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Design is community
The traditional classroom, with its imposed structure, prescribed tasks, and assessment pressures, limits students' natural inclination to tinker, design, and collaborate. To cultivate a genuine maker culture and mindset, schools must provide open, equipped spaces where students have the freedom and time to organically explore, create, and innovate, allowing authentic communities of learners to form and enabling students to prepare themselves for the future. One question I hear often is how can educators prepare our students for the future? The question we should be asking is; how can we create a culture in which our students prepare themselves for the future. |
Design is agency
Teaching technology presents unique difficulties; student abilities vary greatly, and the subject matter evolves so rapidly that lesson plans quickly become outdated. To truly engage students, we must move beyond them merely consuming content and instead empower them to become creators. Offering students choice in their tasks significantly increases their engagement. We should give students agency over what they learn, how they learn, and their pace. This approach not only motivates through curiosity and choice but also makes students co-constructors of the curriculum, shifting the responsibility for keeping content current onto them and giving them genuine voice and choice in their education. |
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Design is human-centred Human-centred design means students becoming deeply and emotionally involved in a design task through developing an understanding of problems on a local or global level. Encouraging students to design for a reason can be a powerful intinsic motivator, and even more so when they are tasked to help others. Young learners, when tasked to design empathetically and to help others in some way, will engage deeply and emotionally with design, making the experience more meaningful and authentic. |
Design is a way of thinking Design Thinking can be a valuable tool for developing a maker mindset; key capabilities such as empathy, resilience, adaptability, resilience and entrepreneurship. I am particularly interested in engaging teachers outside design to use Design Thinking as a model for curriculum design; a prototype can be a draft, a performance, an experiment or a hypothesis. By rethinking the language behind Design Thinking it is possible to empower all teachers to use this powerful model to plan and deliver authentic and meaningful projects for learners. |
Design is multidisciplinary
We need to decompartmentalise design. Modern design is multidisiplinary and collaborative. A system where students move through discrete design disciplines on a rotational basis taught be a 'specialist' teacher is neither authentic nor useful. By encouraging collaborative teams to assign roles based on each member's strengths and interests allows all students to achieve while working towards a shared goal and unique outcome. This has the added benefit of switching the teacher's role from that of 'instructor' to 'learner' facilitating a culture of shared learning community. For an example of this in action see the Makeable Challenge.
We need to decompartmentalise design. Modern design is multidisiplinary and collaborative. A system where students move through discrete design disciplines on a rotational basis taught be a 'specialist' teacher is neither authentic nor useful. By encouraging collaborative teams to assign roles based on each member's strengths and interests allows all students to achieve while working towards a shared goal and unique outcome. This has the added benefit of switching the teacher's role from that of 'instructor' to 'learner' facilitating a culture of shared learning community. For an example of this in action see the Makeable Challenge.
