Uncovering problematics in design education - learning and the design entity

This paper attempts to articulate some of the challenges for the curriculum, teaching methods and assessment in design education arising from research currently underway in London and Australia. Taking a phenomenographical approach, the research asks whether the experience of learning and teaching in design education, both for students and teachers, is consistent with conceptions shared, within the educational community, about the professional world of designers. We believe that there is substantial variation in the conceptions held by both students and teachers about what design is and how it should be learned. These variations in conceptions have a significant impact on how students learn and how teachers teach

Teachers' and students' conceptions of the professional world

In the original 'Improving Student Learning' project led by Prof Graham Gibbs in 1991, one of the case studies focused on approaches to learning on a BA(Hons) Graphic Information Design course. The case study, led by Allan Davies, had the modest intention of trying to determine whether a particular curriculum innovation encouraged a deep approach to learning. Our only significant tool then was Bigg's SOLO taxonomy. Eleven years later and the innovators have moved on, the course has disappeared and the research context and methodologies have developed. During this period, research has suggested that both teachers and students describe their understanding of teaching and learning according to their perception of the teaching/ learning environment (Ramsden, 1992; Prosser & Trigwell, 1999). Studies have identified variation in the way that teachers experience teaching (Samuelowicz & Bain, 1992; Prosser, Trigwell & Taylor, 1994 for example) and variation in the way teachers experience student learning (Bruce & Gerber, 1995). More recently, Reid (1997) has widened the context of research by examining the relation between the experience of work and teaching/learning within the music discipline. In further research (Reid 1999), relations were found within the music discipline where teachers' and students' experience of one of three defined dimensions was strongly related to the ways in which they understood teaching and learning music. The musicians (and their students) described their experience of the professional world in three hierarchically related ways. This constitution has become known as the 'Music' Entity. In 1999, following a fortuitous meeting at the ISL conference in York, Davies and Reid conducted a joint enquiry, using a phenomenographic approach, to determine the 'Design' entity (Davies and Reid, 2001). This research focused on discerning the critical differences, or variation, in the way teachers and students experience and understand their subject and its relation to the professional design world. The outcomes of this research has, consequently, begun to impact on student learning through course design and, in particular, assessment. This paper will be a comparative study of the research already carried out by the authors in a number of disciplines in which the same focus and methodology has been used

The informal learning of new teachers in school

The purpose of this paper is to present what the study of the experiences of beginning teachers and their informal learning says about the process of learning to teach, and to discuss the main emerging themes in relation to a wider literature. The design of the paper is essentially ethnographic and building of grounded theory, based on an accumulation of data derived from interviews with beginning teachers and connecting to extant theory. The findings are that a focus on the informal learning of beginners in teaching leads to the notion of learning as becoming that is predominantly emotional and relational in nature with the emergence of teacher identity. The research is limited in its exploration of the cognitive dimension of professional learning, a dimension which may be elicited using a more tightly focused and structured method. The implications are that learning to teach is not determined by a professional standard and that a revised standard would need to take account of these findings. The value of the paper lies in the pursuit of informal learning as a research area in teaching to reveal a greater complexity of learning in that specific professional context; and showing how the understanding of learning to teach can be enriched through a wider appreciation of the school as workplace, workplace learning and connections to a wider philosophical literature