pending assignments!).

Computers are not allowed in many assignments where I feel it is important for a student to use his hands and get a feel of relationships between type and space.
In the beginning, many students feel very frustrated not to work on a computer, but slowly they realise the joy of handling type.

In the beginning, the students are taken to our letterpress studio to get accustomed to the letterpress environment and basic fundamentals of typesetting.

This helps a lot in basic understanding of letter space, word space, alignments etc.