Design and Technology Education (LJMU)
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    602 research outputs found

    The Reciprocal Nature of Pedagogical and Technical Knowledge and Skill Development between Experts and Novices

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    This paper outlines the findings of a study focused on the impact an expert teacher’s pedagogical and technical knowledge and skill may have on the pedagogical and technical development of pre-service technology education teachers. Specifically, this inquiry falls within the context of traditional wooden boat building in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada. Understanding the relationship between an expert’s knowledge and skill, and the development of a novice’s knowledge and skill is vitally important for institutions charged with graduating technology education teachers. Exploring the impact of pre-service teachers’ pedagogical and technical development was considered in relation to an expert teacher’s pedagogical content knowledge, and the nuance between declarative and procedural knowledge within technological activity. Data were collected from semi-structured interviews, workshop session observations, and researcher/participant journal entries. The sample was purposeful as the participants were recruited from boat building workshops between 2017 and 2019 and the 2017-2018 technology education diploma program cohort from Memorial University. Thematic analysis was used to identify major themes within the data. A descriptive visual framework based on the data analysis was constructed to highlight the complexities of teaching and learning within the multifaceted setting of a technical activity. An analysis of the data indicates that fostering and maintaining reciprocal interpersonal relationships between experts, novices, and peers are critical for the development of pre-service teacher technical and pedagogical knowledge and skil

    Reflections on teaching Design and Technology in a pandemic

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    Which visualisation tools and why? Evaluating perceptions of student and practicing designers toward Digital Sketching

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    An ever-increasing array of design visualisation tools are available to designers. As such, design education is constantly challenged to keep up with these trends so that students are best equipped for entering industrial practice. This paper reports a study into the use of digital sketching, a relatively new digital visualisation tool. The study aims to identify thematic differences in how students and practitioners perceive digital sketching. These are given in terms of the tool’s characteristics, and how these characteristics guide its application in early stages of the design process. Data on perceptions is captured using design diaries and semi-structured interviews. Results show key differences in the way that practitioners perceive the intent of visualisation. Practitioners focus on iterating towards a solution during the design process. Students are much more focused on the task of creating visualisations. This reveals an underlying contradiction in the way tools are perceived between creating visualisations to gain expertise or skill, versus creating them to advance the design process. The insights help improve our understanding of how the different characteristics of digital sketching inform its use. We reflect on how we educate students with respect to selecting and using digital sketching. We conclude with implications for education of digital sketching, as well as other emerging digital visualisation tools

    An Experimental Framework for Designing a Parametric Design Course

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    Architectural forms, architectural knowledge, design process, and design thinking are all changing with the use of computer-aided design programmes, and even traditional university architecture departments now wish to teach these programmes. However, it can be difficult to implement courses on such computer programmes because these departments have traditionally structured curricula. We developed a framework that can inform the design of a parametric design course which considers the university profile, the course profile, and the student profile. This framework evaluates the departments in three categories: ‘open to new design approaches’, ‘supportive of CAD’ and ‘reject new design approaches’. A parametric design course in relation to the proposed framework was designed and implemented as a case study. The process and the results were discussed

    Teaching Design Thinking in a research-intensive university at a time of rapid change

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    In this paper we present a snapshot of the theories, intentions, practices and outcomes produced by a teaching and learning collaboration. This is located geographically and culturally at the University of Warwick, and temporally across the period 2020-2021 marked by the global pandemic. The case study illustrates how a designerly, flexible, open, collaborative approach to learning design allowed for effective adaptation to changing circumstances. This was more effective through being formulated as an ethical approach to Design Thinking, shared by teachers, students, the host department, and collaborators (including two VR companies, a physical theatre company, and a design researcher from South Africa). By developing a humanitarian, ethical, and philosophically grounded Design Thinking, and using it for founding principles, the teaching team were able to adapt and learn, making the most of what was possible. We explore this method in depth, focussing upon how a reflective appreciation of modes of knowledge, and the use of visualisations helps us to cope with the complexity of what we are doing together, before, during, and after the period of disruption

    Design Education: Teaching in Crisis

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    Phenomenological Approach to Product Design Pedagogy: A Study on Students’ Experiences in Interdisciplinary and Intercultural Settings

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    Product design pedagogical approaches require a specific mix of competences that demand multiplicity of perspectives, hybrid knowledge that exceeds professional field silos, and continuous problem reformulations. To do this, design studio education follows many traditions, among which is design critique. Design critique is believed to provide students with the ability to reframe design problems, but it can also lead to misunderstandings. The necessity of this approach is put into question by assessing the experiences of a group of students in an intensive course structured for interdisciplinary work, intercultural teams, and projects based on challenges from practice, where the critique was not part of the pedagogical program. The course was conducted over four consecutive weeks and supported a hands-on approach based on an interdisciplinary work between the areas of product design and occupational therapy, with the participation of Brazilian and Norwegian bachelor students and professors. Students responded to questionnaires prior to and at the end of the course that addressed their expectations of and experiences in the course. A qualitative analysis of the students’ responses was carried out based on content analysis. The joint work with occupational therapy students and professionals, as well as the opportunity to develop projects that targeted demands from people with disabilities, were shown to be factors that contributed to students’ engagement in the course and overall gain of knowledge. The experiences reported here indicate that the phenomenological approach to the design studio, which focuses on providing an immersive environment, deserves more attention from educators, and that design critique is not necessarily a crucial ingredient in design education

    Technical or not? Investigating the self-image of girls aged 9 to 12 when participating in primary technology education

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    Variance in interest and engagement by gender is a complex and long-standing research agenda in the field of technology education. Studies report that girls are more reluctant to participate in technology education, less interested in the subject and more negative towards technology than boys. It is argued that specific attitudes and roles hinder girls from engaging in technology education because technology is presented as a predominantly male domain, which fuels ideas about what technological agency is as well as whose interest in technology and what kind of technology are regarded as legitimate. There is, however, the potential to improve female engagement if we can gain knowledge about what girls do during lessons and how they think about themselves when learning technology. Therefore, the aim of this study is to examine the self-image of girls aged 9 to 12 when participating in primary technology education, by using Harding’s (1986) three gender levels: the symbolic, the structural and the individual. The methods used for this study were participant observations during technology classes followed by a focus group interview. From the perspective of Harding’s three levels of gender, the analysis of the observations and the focus group interview reveals that girls confirm the prevailing male norms and conceptions that are linked to what technology is and what it means “to be technical”, despite the fact that the teacher introduces gender-neutral activities. However, there is an ambiguity in our findings because the girls also resist the self-image of not being technical, especially when they work together and have ownership of their work with and learning about technology

    A Literature Review on The Use of Music in Architectural Design Education

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    In order to improve creative thinking in architectural design education, it is useful to interact with other disciplines such as music. There are many works of this interdisciplinary approach between architecture and music in the literature. These studies focus on new methods of creating forms with music for basic architectural education. The common aim is using music as a creative perspective for designing forms before proceeding to architectural design. Various structural forms designed by students are examined within these studies. It is concluded that designing with music could improve students’ imagination and could be benefit to architectural design education. Furthermore, these approaches could be improved, not only in basic form design, but also to be applied in an entire architectural project from space to façade. Music could be used as an inspiration to be transformed into a product, an interior or an architectural structure, and this could be useful for architectural design studio courses. Therefore, this review aims to underline the benefit of music in architectural education by examining the existing studies in the field, and it is a preliminary research for the further study of a method of designing with music

    The development of pedagogical infrastructures in three cycles of maker-centered learning projects

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    The purpose of the present investigation was to analyze the pedagogical infrastructures in three cycles of seventh graders’ co-invention projects that involved using traditional and digital fabrication technologies for inventing and creating complex artefacts. The aim of the projects was to create high-end multi-material makerspaces by expanding Finnish craft classrooms with instruments of digital fabrication, such as micro-processors, wearable computing (e-textiles), and 3D design and making, for enabling creation of student-designed multi-faceted inventions. Through a qualitative meta-analysis of the three successive learning-by-making projects, we explored the kinds of pedagogical infrastructures required for fostering knowledge-creating practices of learning. Pedagogic infrastructures refer to the designed arrangements and underlying conditions of implementing an extensive study project in classroom practices needed for reaching the learning objectives. We analyzed the epistemological, scaffolding, social, and material-technological dimensions of the enacted pedagogic infrastructures. In accordance with design-based educational investigations, we collected a variety of data (classroom video recordings, teacher and tutor interviews, invention challenges, learning assignments, and working schedules) across three year-long developmental cycles. We discuss the limitations and opportunities of maker-centered learning settings as well as considerations for future development of makerspace as pedagogical innovations for integrating socio-digital and material-technical practices and spaces for learnin