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.