Search

In this chapter, I focus on the challenge of learning and teaching designing and offer an approach to overcome this challenge by proposing a pedagogic framework that enables teachers to focus on the why, what and how of teaching and learning designing in a flexible and creative way. Exploring the importance of design as a human capability, I unpack this capability in terms of its complexity, ongoing discussions about the nature of design knowledge and the concept of designerly ways of knowing. I then turn to explore a concept less well developed in design and technology education, that of signature pedagogies. Drawing on this concept and ways in which it has been developed in higher education design, parallels are explored with mainstream school education. Collected ideas are drawn together to create a framework for signature pedagogies of learning and teaching designing in schools. This framework is structured on design pedagogic purposes of speculation, imaging and modelling, materiality, need-to-know, critiquing and collaboration linked to pedagogic actions that can be taken and pedagogic tools that facilitate such actions. Finally, I provide two vignettes that illustrate how the framework could be used in classrooms.

Technical education has a long history in Australia, and the curriculum area is now currently known as Technologies Education. Two significant milestones in that history include its declaration as a compulsory learning area in 1987, and its inclusion in the national curriculum in 2014. While this indicates a strong curriculum position for the learning area, there remain a number threats to its continuity. The threats include a shortage of teachers, student and community attitudes, STEM and the costs associated with providing a contemporary technology program.

Critiquing, as a key component of Design and Technology (D&T) education, made its global debut 15 years ago in the redesigned South Australian curriculum. It has since gained international recognition for its validity for the education of all children. This chapter sets out the story of critiquing as Design and Technology curriculum phenomenon, and, while the story reports a personal research journey, it was the work of a dedicated team that brought the curriculum as a whole to fruition. Key episodes of the story address: curriculum research method as autobiography; the politics of D&T curriculum; the theoretical underpinnings of the critiquing innovation; its local, national and international contexts; the curriculum challenges its introduction was intended to resolve; and some consequent theorisation since its inception. In this story, ‘Design and Technology’ is seen as much more than a school ‘subject’. It is argued that critical-ethical design and technological literacy is necessary if sustainable, democratic futures are to be achieved. Critiquing is fundamental to such literacy.

This chapter critiques design and design practices from historical, social, cultural and sustainable perspectives as a basis for opening up a broader perspective on the ways design and designing are seen within mainstream design and technology education in schools. This chapter is divided into four broad sections. The first section explores the ways that design practitioners, theorists and historians critique past and present practices of design from within the profession. This is followed by an outlining of approaches that some designers have taken in using design itself as a way of critiquing society and culture. The focus then turns to design and technology education and highlights concerns that have been identified both at school and higher education level. Finally, consideration is given to examples that illustrate positive approaches to bringing broader and more critical approaches to design and technology in classrooms, including ways that are developed in detail in further chapters in this book.

This chapter begins by pointing out that the behaviourist paradigm that still largely dominates assessment practices conflicts with more progressive understandings of constructivist and sociocultural approaches to learning and teaching. In order to progress assessment in Technology Education, Kay argues for adopting a pedagogic approach to assessment (where both teaching and assessment practices aim to support learning), maintaining authenticity in activities through which assessment is being undertaken, recognising the importance of judgement in valid processes of assessment, and maintaining a focus on equity and the inclusive role of the learner. The chapter also considers the potential affordances of new technologies in assessment. The chapter concludes by pointing out that future developments should support teachers to align learning and assessment. This is to ensure that learners engage in technological practice that makes visible to them and their teachers and assessors the learning that has taken place and the capability that has been developed.

SPRINGFIELD, Ill. (AP) — Joe James, a Black man, was asleep under a tree when he was grabbed, beaten and then arrested for the murder of a white man in Springfield, Illinois.Before he was put on trial and later executed, a white mob seeking vengeance for the crime James was accused of committing took out its hate and anger on other Black people in the state capital. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]