Broadening the Definition of Intelligence in Design and Technology Curriculum

This week I'm talking with Alex, artist and lecturer in environmental design, and Sam, the design and technology curriculum lead at Oak National Academy.

Alex's research, presented at PATT40, is the starting point of the conversation. He focuses on the often-overlooked non-verbal intelligences and offers a fresh perspective on how we might better assess different cognitive strengths.

(Text generated by AI, edited by Alison Hardy)

Find Alex online

Website

LinkedIn

Find Sam online
Website

LinkedIn

Greenhalgh, A. A. (2023) “‘If D&T wasn’t so easy, I wouldn’t be so good at it’: Nonverbal Ability and Confidence”, The 40th International Pupils’ Attitudes Towards Technology Conference Proceedings 2023, 1(October). Available at: https://openjournals.ljmu.ac.uk/PATT40/article/view/1731 (Accessed: 5 February 2024).

Ciaran Ellis posted a thought-provoking question on LinkedIn recently: Do design decisions involve value judgements?

What do you think? Join the conversation over on LinkedIn and let us know what you think. 

Transcript

Alison Hardy: 1:00

You're listening to the Talking D&T podcast. I'm Dr Alison Hardy, a writer, researcher and advocate of design and technology education. In each episode I share views, news and opinions about D&T. So this week it's part of the PAP 40 series and we're doing something a bit different this week. I don't recall I think I've only had one podcast previously where I've had two guests on at the same time, so it's not quite classroom practice, but managing the two of them to make sure they stay on focus, but hopefully it'll work out. So I'm really excited because we have Alex, who presented a paper, and Sam, who selected Alex's paper to talk about. They only met, or Sam saw Alex present, and so I thought let's have them both together and we can talk about it. So, alex, I'm going to start off with you If you'd like to say who you are, where you are and what you do.

Alex Augustus: 1:58

Yes, I am a practicing artist and designer and I'm also a lecturer in environmental design at the University of Creative Arts. I, previous to this, I had a public art and design studio in South Korea, in Seoul, and then I've also worked for gaming companies, advertising firms so a bit of an unusual spread of design work before going into education.

Alison Hardy: 2:30

Yes, you've done quite a few different things which we'd love to unpick, but I'm going to hold off there. Thank you, you're a perfect guest because you've just given us just enough information. I tell you, what would be great, alex, is if we can have some links to some of that stuff. We can put that in the show notes so people can find out a bit more about you as well, sam, who you are, where you are and what you do.

sam Booth: 2:52

Yes, my name is Sam Booth and I am curriculum lead for design and technology at Oak National Academy, where we are going to be building a Key Stage 1 to 4 designer technology curriculum model over the next year with our curriculum partners. So watch this space. I've been a teacher for 17 years, head of partner for eight years and now working at Oak.

Alison Hardy: 3:15

Right, so you picked this paper, you picked Alex's paper, so do you want to give us an overview? This is a little bit of a test, isn't it? When you've got the author in the room?

sam Booth: 3:25

Certainly is yes, I'm going to get my book out. So basically, yes, Alex. So I was there for a day and a half and also, alex, I sat through your paper and fundamentally what I got from it was that you believe that the education system discriminated against what you call nonverbal intelligences, and one of the reasons for that is because we tend to assess students through very academic ways and you wanted to look if you could change that. You saw that there was almost like a negative view, almost like an unintelligent viewer, of people who had practical performance in non-academic subjects, and what you ultimately wanted to do was change the perceptions within a year, eight class, by promoting high attaining students and also by shifting the whole class perception, and you were trying to do that by using Ravens progressive matrices, which is interesting. So a lot of these things I hadn't heard of. This is why your paper was so interesting to me. What I also really liked as well, that you acknowledge failures within your research and you even talk about things like, you know, gardner's multi intelligence theory and the kind of issues with that, and the kind of ultimate aim of it was for you to find a more tailored approach to assessment within design technology, I think. I think from my point of view. So that's a quick overview.

sam Booth: 4:44

Obviously you can, you can, you can add to that my overview that the two big things that I kind of took away from this is which is why I kept thinking about this on the train home from Liverpool was here. We have someone doing their PGCE and stood up at Pat's presenting some action research. So there's two huge things that I'm like right. First of all, you know, kind of what is your advice on teachers presenting at pack is when I walked into that hall on that Wednesday morning and I'm looking around that whole, there's everyone there. I've got all their books, they've influenced me and design technology and I hadn't really considered that actually there's also teachers there standing up in front of all these people and presenting, which, first of all, is extremely brave. But I'm really interested in what your thoughts are on that.

sam Booth: 5:23

But also action research. You know we have hundreds of pupils going to our classroom every single week and we have lots of opportunity to do things like you have done. But we don't see it that often, especially from classroom seizures, especially classroom teachers are relatively new to teaching. I know you're not not that new to education. So they're the kind of two things I'm really interested in, and I think what kept me thinking about your paper is is, you know, what advice could you, you know, give to the world of teaching on that?

Alison Hardy: 5:52

Cricky Does. That is that, alex? He's not asking much of you. But first I'd like to check has has Sam given a good synopsis of your paper? Is there anything you want to add? And with those questions, I want to add.

Alex Augustus: 6:05

but I'm sure there is. Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, first of all, thank you so much for coming to the talk and you know I really appreciated it. I really appreciated the audience. It was lovely to get feedback and that was a brilliant summary. I'm glad that you did it because I think you did a better job than I planned.

Alex Augustus: 6:28

But yeah, you pointed out, it is unusual in, I mean my my being in this position at all is fairly unusual, especially doing the PPC, because I've already been a lecturer in art history. You know I have a decade-long career behind me before coming to it. So it somehow put me in a position where that that kind of power relationship that might have existed with, you know, a 21 or a 22-year-old coming to a PPC fresh, it wasn't quite there in the same way. So I was very comfortable to question everything and what I came to was almost like a little bit of a conspiracy theory really. You know, getting my tinfoil hat out and thinking about how it does seem like the world in general is biased against people who are more visually and creatively minded. And when I did the PPC it just really snapped into focus how that seemed to very much begin as children and the way that we put people through school.

Alex Augustus: 7:46

And the big. You know. The thing that really brought that into focus for me was the disparity between what we're teaching, the way that we're assessing kids in school, versus what an actual design profession looks and feels like. And having worked across spatial design, graphic design, game design, a design, I was looking at this kind of setup, thinking these are not necessarily the way that we're testing them, is not the way that they're tested in a workplace. You are not asked to sit down and write for two hours on a literacy memory based exam in order to do a job as a graphic designer. In fact, you would be penalized as a graphic designer for touching the text You're supposed to copy and paste. You should never change the text which has been written by the copywriter. Yet somehow we have this list of vocabulary. We're supposed to be teaching year seven, eight, nine students.

Alex Augustus: 8:53

In many ways I felt like somehow the space of design had been co-opted by other subjects and we were doing a little bit of the heavy lifting that might perhaps take place in an English class. In English lessons they get a lot of time in the school week. I don't think with all of the things we have to teach them about design, if we remember this as a subject is the one which prepares them to go into the world of work for the entire human-built environment. Sometimes we forget that this is the course that leads you into architecture, product design, fashion design. This is a very important subject. We have a lot to teach, and I think that the time spent teaching certain types of vocabulary is not essential in my mind, compared to all the things that we could be teaching them.

Alison Hardy: 9:54

That's where you came from with your study, Sam. You had a couple of questions. What was yours? The question was around the concept, but what else were you curious to ask Alex?

sam Booth: 10:07

about Basically? Yeah, I suppose if we go into your research, one of the things I found very interesting was how you were trying to promote the confidence of those pupils who maybe don't have that confidence because of what you've just been talking about. It was the idea of self-concept, wasn't it? You were trying to build that confidence through using the DOTS project. I found that quite interesting. Did you find that in your research? You talk about that and you talk about how it did increase the confidence of some, but you also found that those one pupil they didn't get more confident. In fact, it might have actually had a negative impact on their confidence within the lesson. Did you find, as a whole, you think you actually succeeded in that?

Alex Augustus: 11:02

Yeah, getting into the details of it as a whole class the confidence in DT went down slightly, but the confidence of the selected targeted groups went up. Just to give a little bit of a background about the study, in the first 10 minutes of each class I did cognitive ability tests which tested nonverbal intelligences related to spatial manipulation and visual manipulation, but they were non-literacy based and they were non-memory based the two things which I think we test most in secondary school. I removed from that testing. It was framed as a competition. There were these little plastic trophies behind the board. Then there was a leaderboard. Just the top few students of each week would get their name on board. The idea was to pick up on intelligences which are not normally celebrated in secondary school, test them, celebrate them and then hopefully the people who were celebrated would then get a little boost of confidence.

Alex Augustus: 12:34

One of the things that I was ultimately I said that this project was research was kind of a failed experiment. The reason why I say that is because the thing I was testing, the Raven progressive matrices. It actually tests quite a niche part of the skill that you need to be a good designer. As you said, there was one student who was actually the book. Work was great. They were actually the highest scoring student in non-verbal ability based on the SATs tests, but they never got onto the leaderboard. There was an indication that that student's confidence went slightly down by the end of that experiment Then. That's why it was important for me to use triangulation, because then I could see from the other forms of testing that something wasn't quite working out and it made sense that this deductive intelligence it didn't test all of the things which were necessary to work out. It was too narrow in the wider gamut of what makes a good designer.

sam Booth: 14:00

I think as well, when you're still up in Pat and saying that that's also quite inspiring as well to go well, actually you've accepted the fact that you've looked at that. You also talked a little bit about the extranosic motivators and the trophies and how actually that might not have worked. I really like that. What kind of advice would you give to teachers then in their classroom, in their everyday practice, who have got an idea and think, actually I want to try something out and I want to do a bit of research, because, like I said at the beginning, it doesn't happen that often.

Alex Augustus: 14:33

Yeah, no, that's. I mean it's. It's a tricky one, right? Because this is also something that I see quite often at Cambridge, when you know the professors and students and researchers are talking about what kind of research that normal, you know, like teachers would do in the classroom in like a kind of normal routine, just, I think the elephant in the room with this. For me there's two of them. The first one is there, just isn't enough time.

sam Booth: 15:11

It always comes down to time, doesn't it? It's always time.

Alex Augustus: 15:14

I'm going to be honest, like that year almost killed me. I mean, I, you know I, working running my own company in Korea doing all kinds of public art installations, somehow was less tiring and less stressful than that, than that one year of studying. So I mean, that's the first one. And then the second one is you know, it sounds a little bit cynical, but I think it also comes down to pay. Like there are a lot of these, a lot of researchers calling on teachers to do their own research, but the reality is, in any other profession, if you were going to be doing the job and also researching the job and then using that to steer the mission of the department or the school, or even the discourse about your entire subject, nationally or internationally, that would be paid. You know that would be paid.

Alex Augustus: 16:04

Well, when it comes down to time and money, it's a really tricky one, because I wouldn't want to add anything to a teacher's workload. You know, I mean I'm so in awe of what secondary school teachers do. I don't know how they do it. It's like superhuman to me. Whereas working in the university there is some time, there is a lot of time for research. So it's built in, it's baked into the position.

Alison Hardy: 16:36

Yeah, I think. I mean I find that in my role I've got time. It's what I do, you know, as part of my, but it's part of your job, isn't it? It's part of what you're kind of expected to do, but yeah.

Alex Augustus: 16:48

I'm sorry, that's really cynical.

Alison Hardy: 16:50

No, it's, you know, you've lived it. I mean I mean you're honestly there about the PGA year and for international listeners, the teacher training in the UK is primarily done in one year. I mean there are primary is primarily done over three to four years with a little bit of one year and there's a little bit of multiple. You know, three to four years for secondary, but mainly it's in one year and it is exhausting. The expectations are ginormous and pretend. Sometimes schools expect you to turn up as a new student teacher, fully formed and doing everything.

Alison Hardy: 17:24

So no, I think your honesty there, alex, is really important and I mean the magnitude of the project with all the complexities you've had. That was my sorts of thoughts when I read it I thought blindly there's a huge amount going on in your project, as you say and as Sam has pointed out. But I don't think that should stop people from having a go. And you're honest Sam says about well, it kind of worked in places but not in others. We can't keep publishing research that says well, it works, what I did was fantastic and it made a difference. Actually, sometimes we do stuff and it doesn't tell people what doesn't work. Then they're not going to work.

sam Booth: 18:03

They're not going to learn anything from it either, and building that confidence in teachers to be able to do things like this. I think as well you said as well, alison, before that the PAC conference is a welcoming and what was the term you used A friendly place where actually you can do this, you can do this kind of thing, which is good. Just to play slightly devil's advocate, alex, obviously the education system that we have, the way we assess design technology. By the time they get to end of year 11, if they choose to do it as a subject, because in most places it is an option they are going to have to sit a two hour exam where they're going to have to recall knowledge and they're going to have to have a certain level of literacy. So obviously we can talk about this, but ultimately that's just the way it is at the moment. What are your thoughts on that?

Alex Augustus: 18:54

I don't know exactly. So I would say you know all the teachers I observed doing a brilliant job of teaching the curriculum. I think the problem is that the problem is the assessment. Really it's this, I had it written down here the assessment for GCSE. So, for GCSE and A level, correct me if I'm wrong here, but it's 50% an exam and 50% coursework for both of them, and GCSE is a two hour exam. That's correct, yeah, and in A level it's two papers and it's four hours in total.

sam Booth: 19:39

I think sometimes it differs between exam board, I think, but yeah, and that is a lot, you know.

Alex Augustus: 19:43

That is just going back to this idea that that is, in my opinion, a wholly inaccurate way to be testing that field. I believe you know the amount of times that you have to use memory as a designer. Obviously, there are types of information you have to retain whilst working with forms and materials and doing research, and you know if you can do literacy based desk research as a designer, that that is obviously invaluable. That's brilliant. But thinking about the specific things which different subjects are teaching, I think that the basis of you know most subjects are literacy based, if you take all the humanities just in the way that we. So maybe I could give a little bit of background about why I'm really interested in this and, as as anyone who's done a PC will know, there's a huge amount of paperwork involved in in applying to the course and getting on to it. So I was kind of going through my attic and I was trying to to find all the paperwork that I need to apply to the course, like degree certificates, things like this, and I came across this handwritten note that my mum had written in 1998, and it had my cognitive ability scores on there and they were divided into verbal, quantitative and nonverbal. So verbal score was average ish. The quantitative was quite far below average. And then the nonverbal was 76 out of 80, which is there's a note on there to say that it's it's very high.

Alex Augustus: 21:31

But the problem with this, and the reason why I went through school thinking that I wasn't particularly intelligent in any way, is because the first two scores are used to divide sets, so English, maths, some of the humanities but the third score, the nonverbal score, is essentially just thrown out. It's not used. It's not used to inform anything. So when I was going into the, into the classes where that would have counted, I was never really directly told that grade myself. It was given out in a parents evening. It was never really passed down to me. That was the first time I'd seen it and had I have known that and had that have been some part of my education process, I think I would have grown up with a lot more confidence and I that that's really where the idea clicked.

sam Booth: 22:23

Yeah, that's really interesting and because in my previous school obviously we did the cats test when, when the pupils would come in at year seven, and every year I would develop a, we'd have a spreadsheet which I would give to all my staff so we could, you know, record data. But what I would always do is highlight, you know, that nonverbal score and make sure that the teachers not necessarily that we did anything with it, but it would be on that spreadsheet and it would be highlighted and it was more of a nudge to say, hey, look, you know, this is very closely related to what we're doing, especially the 50% of the kind of open, expansive part of our teaching, and it was kind of direct, you know, to say these people may show, you know, ability within this, even if they haven't shown ability in in. You know the other two, the other two scores. Yeah, that's really interesting.

Alison Hardy: 23:10

You mentioned Midias and Yellis in your paper. I mean they're a bit of a flashback because not not every school uses those. There was a, there was a real pattern at one point that a lot of schools use those and when I was teaching back in the early 2000s in Lincolnshire and then in Northampton, should we use them in both? And, like some, I use those spatial scores as a real indicator around design and technology. And I'm just going to kind of pick up on your language. It's really interesting, alex, that you talk about it is a grade and it's actually a reference around ability. It's not a grade if that makes sense, it's. It's around the individual and that's how we're kind of seen as a. It says judgment isn't, it is actually more of an identification tool of. This is where your patterns of strength are and I wonder if they kind of sort of went out of fashion a little bit with you know you pick up in your paper, alex, about Gardner and that there are. There are significant flaws with his work and he's acknowledged it and other people acknowledge it and I think that's a real fashion about different learning styles and search and and it's almost like the baby was thrown out with a bathwater in some ways. You know I found Midius and Yellis really powerful and helpful in me working with individuals and organizing small groups in my classes. But then there's this whole backlash against Gardner, against VAC. I mean they are dodgy theories in a way, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't be thinking about what insight they were trying to give us and just go, as you say, down. This complete cognitive knowledge is all in the head, not in the body way of thinking, which is what the exam system in the UK has done in the last 10 to 15 years. It sort of shifted very much away from that spatial body. You know learning is held in the body, not just in the mind. It's kind of been lost and sorry, I'm going to go off a little bit of a spiel here.

Alison Hardy: 25:22

You know that whole design and make assessment was really central and a lot of the research in science and technology assessment has been around. That you know from Richard Kimball, you know and others about in a doing design, responding to a design context in real time which then became coursework, and then it loses. So think about your experience, alex, as a designer. You design in real time. What's happening now in classes, it's not in real time, it's stayed, it's managed, and so that assessment, even when we do do that, 50% of the time it becomes, in my view, quite false because it's so stage managed, which is not what happens when we're really designing and responding to a context. So everything has kind of gone down a line of square peg, round whole, and so the assessment has lost the essence of what it is to have that design and technology capability and that ability to respond. So that's why I think your research, alex, is really powerful, because you're bringing out, you know, hang on, hang on. We've kind of gone too far the other way, and one way I'd say that yours is going very much in the other way, but you kind of have to be taken that way to pull the other end back, don't you? It's my view, but hopefully there will be change, hopefully.

Alison Hardy: 26:48

It's difficult, it's challenging, it's a real challenge that you know some people within government see that intellect and ability is all about what's held in the head and not in the body, and I find it fascinating. I've mentioned on the podcast before that the key subjects that are held in the performance tables have nothing to do with the body. So if you think about the ear back. None of those have to do with the body. English, maths, the sciences, the humanities yes, okay, people are involved, but the learning tends to be cerebral rather than involved in the body. All the subjects that are outside the ear back D&T, art, pe, drama they involve learning, this embodied learning that involves the whole body, and I find that absolutely fascinating that there is a decision made somewhere that the only things of value are to do with what's held in the brain, not in the body. And I kind of wonder if whether it's because those politicians are too scared about thinking about things to do with their body. But that's me going off on a random note.

sam Booth: 27:55

It probably matches also with the fact that obviously you know, we know about numbers taking design and technology GCSE, and we have lost so many to things like 3D art, where it's 100% coursework or NEA, whatever you want to call it. You know, where there's almost an unlimited time as well to carry out your project, which is more in line with what you were talking about, alex.

Alex Augustus: 28:17

Yeah, I mean, when I did A Levels I did the same. I did 3D design and I didn't know at the time that that was under the art curriculum rather than the D&T curriculum. But no, everything that you were saying, alison, I really agree with. I think it's this term is very interesting. I haven't thought about it in those terms before this idea of knowledge held in the body rather than knowledge held in the mind. And it's true, you know, this kind of muscle memory, spatial awareness, all kinds of you know, fine-tuned, highly adept things that are not celebrated as much. And I think that you've got a really good point about the idea of the politician kind of you know. In many ways, the kind of dominant ways of thinking and behaving reproduce themselves as long as types of people get into power.

Alex Augustus: 29:14

Right, how do you come? You don't become a politician through being a great musician and sportsman. You. There will always be exceptions, but on the whole, the kind of verbal, the verbal talent, the verbal ability which seems to be celebrated way over the nonverbal, is what will get you into a position of power like that, where you're then making decisions about how the non-verbally based subjects are taught. So it reproduces itself. But even the terms verbal I was thinking about this yesterday, actually the terms verbal and nonverbal, it's almost like the nonverbal, it's like it's missing. It's, you know, even the way that we label, yeah, the language of it.

Alison Hardy: 30:00

Rather than saying it's about spatial, we're saying it's nonverbal, so it's not something rather than it is something.

Alex Augustus: 30:07

Yeah, and I, I, I definitely agree with you.

Alex Augustus: 30:10

I think you know I, I don't want to make out like everything which is happening now is is not to the benefit of the kids and to future designers, because there's a huge amount which is done which is, you know, brilliant.

Alex Augustus: 30:27

I observed so much which I thought was was great training. It's just, you know, there are some, some students who did brilliant with kind of manufacturing and making, thinking around the ideas, and then when it came to the kind of revision period in year 11, they started misbehaving, you know, throwing things around the class, not not concentrating, walking in and out of classes, which I observed, and I, as an observer, you have a bit of freedom to kind of bounce around and investigate and I was asking them why, why are you doing this? Now, you know you've worked so well up until this point and they, they just directly told me, like the assessment is memory based and we all have crap memories and we're going to fail it, and that was their perception and they in their minds, they had done everything that they could in the coursework and that was their best chance of carrying them through, because they didn't expect that in that setting and of an exam hall that they would perform. It's pretty sad.

Alison Hardy: 31:36

Yeah, it is sad, but they basically been told that they're worthless if they can't remember anything.

sam Booth: 31:42

It is. And we have to have lots of tools, don't we, you know, especially in our subjects, that can support those types of pupils, you know, to get them through that. You know we have to do that. I mean, you know, looking at, you know that design technology, especially at secondary, which is obviously what we're really talking about here, you know the national curriculum, I think, is great. You know, when you read through that, especially that kind of the purpose of study, it's amazing and it talks about capable citizens and all those wonderful things which makes design and technology such a valuable subject, what I think is a value, a subject for all. You know it is just a shame that we have pupils, when they get to that GCSE, that they think for 50% of the course they're going to struggle with it.

Alison Hardy: 32:25

So to bring it back to your research then, Alex, you've kind of talked about what you think didn't work, but what did work? You know what was the outcome for you, as well as for the pupils.

Alex Augustus: 32:42

Yeah. So one thing which I it was not something that I necessarily expected, but something which was a very nice surprise is that the students with special educational needs did exceptionally well in the tasks, and so I have some numbers here Bye. There were 10 students in the class of 21 who had been flagged for having special educational needs. On average, their perceptions of their own intelligence shifted the most, so they had the largest increase. This group in intelligence, as indicated by the self-efficacy and self-concept measures. Their confidence rose across all subjects, but particularly in art history and RE were the top three and in terms of the leaderboard, they made up the majority of the leaderboard. They were two thirds of the final students on the leaderboard. So in the numbers and figures, there's a positive shift in their confidence and also their perception of how intelligent you need to be to do well in DT. The third part comes when I did interviews with them and I was getting these statements back from them, where they were essentially in disbelief, they thought you'd marked it wrong, didn't they?

Alex Augustus: 34:26

Yeah, they came up with all these kind of formative excuses as to why they were not the people who should be on the leaderboard, and the interesting thing I found was that they were always comparing it to other subjects. So it's not as though an A in D and T is the same weighting as an A in English science and maths.

Alex Augustus: 34:48

If you get an A in D and T, the feeling is that I perceived was like that A was a lesser A because, the subject was a lesser subject, which was very sad they were saying well, I was looking around the room, there are people in this class who are also in my maths class.

Alex Augustus: 35:09

They do very well at maths.

Alex Augustus: 35:11

Therefore they should be on this nonverbal ability leaderboard because it's going back to this idea of this kind of old idea of G and a general measure of intelligence, that if you could measure one facet of intelligence that can be applied across the board and if you're kind of the best in this one arena, you'll be best in all the arenas.

Alex Augustus: 35:37

And that's, I think, the spirit of what Gardner was saying. I mean, obviously, I agree that a lot of his claims were quite outlandish, particularly in the way that he selected eight types of intelligence which do seemingly appear to have just kind of been pulled from thin air. But in what I write in my paper really is that I'm taking the spirit of that. The spirit of his research is quite simple. It's just saying we take the academic abilities and we apply them across the board, as though that will tell you a measure of intelligence in every single subject. And what his research appears to be calling for For me is that we need different metrics, different forms of testing for different types of intelligence, and it's just the basic acknowledgement that there are different types of intelligence.

Alison Hardy: 36:41

Yeah, it's a bit more nuanced than a blanket, and so, sam, I'm going to come to you as we finish. So what, from your perspective, are your takeaways from Alex's work and the conversation this morning for you and for teachers who might be listening?

sam Booth: 37:03

So I think a clear part of this is again coming back to my first questions at the beginning is almost yeah, I know there's no time, but almost have a go. I think if you've got an idea you want to do a bit of research, we've got the pupils in front of us and it's just kind of have a go at that. I think that's important and I think, on what you've just been saying, alex, you've almost got to change the culture, haven't you? It's almost like a cultural shift. I found the same as what you were talking about in my last school and ultimately, you know they would look at their DT grade. They would see it not as valuable as a maths grade, but that's because they were looking at their next steps. So it'd be like, okay, where am I going to do my A levels? They want to look at these. They want to look at English, maths and science. And then what are the next steps after that?

sam Booth: 37:47

And a really good connection of this is if they wanted to go on to university to do engineering, they're not going to look at their A level engineering grade. They're not interested. They're interested in maths, further maths and physics, and almost no universities even on design degrees, you know architecture, almost none of them will put anything DT related on what you need to get in, you know, and obviously they wouldn't because it's the such as small cohort doing it. So you know, if financially it wouldn't, it wouldn't be possible. But that cascades, I think, then down through the, through the schooling system, to the point where we then have, like you said, year eight pupils who think their value in DT, even if they are performing very well, is lesser than a value in another subject. But I think as teachers we have to have that conversation with them, like you did, you know, and we have to change that culture. And you know, I think you know. Then you know, like what you said, you can, you can see the difference in the pupils.

Alison Hardy: 38:41

Yeah.

Alex Augustus: 38:42

Yeah, it's very and that I think I think I mentioned that point in the paper. I can't remember if it, if it got cut out, the shorter version of the paper. But yeah, it is very much a culture and I've had, I mean that you can see, across the board, like as a PGCE doing D&T. The year that I did it got funding for D&T students and there were people very openly, other PGCEs from other courses very openly coming to us and saying we can't believe that one of the funded subjects would be D&T, as though it was not worthy, you know, compared to to the sciences.

Alex Augustus: 39:30

On top of that, I've even had D&T teachers come to me and say that there's there's a really big ethical consideration here, which is that if we identify intelligent students in our classroom, we have an have an ethical obligation to push them away from D&T GCSE. We allow them to take the GCSE, then get into Oxford, and so I was curious about this and you know, during my time in Darwin College in Cambridge, I was asking all these engineering PhDs, what A levels did you do? And a lot of them told me that they had done D&T and it hadn't stopped them. But you're, you're right, there's a perception and it's almost like a risk, like if I do D&T, is it going to be taken seriously, and it's an uncertainty, whereas you don't get that with the maths, physics you know, the harder the harder.

Alison Hardy: 40:25

Be careful about the words. We all fall into it. We all fall into it. Now, I know this conversation could go on and it might be that we need to get you both back is get both back again to continue this conversation, and because we've actually covered a huge amount of ground in about 35, 40 minutes that we've been recording for. But no, thank you, I think there'll be plenty of people be wanting to follow up the conversation with both of you.

Alison Hardy: 40:50

And what's fascinating is this started as a conversation about a piece of research, but actually it's shown how the research was shaped and influenced by experience, by your experience, alex.

Alison Hardy: 41:02

That made a difference then to what you were trying out and then has got you thinking and Sam thinking, and others who are in your audience from there. So it's not just about I'm going to do this piece of research and publish it. It's actually it's come from a place that's of significance to you as a person involved in design, education and design, and then wanting to do something about it, trying out, seeing what works and what hasn't worked, sharing that and then an audience engaged with that and having a ripple effect. So hopefully that just shows to people how powerful a small piece of research that's not to demean what you've done Alex say it's small, but it was within one group can have an impact and get people thinking. So thank you for coming on and sharing your thoughts, and, sam, thank you. I can see that the pair of you could keep talking or aligned somewhere before we start spiralling off, but thank you to both of you.

sam Booth: 41:57

Brilliant. Thank you very much.

Alison Hardy: 42:01

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 member via speak pipe or drop me an email. You can find details about me, the podcast and how to connect with me on my website, drallisonhardycom. Also, if you want to support the podcast financially, you can become a patron. Links to speak pipe patron and my website are in the show notes. Thanks for listening.