Design-driven education in primary and secondary school contexts. A qualitative study on teachers’ conceptions on designing

Abstract

Design in educational contexts is a relatively new topic. The basic idea of design and design-driven education is that students and teachers participate together in the planning, implementation and evaluation of learning projects. However, how design-driven education should be carried out in practice is yet to be established. Therefore, the aim of this study is to gain insights into how such practice could be implemented. Through a qualitative study, the authors examined primary and secondary school teachers’ (N = 5) conceptions on various aspects of design in educational contexts. The results indicate that design-driven education emphasises the need for collaboration between students and teachers, and the teachers’ active roles as facilitators for learning. Furthermore, in order for such design-driven practices to be successful, the learning process requires students to be self-regulative learners. The use of technology was also experienced as a natural part of design-driven education. The results present the participating teachers’ understanding of how design-driven education in school contexts could be organised.

Keywords:

• Design-driven education
• collaborative learning
• self-regulated learning
• pedagogical use of ICT
• twenty-first-century learning

Acknowledgements

The research was carried out in the context of the European Union-funded Innovative Technologies for an Engaging Classroom (iTEC) project, which ran between 2010 and 2014 (http://itec.eun.org/) [grant number 257566].