Abstract:
Design thinking is an approach to pedagogy that draws on processes from the field of design to create opportunities for interdisciplinary collaborative inquiry. It has been adopted in higher education as an innovative framework in which students work through an iterative cycle of exploration, experimentation and production informed by epistemic diversity and feedback.
In the context of teacher education, a model of design thinking offers a framework by which pre-service teachers may understand how texts are produced, but also how collaborative inquiry may be enacted. While it is framed as innovative, design thinking in literacy education has resonances with well-established approaches to narrative text production and student-centred pedagogies. However, the emphasis in design thinking on interdisciplinary knowledge is perhaps more innovative in the higher education setting.
In this paper I discuss an interdisciplinary project in which students from the School of Education and School of Art, Architecture and Design collaborated on narrative text production. Each group of students drew on disciplinary knowledge to produce a multimodal text in which diverse repertoires were assembled. While the project is explored as an example of the continuity of an inquiry based model and collaborative text production practices in a higher education setting, it also provokes an investigation into the innovative aspects of interdisciplinary learning in this context.
In the context of teacher education, a model of design thinking offers a framework by which pre-service teachers may understand how texts are produced, but also how collaborative inquiry may be enacted. While it is framed as innovative, design thinking in literacy education has resonances with well-established approaches to narrative text production and student-centred pedagogies. However, the emphasis in design thinking on interdisciplinary knowledge is perhaps more innovative in the higher education setting.
In this paper I discuss an interdisciplinary project in which students from the School of Education and School of Art, Architecture and Design collaborated on narrative text production. Each group of students drew on disciplinary knowledge to produce a multimodal text in which diverse repertoires were assembled. While the project is explored as an example of the continuity of an inquiry based model and collaborative text production practices in a higher education setting, it also provokes an investigation into the innovative aspects of interdisciplinary learning in this context.