In this episode I explore how teachers can enhance their classrooms through research and writing. Using the example of design fiction to spark students' imagination, I explain how reflective, research practice can be a powerful tool for professional development. I explain the steps D&T teachers can take to incorporate research into their teaching strategies, creating an environment where creativity flourishes and success criteria are clear.
Discover how engaging with published research can provide significant benefits for design and technology teachers. I explain the importance of community contributions like the PATT40 conference papers and offer advice on navigating academic papers with ease, using resources like the Researching D&T website.
My aim is to build a collective knowledge base that not only enriches D&T teaching practice but also boosts the reputation of D&T.
45 Why D&T teachers will benefit from doing a masters (IMO)
49 Getting started with writing about D&T
65 Talking lockdown and ethics with Daniela Schillaci Rowland
Ciaran Ellis posted a thought-provoking question on LinkedIn recently: Do design decisions involve value judgements?
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Alison:
This is the follow on episode 2, matt's conversation with me on Tuesday about Patt 40. What I just want to explore a little bit more in detail is some of the things that Matt and I talked about. So we talked about teachers getting involved with doing research and also teachers getting involved with writing about research and then finally engaging with research. So my aim is to try and sort of cover those three things, but I'm sure they will overlap. And now I've talked about these before, but I wanted to be a little bit more pertinent in this episode about why I think it's important. So I talked about this in several different episodes and I want to bring it together in one. So I said one of the things that Matt and I and many others I work with are really interested in getting teachers involved in doing research about their own practice. Now there's a future episode coming out with Joanne Taylor, who attended the conference, who talks about getting involved and talks about the busy lives of teachers and it is really busy, for as a teacher and you know I did my masters when I was ahead of department and also when I moved schools and that can be a real challenge to do a master's or to do any research study on your own practice. So for me, if you're a teacher and you're wanting to get into doing some research, I wouldn't think about it being a major project. I would think about it in some small change that you're wanting to do in your classroom. So it might be that you're wanting to bring in a new design strategy. So I'm going to pick here design fiction. I've written about it so it's kind of easy for me to to talk about it. If I wanted to as a teacher and I had a teacher do this, a student teacher wanted to do some practice about design fiction. Never done it before. How would I approach that? And keeping it straightforward without making any major disruptions? Well, design fiction sort of fits best if we're talking to children about emerging technologies. So if you've never done that before, we might think we can find two or three lessons to do it. It's kind of keeping it low scale which makes it low risk.
Alison:
Okay, so I'd be thinking about me as a teacher, why I wanted to try it. So I'd be thinking about design fiction. It's a strategy used by teachers and by designers, so that's a really good reason why I want to bring it into my classroom. I think I should be teaching children design strategies that they can use. I'd be kind of writing a reflection about why I want to do it. When I say a reflection, I don't mean an essay. I mean it might just be, well, you know, a couple of hundred words of my own thinking about why I want to do it, and that would help me sort out what it was that I was hoping to find out from from trying this out. And then I plan the lesson keeping that in mind, thinking Okay, so I'm going to try design fiction.
Alison:
I want it to introduce them to a strategy of designers, but it's also design fiction is because there's no Requirement for children to make a model and it's about storytelling. So that's another reason is I'm wanting to try something where there's no, there's no model, but actually, so in some ways there's more opportunities for them to be Expansive in their creativity. So that's what I'm wanting to do as a teacher, by bringing this in. So I design the lesson or the lessons where I'm going to use design fiction and I'm mindful of my what I would now say is criteria for success. Okay, new thing for design that designers use and you strata designers use, and there's not having to make a model. So children are more creative.
Alison:
Now I'm not going to do a comparison with a group that aren't using this I'm. You know that's making it too complicated. I'm just looking at this one. Say, for example, year 8 class. I've got my criteria. How am I going to find that? How am I going to find out Whether they've understood that it's the way other designer works? Well, I could ask them at the end of the design fiction. Or I can ask them at the beginning what do you know about how designers design? What strategies do they use? And then I could ask them at the end Okay, I've now taught you this new strategy. What do you think about it? Why do you think designers would use that? How might they use it, how might you use it in the future and how might that help you? So I can kind of think I can ask some questions as the children at the beginning and at the end.
Alison:
And then this thing about I'm Creativity, because creative doesn't have to mean that everything's radical or different, but it's expansive, I suppose. Excuse me, they're not constrained by their making skills. So what I might do there is I might look at the work, you know, look at the children's work. I'm a teacher, I'm a professional, and I can see Whether their ideas are more expansive. And I could do that by comparing, for example, a child and I could look at three or four children. I could compare what they've done a year and what they've done in the previous Unit of work where they've had designed things. Or I could just make the judgment for myself by thinking what do I mean by it's more expansive? And it might be that I might look at whether they've annotated or talked about and materials that we don't have in the classroom or processes they can't do in the classroom. So I've set up my criteria, my two criteria. I've set up how I'm going to make some judgments at the end of it.
Alison:
So this is kind of no different than me doing good Classroom practice. I've put some extra things in place by maybe writing a reflection at the beginning to get out my head why am I doing it? But that's helped me identify why I'm doing it and what I want from it. I Then do it and I look at the children's work, I ask them some questions. I don't make it formal and I'm not going to report on this necessarily at this stage. So I've not done any ethics, this is just for my practice. So then I might think, okay, I've now learned from this, what have I learned from it? And make myself some new notes and then think, okay, I'm not going to try this out with a different year, a group. I'm going to actually develop this into my units of work for next school year and I'm going to make some notes. So that's a very straightforward way that teachers can get involved in being a practitioner, researcher, a teacher researcher. I'm going to put a link in the show notes to Phil Roberts's work, who talks about this type of activity.
Alison:
Now I wanted to take now a stage further and write about it. I think it's really important in D&T that we get teachers that teachers if you're listening that you write about your practice and you critique your practice publicly. Well, I don't think it's important. It is, if it's written, other people can read it. If it's rather written, other people can engage with it and try it out and build on it. If it's written, then you're adding to that body of knowledge that we have about the subject. That helps it get better. Thing is, if you start to write about it and you're using the children's work and you're using quotes from the children to write about it, then we're starting to kind of move into ethics and GDPR. If you're in England data protection so it's there that I might have a conversation.
Alison:
If there is in my school with a research lead, again making it clear I'm not wanting to do something that's major, I just want to try some out. But I want to add to my community by writing a blog post with some pictures of children's work and some quotes. How do I get the ethics? How do we do that within the school? And it might be that you're there for it means that you end up writing a letter home and saying to the parents everything can be anonymized. I will be putting children's work in a blog, but I'm not going to put their name on it. The children will be able to recognize their own work, but I'm not going to do anything that makes that work identifiable. So you're thinking about confidentiality, protecting the children. Obviously, if the children then see that and they share that with their peers. That's up to them, but you'd kind of cover all of that. So that's a really important bit.
Alison:
Ethics and myself and Daniel Schillarchi-Roland a couple of years ago talked about this on the podcast and again I'll put a link in the show notes to that. So this is. This is now moving out of doing classroom research for yourself, for your practice, that you might share informally, verbally, in a department meeting, to think you might. How am I going to share this with my peers in the D&T community and within my school? I have to start thinking about ethics. I'm putting a bit of rigor in it, not saying that what you've been doing isn't rigorous before, but that's been more targeted to your own practice. Now, if you're wanting to do it to others, I think that's why you need to kind of start thinking about how we're going to articulate that. So that's why I'd look at some of the writings about action research, and again I'll put a link in the show notes to where you can find out a little bit more about how to do action research.
Alison:
So those are two things that I think are really important for D&T teachers to get involved with. The first one is not so onerous. I think that's just part of good practice as a D&T teacher. The second one is a little bit more, but I just think that's fab for contributing to the community and that body of knowledge, and we are an underrepresented subject in terms of what is written, and we're also really underrepresented subject in terms of what is written about what is happening in the classroom. That is making a difference to children's design and technology capability, and so that leads me on to engaging with published research. So the PAP 40 papers are a fantastic place to start because most of the re-accessible. I'm not saying that the others aren't accessible. They're written more for an academic audience, but much of it.
Alison:
In the next few weeks I'm going to be releasing some podcast episodes where we've got people on. We're talking about specific pieces of research from the PAP 40 conference, which I think is really exciting. It's a good place to start, but how do you read it? And I think that's a real challenge. I've done a podcast about this before. Again, I'll put links in the show notes for you to find that. My suggestion is you read the abstract, you read the introduction, you read the conclusion, and it tends to be in those places that you're finding what this research is doing that can be useful for classroom teachers. It's not all written like that, I'm sorry to say, but I think good research should have something in there about what difference it makes at practice.
Alison:
One of my things I noticed about the PAP 40 conference is there wasn't actually a huge amount of research that was done where the participants were pupils, and that's where I'd be looking. If I was a practising teacher. I'd be looking what research has been done in the PAP papers or other papers about D&T that involves children, because that's where I'm going to be learning I think, the most. From my own practice. I can try some things out and I know that I'm then becoming research informed. Another place you could look to find research is on the researching D&T website, which is a website that myself and several others edit and where we put information about different journals and different articles that we think people might find interesting. And if you're interested in doing that, if you found an interesting article and you want to write a blog post, then you're more than welcome to email me. And again, links in the show notes about how to contact me about a paper that you found useful and the impact it had on your practice.
Alison:
So I'm kind of developing here on quite a lot of things that was talked about from Matt and me getting teachers involved, starting with doing research in your own classroom. That's just for your own professional development. How do you then share that beyond your classroom in a way that's ethical? How to do action research, looking at Phil Roberts and then finding published research like the PAT 40 and engaging with that and reading that so that you can start thinking about how that can impact on your practice. If you're a D&T teacher, I really think it's important that, as the D&T community, that we're involved in this because it adds it adds rigor, but it also adds that ability to critique and develop which is what we do in the design and technology community, whether we're designers, whether we're researchers is developing our own practice. And I also think, finally, for the profile of the subject, I think it's important that things are written and shared and that schools senior leaders can see that teachers are using research to inform their practice that's coming from their own communities. Anyway, as ever, thanks for listening. If you want to write anything about any research that you've read that you think would be useful to share with the wider D&T community, please do get in touch. I'd love to hear from you, as we add to that body of knowledge, about what practice has been done in classrooms and what research has been done that informs the practice of classrooms.
Alison:
I'm Dr Alison Hardy and you've been listening to the Talking D&T podcast. If you enjoyed the podcast, then do subscribe on whatever platform you use, and do consider leaving a review, as it does help others find the podcast. I do the podcast because I want to support the D&T community in developing their practice, so please do share the podcast with your D&T community. If you want to respond to something I've talked about or have an idea for a future episode, then either leave me a voice memo via speakpipe or drop me an email. You can find details about me, the podcast and how to connect with me on my website, dr Alison Hardycom. Also, if you want to support the podcast financially, you can become a patron. Links to speakpipe patron and my website are in the show notes. Thanks for listening.