Title: Design Thinking K-12: An Alternative to Critical Pedagogical Deficiencies in Secondary Education
Stream: Design Thinking
Presentation Type: Live-Stream Presentation
Authors:
Keith Owens, University of North Texas College of Visual Arts and Design, United States
Michael Gibson, University of North Texas College of Visual Arts and Design, United States
Abstract:
This presentation will articulate how two university-based design educators examined the following hypothesis: that Design Thinking — a project-based, iterative, investigative framework used to understand and guide decision-making — is a viable antidote to two misconceptions prevalent in American K-12 education that deform pedagogy. Both are deeply antithetical to the development of critical thinking and broadly informed learning.
The first misconception involves the conflation of learning about subject matter with learning how to learn. This subject-based approach to knowledge acquisition is deficient because it reinforces subject stratification, limits the construction of understandings informed by synthesis and recombination, and narrows the locus of learning to a given topic rather than how learning occurs independently of and across specific areas of study.
The second misconception involves the conflation of thinking about subject matter with thinking about thinking. When presented as the only way to consider how and why things in the world work and fail to work as they do, this delimited approach inhibits opportunities to consider the influences and effects of differing paradigms, theories, contexts, and concepts in and of themselves and to question relationships existing between various phenomena.
The validity of this hypothesis was tested during a multi-year partnership with a local school district to facilitate projects guided by Design Thinking in middle school arts classrooms. This initiative further sought to determine how students’ habits of mind could be affected by immersing them in learning experiences guided by this approach.
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