Toward sustainable practices in technology education

This paper discusses the problematic relationship between technology education, consumption and environmental sustainability. The emerging global sustainability crisis demands an educational response that moves beyond mere ‘tinkering’ with classroom practices, toward technology education which embraces life cycle thinking and ‘eco-innovation’. It will argue that the urgent transformation to technology education for sustainability citizenship must begin with a critical examination of existing practices and assumptions which underpin unsustainability. The initial context for this discussion will be technological education in Canada and the United States, in particular a recent national report on the assessment of technological literacy. The paper concludes by suggesting several ‘new paths’ forward to move technology education toward more sustainable practices and more relevance for young people.     

The Politics of Technological Literacy

Technological literacy has been given official sanction; it is the end of technology education in the United States. For most technology educators, the construct is neutral, and something nobody could be ‘against’. This article situates technological literacy in its ideological context of competitive supremacy and conservative politics. In opposition to a ‘neutral’ notion of this construct, a turn toward critical technological literacy is negotiated. Critical technological literacy represents an overtly political turn toward overcoming forms of power that sustain inequities in the built world. To engage in these politics, it is argued that technology educators will necessarily have to resituate their practice within cultural studies. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Risk Sharing,the Cost of Equity and the Optimal Capital Structure of the Regulated Firm

This paper considers the relationship between the regulator’s pricing decision and the allocation of risk between consumers and shareholders. Consumers are willing to trade-off price variations against a lower expected price. Prices are higher in adverse economic conditions, but shareholder returns are not necessarily lower. It might be optimal to insure shareholders against market risk, so that consumers could thereby achieve a lower expected price. The allocation of risk between consumers and shareholders depends on the capital structure of the regulated firm, and a very special set of conditions must apply for the social optimum to be 100% debt finance with the firm operating on a ‘not-for-profit’ basis.      

Children’s developing understanding of technology

The issue of children’s conceptions of technology and technology education is seen as important by technology educators. While there is a solid body of literature that documents groups of children’s understandings of technology and technology education, this is primarily focused on snapshot studies of children aged 11 and above. There is little literature relating to individual children’s changing conceptions over time, or to children younger than 11. This paper documents and discusses the changing understanding of the meaning of the word ‘technology’ of seven children over their first 6 years of primary school (age 5–10). It seeks to explain the source of the children’s understandings of the word ‘technology’ and to suggest some teaching and planning implications for technology educators.     

The social agenda of education for sustainable development within design & technology: the case of the Sustainable Design Award

The paper explores the adoption of the social dimensions of sustainability in technological design tasks. It uses a lens which contrasts education for sustainability as ‘a frame of mind’ with an attempt to bridge a ‘value-action gap’. This lens is used to analyse the effectiveness of the Sustainable Design Award, an intervention in post-16 technology education in three countries to encourage students and teachers to strengthen design for sustainability in their work. In each country, the intervention project provided varying combinations of teacher professional development, provision of learning resources, in school student support, lobbying of key curriculum policy makers and a student Award. Three types of teacher are identified by reference to their motivation for introducing sustainability into their teaching of design. These teacher types are linked to a hierarchy of teachers’ understanding of the social dimension of sustainability. The consequences for continuous professional development are examined. The findings are then used to critique the value of the lens.     

Motivating children to learn: the role of technology education

Design and technology education provides children with opportunities to create solutions to specific needs in innovative ways. This paper reports on research that focused on the language that the children used when they were involved in a design and technology activity. In accessing the results of the language study, the findings suggest that the children’s motivation was high and played a significant role in children’s task engagement and persistence. Analysis revealed that there were several key ideas that the children focused on, namely: the fun experienced by participating in the activity, the difficulty of doing the task, the satisfaction of completing the task, the importance of social interaction and the frustrations surrounding aspects of the task. These affective factors that are related directly to motivation will be demonstrated through the children’s language responses to their participation in design and technology education.     

Teacher Perceptions of Design and Technology: A Study of Disjunction between Policy and Practice

This study examines the curriculum directions being charted by a sample of county secondary school design and technology teachers in England and Wales. The purposes of design and technology are analysed, and the syllabuses and examinations used reviewed, together with how design folios are incorporated into teaching. In addition, teacher reports on student-teacher classroom performance, and student-teacher evaluations of their teaching practice experiences are analysed. It was found that teacher perceptions are highly pragmatic and technical, with the pupils‘ intended learning outcomes largely being defined instrumentally in terms of product output rather than in design process terms. A disjunction is found between the statutory Order on Design and Technology and its implementation, with many teachers ’constructing‘ their design and technology education programmes within a ’craft paradigm‘. The discussion offers possible explanations for this and concludes that it has as much to do with the perceived status of Design and Technology as a school subject as with a ’product – process‘ debate. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Technology Education as Solo Activity or Socially Constructed Learning

There is a continuing perception that current educational arrangements for technology education in modern liberal democracies are at odds with its actual delivery in the classroom (Dakers & Doherty 2003). The technè versus poiesis tension (explained later) is one major contributor to this perception. Equally, the practice of transmission versus constructivist pedagogies contributes to the mismatch between policy and practice.This paper will investigate how factors relating to these two contributions affect the delivery of technological education. It will begin by discussing the derivation of the word technology and how its modern incarnation has become not only amorphous, but confusing for technology education, in that the term can be taken to mean production on the one hand or process on the other. It will then explore technology teachers perceptions (and misperceptions) of what constitutes technology education, and discuss why this can lead to confusion. It will further consider how this can affect the pedagogy adopted. It will then examine two pedagogical frameworks which result from teachers perceptions of technology education as either; a process of internalisation of technological skills and functions as representations exclusively within the mind and unique to the individual, thus solo, or; a process of technological skills and functions embedded in sociocultural activity in which cognition is distributed across the internal mind and the external environment. Finally, the paper will offer a framework for the delivery of technology education set within a community of learners paradigm.     

Learning in Design and Technology: The Impact of Social and Cultural Influences on Modelling

The paper introduces the highly problematic nature of modelling in design and technology education and examines the relationship between cognitive and concrete modelling. Its aim is to gain insight into what learners do, rather than what others say they ought to do in their learning activities. The variety of purposes that educators have for learners’ modelling are discussed through examining the contested curriculum justification for design and technology education itself. The paper proposes that learners’ modelling cannot be extracted from the social milieu in which they act and it provides some insights of these social influences through the analysis of two case studies. Their settings are a girls’ secondary school and a college of higher education. Each case study is presented independently but organised with a common format to consider a) the impact of assessment on learning intentions and outcomes; b) cultural influences on learning and modelling; c) social influences on learning and modelling. A discussion of the emergent themes considers implications for teachers. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Designing the future? Technology,values and choice

There is a widespread recognition of the desirability of broadening the scope of technology education with the objective of a form of technological literacy which would embrace social relations as well as technique. In 1990, Technology was introduced as a compulsory element of general education in England and Wales. Initially the curriculum gave equal weight both to the context as well as the content of technological activity, but subsequent revisions point the way back to an emphasis on technique and a narrower view of the role of the designer. In some respects, this simplifies the task of the technology teacher, and it might also be said to reflect the everyday realities of much technological activity. It is, however, an essentially conservative approach which tends to reinforce and legitimise attitudes which place a high value on technical performance while consigning the purposes and outcomes of technological activity to the shadows. It is argued that, for the sake of the future, it is essential that values in design and technology are brought up to the light. Technology teachers should take some responsibility for this, but cannot be expected to shoulder the whole burden.     

Assessing South Africa Learners’ Attitudes Towards Technology by Using the PATT (Pupils’ Attitudes Towards Technology) Questionnaire

The PATT (Pupils’ Attitude Towards Technology) questionnaire, as validated for the USA, was used to assess and analyse South African learners’ attitudes towards technology. The responses of 500 girls and 510 boys, from the Gauteng Province in South Africa, were analysed using a principal component and a principal factor analysis. The explained variance was rather low and indicated that the questionnaire needed adaptation for the South African context. The outcomes of the research were positive in that there were no significant differences regarding the gender attitudes that ‘technology should be for all’ and that ‘technology makes contributions to society’. The fact that girls have a stronger gender discrimination view related to themselves regarding technology needs to be addressed in future curriculum development issues. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Do computers improve the drawing of a geometrical figure for 10?year-old children?

Nowadays, computer aided design (CAD) is widely used by designers. Would children learn to draw more easily and more efficiently if they were taught with computerised tools? To answer this question, we made an experiment designed to compare two methods for children to do the same drawing: the classical ‘pen and paper’ method and a CAD method. We asked two groups of 14 children to draw a geometrical figure: the Rey-Osterrieth Complex Figure (ROCF). The first group drew it with a pen on a sheet of paper (‘paper’ group) and the second on a computer screen with CAD software (‘computer’ group). Two drawing conditions were studied: ‘Copying’ the figure and drawing from memory. Results showed that the ‘computer’ group was better at copying the figure but that both groups performed equally well when the figure was drawn from memory. These preliminary results suggest that using a CAD tool could help children while they copy a model, but that it does not improve their ability to draw the same figure using their own, internal model.     

ASIT—a problem solving strategy for education and eco-friendly sustainable design

There is growing recognition of the role teaching and learning experiences in technology education can contribute to Education for Sustainable Development. It appears, however, that in the Technology Education classroom little or no change has been achieved to the practice of designing and problem solving strategies oriented towards sustainable design. Brainstorming, Brainwriting, SCAMPER, Metaphoric Thinking, Outrageous Thinking, Mind Mapping and other problem-solving strategies used in the classroom could be suitable for eco-design, however, there appears to be little research data on their use. This paper examines and presents the ‘Advanced Systematic Inventive Thinking’ (ASIT) system as an eco-design strategy. ASIT is derived from a more complex engineering-based problem solving strategy known as TRIZ (the Russian acronym for The Theory of the Solution of Inventive Problems). Drawing on Stable’s (in press) call for new approaches to address sustainable design and achieve solutions through Technology Education, this article traces the history of TRIZ and the development of ASIT. It then argues that the ASIT strategy can be an effective methodology to be taught and used in the Technology Education classroom to solve problems in the ‘eco’ or sustainable design context. Several design scenarios have been included to illustrate how ASIT can deliver eco-design solutions to problems. These examples demonstrate the flexibility of the methodology and the diverse range of applications in which ASIT can be applied.     

Assessing the Efficacy of Structural Merger Remedies: Choosing Between Theories of Harm?

This paper shows that many structural remedies in a sample of European merger cases result in market structures which would probably not be cleared by the Competition Authority (CA) if they were the result of merger (rather than remedy). This is explained by the fact that the CA’s objective through remedy is to restore pre-merger competition, but markets are often highly concentrated even before merger. If so, the CA must often choose between clearing an ‘uncompetitive’ merger, or applying an unsatisfactory remedy. Here, the CA appears reluctant to intervene against coordinated effects, if doing so enhances a leader’s dominance.     

Fostering Systematic Innovative Thinking and Problem Solving: Lessons Education Can Learn From Industry

This article aims to illuminate different means of nurturing creativity in the high-tech industry and in modern organizations, particularly in the context of problem solving and product development, and to examine the potential implications for technology education. There is a large gap between conventional wisdom, which maintains that technology education is intended to foster creative thinking among pupils, and reality in the field. The case study presented is that of a mid-sized Israeli industrial plant, dealing with the design and production of construction tools for professionals and domestic use, such as spirit levels, measuring tapes, squares and rulers. This plant utilized innovation, uniqueness and quality as the main instruments in the battle for the market. A series of workshops for the plant's staff, entitled ‘Systematic Inventive Thinking’, resulted in the development of a range of new, original and successful products. The cumulative experience indicated that people can learn efficient techniques for solving a problem, or developing a new product, by breaking it down to its basic components, by ‘playing' systematically with ideas, in order to achieve new results. The notion that methodical courses can trigger pupils' incentive to be innovative and original, and can foster teamwork is almost absent from the field of education. Educators and scholars in technology education pay little regard to teaching and exploiting methods to fostering systematic original thinking and problem-solving. The challenge in education is to find an optimal combination and balance between fostering activity based on openness and ‘disorder’, on the one hand, and imparting systematic methods for innovative thinking and problem-solving, on the other. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

“If I was going to design a chair,the last thing I would look at is a chair”: product analysis and the causes of fixation in students’ design work 11–16 years

Creativity is acknowledged to be important for economic growth and as an everyday life-skill, however several influential reports have suggested that education could do more to harness creative talent. Creative cognition literature suggests the lack of creativity is at least partly the result of ‘fixation’ (difficulty in generating novel ideas due to imagination being ‘structured’ by existing knowledge). This paper focuses on the secondary (students aged 11–16 years) design and technology (D&T) context in the UK. Here we examine whether teacher practice can contribute to fixation by focusing on one specific facet of teacher practice in D&T; the use of product analysis to inform the generation of creative design ideas. Data is drawn from the preliminary phase of a research and intervention project from interviews with D&T teachers (N = 14), students (N = 126) and lesson observations (N = 10) and an analysis of documents and student work. Product analysis is widely used at different points in design projects but, as is shown, in all cases current practice can lead to fixation, as thinking is constrained down specific paths and tasks are at best at procedural rather than comprehension level. The implications of these findings and tentative ways forward for practitioners are discussed.     

Using ‘Electronic Portfolios’ to Challenge Current Orthodoxies in the Presentation of an Initial Teacher Training Design and Technology Activity

The paper examines the extent to which a University undergraduate curriculum initiative provided initial teacher trainees with opportunities to challenge orthodox design methodologies through the production of an electronic portfolio within and extended design and technology activity. It was found that the ‘electronic portfolio’ served primarily as a developmental tool for promoting creative continuity and sound, reflective, design practice within a structured educational design challenge. The portfolio also provided a focus for the development of ‘e’ learning skills as it facilitated the use of new technologies in the compilation of the portfolio. Additionally, the portfolio provided trainees with a means by which they were able to demonstrate their capability to prospective employers. The use of the ‘electronic portfolio’ challenges current orthodoxy and methods routinely employed to present and assess trainees’ creative work, which have been shown to constrain innovative practice. The paper concludes that the use of the ‘electronic’ portfolio was successful in facilitating trainees’ engagement with a creative Design and Technology process.     

Technological literacy: a multliteracies approach for democracy

Throughout history various grand narratives have impacted on technology education. In the current post modern era of globalization, technology education continues to struggle for relevance and definition, and takes various forms in different countries, but none seem resoundingly successful. The current development of what some have termed a digital democracy (Web 2.0)—the explosion of a new type of information technology which has become an integral characteristic of young people’s lives, is the starting point for this paper. Mainstream literacy theory was reconceptualised in the 1990’s with the foresight of anticipating the significance of a range of literacies. Broad conceptions of Technological Literacy have always accommodated multiple literacies, but must now essentially do so in a dynamic way through the pre-existing pedagogy of design.     

Probing intentions of design and technology students

The paper describes aspects of a larger study that explored what did happen as opposed to what should have happened for eight students on a BA Design and Technology course in a college of higher education. To seek the actual rather than the desired, an ethnographic methodology was used to minimise the influence of any prescribed view of design and technology. The data source was interviews, conducted with students over the four years of their course. Two analytical ‘tools’ emerged during the study and certain facets of the process of analysis are illustrated in the paper through one respondent's use of one of the tools. The outcome of this analysis exemplifies a central outcome of the study, that respondents experience tension between the intention of making change to the made-world through designing and the intention of making change to themselves through learning. The paper concludes with a critical examination of the methodology and examines this conflict of learners' intentions in the design and technology education literature. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Positioning industrial design students to operate at the ‘fuzzy front end’: investigating a new arena of university design education

This paper describes pedagogic research to instigate, support and understand a significant change in the education of undergraduate industrial design students. Design educators at Loughborough University, UK, have proposed that it will be critical for future industrial designers to learn new knowledge and abilities which will enable them to successfully operate at the ‘fuzzy front end’ of new product development. This is an arena before a traditional design brief exists (i.e. ‘pre-brief’), and typically involves in-depth investigation of such issues as users, experiences and brand, followed by exploitation of the findings. Curriculum development and new teaching, evolved over five annual cycles of implementation, reflection, planning and new implementation, is described. A model of the activities and processes of this ‘pre-brief’ arena is presented. Through structured investigation of the cycles of improvement and follow-up evaluation research, evidence gathered from stakeholders (students, educators, and industry) indicates that industrial design students can be taught to successfully operate at this fuzzy front end, and that this can be a highly effective strategy for students in their design project work. It also suggests that the students’ enhanced abilities will be in demand following their graduation.