Rethinking Design and Technology Education for a Sustainable Future: A Conversation with Professor David Spendlove

In this episode, I interview  David Spendlove, a professor at the University of Manchester, about his radical thinking on design and technology education. Spendlove reintroduces his concept of "Design and Technology 2.0," which aims to create a new conceptual space for rethinking the subject without the baggage of its current form.

David argues that the current model of D&T education, driven by materialistic outcomes and consumerist ideologies, may be doing more harm than good in today's context of sustainability and climate change concerns. He suggests that D&T education should move away from its focus on product creation and instead empower students to question assumptions and engage with the complexity of values involved in design decisions.

The discussion delves into the political nature of D&T education, its historical context, and the challenges it faces in the current educational landscape. David emphasises the need for a critical examination of the subject's underlying ideologies and the importance of considering an "Earth-centred" approach rather than just focusing on human needs and wants.

The podcast concludes with thoughts on the future of D&T education, the role of academia in provoking new ideas, and the necessity of creating space for teachers to rethink the subject. David and I highlight the potential for D&T to be a powerful and transformative subject on the curriculum if it can evolve to address the pressing issues of our time.

(Text generated by AI, edited by Alison Hardy)

Links to things mentioned in the show are  only available to subscribers.

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: 0:56

So welcome to this week's episode of Talking D&T. Today I'm with David Spendlove, who's a professor at the University of Manchester. He's been on the podcast before talking about some of his thinking about design and or technology 2.0, which has been a bit of an impetus for the redesigning D&T project that I'm doing with some teachers. But David's on here to come and contribute to the shaping D&T podcast, which is a series that I'm running around what's happening around design and technology in England at the moment, how we're in, the situation we're in and what needs to be done. And David's here because David's quite a radical thinker, I think, for some people about design and technology, and challenge is me whenever I read one of his papers. So kind of the starting point is partly PATT 40 paper, do no harm 2.0, but also maybe the wider context about the politics of D&T. So, David, just want to give us a quick hello and bye about who you are and where you are.

David Spendlove: 1:57

Yeah, so hello everyone, and my name is David Spendlove. I'm professor of education, got a long background in design and technology education. I write about it. I don't necessarily work in the area these days, but I think that offers me a different perspective. So, for instance, one of the things I have responsibility for the University of Manchester is an oversight of around 800 programmes. So you know, every one of those programmes tells me their subject is the most important. So I'm used to that and I think one of the things we have to do is think about what the unique contribution of design technology is in a competitive field where lots of programs or subjects should be in that space. So that's my background.

David Spendlove: 2:42

And the paper that you just mentioned was the paper I presented at the Pat conference in October. Interestingly, the PATT conference was in Liverpool and it was held about a mile from where I was born and I nearly didn't go because I've got to be to many of these conferences around the world, but I thought I've got to go to the one that's nearest to home. So I went and I really enjoyed seeing everyone in that conference and thinking again and presenting the paper. And the paper I presented was 2.0, do no Harm. So it's building upon this idea of 2.0 design technology. Just briefly, just to reiterate what that is. The reason for saying 2.0 is I'm not interested in having a conversation specifically myself about the development of the existing model in its current form, because I think that, contested, it exists, it's got a history and so on. So by talking about 2.0, and this conversation has been gone, I don't know how many years it's to try and create the conceptual space where people don't have the automatic history and cultural alliance and feeling about that activity and to go what would the 2.0 version be in a different space? Because if we try to get from where we are, without current model, to the next iteration, it's a very slow process. It's grounded in history and strong feelings and people have got their own beliefs. But by creating the space for 2.0, again, I want for people to kind of put their baggage aside or be it difficult and say, okay, so if we were starting again, knowing what we know, what is it that this thing should be? So that's been part of the thinking that I've been doing over I don't know five, six, seven, eight years in relation to this and I kind of add to it incrementally when I get the opportunity.

David Spendlove: 5:02

And this latest one starts from a position and it's again it's deliberately challenging and that's again it's able to be challenging because it doesn't exist. But it questions the assumptions that we have about the 1.0 version of design technology current version we have and the starting points and it's in the paper, and the paper is available presumably in various places. The starting point is that on any given day, students across the globe who have adopted a form of 1.0 are potentially doing more harm than good. And it's deliberately provocative and that's why the paper is called you know harm and the do no harm is based upon the neurosurgeon who you know. His mantra when he was doing brain surgery was, you know, to minimize the harm that he was doing. And I think if you took a perspective of designing technology and said, how do we create a subject that doesn't do harm? Now you might say, well, what harm is it doing? Well, I think you know.

David Spendlove: 6:20

Again, I think the difficulty is we've, we've, we've developed a subject and the subject is now existing in a very different area from which it evolved from.

David Spendlove: 6:31

So you look at the historical nature of the subject and where it's come from and you know it was driven by kind of materialistic outcomes. You know, manufacturing, product development, and one of the things that I've been doing is kind of talking about this from a political perspective as well. So there's two things going on here in this conversation. Because designing technology grew out of a capitalist kind of philosophy, you know it. It's emerged in the kind of 80s and 90s, supported and promoted by conservative government. That's where the main growth emerged, and I think we're now in a very different space, particularly when you think about the kind of sustainable issues that we deal with and how we move away from this kind of growth orientated capitalist ideology that we've got, where we create products in the subject. And there's lots of issues that are contentious with that. You know, one, I don't think it's sustainable. Two, I don't think it's desirable. But three, it's almost something that we do quite naturally. It's instinctive.

David Spendlove: 7:53

You know the saying yeah, something without thinking isn't it really Now question yeah, and it's almost innate in the subject that we, you know, we are creating products. I mean, interestingly, when I wrote the paper as you know, the papers go out and they get kind of reviewed and you never quite know what you're going to get and in terms of feedback and none of the feedback was about any of these points that I'm making you it was it was actually just more from an international perspective saying, yeah, that doesn't necessarily apply to us in in this particular country although not your country, it was. But I'm talking about the UK and certainly England, and England's model has been a production and consumption model which ultimately is, I say, potentially doing more harm than good. And there's a fine balance because there's there's there's that whole notion of you know if, if the benefits outweigh the disadvantages, then you can justify it. So you'd have to have some strong, you know, sense of conviction as to what, what do we ultimately get from the subject that justifies the nature of the way that we do it, to justify the consumption, the material use, the cost of running it and so on. And again, going back to what kind of previous point about having an overview of lots of subjects. Everyone's fighting for space and everyone is wanting to be in a space and I think increasingly you've got to be able to articulate what that cost benefit analysis is. And you know, if design technology can demonstrate that or evidence that or even make a clear case for that, then it's weird.

David Spendlove: 9:44

I will also say that you know there is a danger and I see it with the design technology association and peripheral activities of trying to recreate what we had in the past, because what we've got now is failing. We know it's failing. You know I don't know what the numbers are, but about 20% of what they used to be in terms of entry. You know, we know we can't get the teachers and so on. But in trying to resuscitate or reinstate what we had, you know it's almost walking down a pathway that leads us to a kind of worst case scenario. And again, if you take the position of do no harm, that puts a different emphasis on the subject. You think about material consumption, about what you're educating children into. You know you're kind of educating them into kind of capitalist consumption, consumerist ideologies, which really, you know the subject offers a real opportunity to question and actually one of the viewers on the curriculum that can ask those questions. So yeah, that's my pitch. That's quite a pitch.

Alison Hardy: 10:51

Yeah, I mean, I Petina talked about this as well. You know, we're teaching children about sustainability and then we make them to make stuff that ends up in the bin. Yeah, yeah, For one of a better way of putting it.

Alison Hardy: 11:05

Yeah, I think, yeah, I sort of heard about that early 2010,. That sort of area and that kind of got me to think and it. But it's very difficult to say that out loud to D&T teachers because it is so innate. It's so part of our, of the being of the subject, this manifestation of the things that are in the heads, of this realization of this three dimensional thing. Even though people try different things and say we do it with CAD, we do it with, we use scrap materials and such, it's still, as you say, perpetuating that idea of consumption and that capitalist idea of generating more is a good thing.

David Spendlove: 11:47

I mentioned it in the. I mean so two things, though. One is that's why I'm talking about 2.0. People got to do what they've got to do, they've got to deliver a curriculum. They've got to, you know, in the space, in the space where there's no alternative, that's what they have to do. 2.0 affords us the opportunity to do that. But I mentioned in the paper you know I'm, I, I, you know I've got a passion for that, I've got a passion for design and longstanding passion and interest in design and products and so on, and I'm not anti-products but mentioned in the paper that I went into the design using in Milan immediately after COVID and was kind of struck because I was looking around and whereas normally I would be kind of cooing at these products, you know we'd just come out of a pandemic and we'd all had our lives dramatically changed and you can see very similar scenarios with kind of the pandemic and issues to do with climate change and so on.

David Spendlove: 12:53

You know climate change could, could be COVID exponentially, you know, drawn out. And there in the you know and I've been to design museums all around the world and there in the design museum was this homage to consumption products, you know, over-consumption. And, you know, whilst they they, they were testament to, to interesting, innovative design, we have had this kind of tension between good design and promotion of goods and design obsolescence, where we're creating things that people don't need, and you know, that kind of strikes me as something we've got to reconcile with. And if you imagine a 12, 13, 14 year old child who is pretty clued up and it's always mixed, the kind of the nature of the, you know where children actually are, in the kind of the sustainability debate but you imagine a child who's pretty clued up being taken into a design technology session where they're going to make something that actually no one needs, they're going to use materials that actually shouldn't have been, you know, consumed in that way and they're going to have to take this thing home that actually no one really wants. And you know, and what did they actually learn in that process?

David Spendlove: 14:19

Well, it goes back to something I wrote many, many years ago which was called a device for grandma. And you know, the device for grandma was this device that this child had made and it was the most fantastically engineered device, which was basically to help a grandmother put a nail in the wall to hang a picture, and it was massively over engineered and used huge amounts of materials and actually the answer was BluTac. You know you could use BluTac to just simply do what this device did, but because of the kind of coercion and collusion that's required in the subject of passing, then we legitimize you know we legitimize parking, your beliefs and values to enable you to get to this. You know notional success, and I think I mentioned in the paper. You know the road to failure is through this kind of appearance of success.

Alison Hardy: 15:18

Yeah, yeah, and you mentioned there around values when you were talking at the beginning about you know.

Alison Hardy: 15:25

You know, putting aside 1.0 and looking at 2.0 and some of the things that some of us are doing, kind of like this tinkering around trying to reclaim what was lost.

Alison Hardy: 15:35

I mean, I'm not so struck as the failure about the failure if it's a failure about the numbers, because it might be where the subject needs to be at the moment, where it's the right place, but it's more the quality and the understanding of what we're doing that challenges me.

Alison Hardy: 15:51

But what I think is one of the things that was around in 1.0, early on, which I really think has been lost, is this discussion about values. You know, and I've been doing some work where you know, I've kind of gone back to those original documents and looked at them in the context of what the curriculum is at the moment and all that stuff that David Layton did, that taxonomy of values, A taxonomy. But where do you hear and see that taught, you know, and children engaging with the complexity of those values and how we have to make compromise, you know, and but those things aren't talked about anymore. It's so strung up, pulled up on this process and, as you say, this collusion to get this outcome to meet the marking criteria, while we're forgetting. Actually, maybe what the might thing is to do with that chapter is to design nothing.

David Spendlove: 16:46

Yeah, absolutely, and in fact many years ago, when I was running the design technology course for teacher training and I actually did this exercise with the group and someone came back and did exactly that.

Alison Hardy: 17:03

Yeah.

David Spendlove: 17:04

And I've subsequently done it in various forums where you know they talk about being creative and so on, and you then take them at face value and you go okay. So what I've done is not do what people would normally do and there's a tension because people feel very uncomfortable with that. But again, you know the cost benefit analysis of doing design technology. I'm sure there's lots of people who want to do that technology, but taking a purely kind of a critical stance to look at the subject, taking a piece of material that you've flown all around the world, you get there and then to cut it up into something that wasn't needed and then it's going to a landfill or to have to have this notional, emotional value which you know because they've put something into it. I think you've got to have a strong justification somewhere along the line. And you know, again, I think we've talked about this before.

David Spendlove: 18:04

But the thing that that got me many, many years ago it's almost 20 years ago now was the QCA statement of importance, where it was about improving the quality of life, and I think trying to improve the quality of life in 2007 is actually probably very different. We live in a very different world in 2024 and I think the world of climate change has moved on significantly over that time, I think in terms of consumers and politics, and the nature of engagement with products has also moved on. Yes, I don't know if the subject on and that notion of values, yes, is absolutely critical to that and you know. So, again, the I've been kind of just going back and thinking about some things and you're right about Steve Petrina, because there's actually a very few people who have talked about the kind of the political nature of Steve Petrina Kirsty Min, steve Kerl there, the prime ones who you know have had this conversation.

Alison Hardy: 19:09

He's reading is really uncomfortable yeah, yeah, yeah because it's challenging this norm.

Alison Hardy: 19:17

If you say this innate thing that we make stuff and that's the outcome, that's that's what the whole thing is about, and you know the thing I've been writing is, you know, I went back to this value thing. So going back to that idea about, well, the final product is nothing. But if I can stand there and articulate why it's nothing from a values perspective, then I've done it, haven't I? I've done no harm. Do you know what I mean? Because I'm able to, and it's that. But we're not giving children that language about values.

David Spendlove: 19:47

Well, yeah, and we're not giving them, you know, the power to actually, or the agency to question those assumptions. I mean again, you know, I mean you've seen it a thousand times were, you know, on a project and you know I always sat in that space, that difficult space, with when I was training teachers. In that you know, I recognize that on the Monday they had to do that project with that group.

David Spendlove: 20:17

There was no, there was no question about it, but I was also going to provoke them as well to question it, because you know what you would see in the classroom and you still see it and you still hear about it as well is 20 children, 25 children increasingly, doing X project and the teachers, you know, kind of miraculously, slowing some down and speeding some up, and the actual real control is the teacher, you know, and that's where the art of the teacher is, because their job is to get them all to the end and finished at the same time. And you often used to get the trainees who would stay up all night finishing the children's projects for them, and the kids would walk in the next day and think you know, the pixies have been and what would actually learning from that. So we have this tension where the product becomes the thing and that drives the whole process, which is an artificial process. And actually it's an artificial process about so many different things. It's about kind of as I said you know, going back to previous stuff I've written about kind of collusion, and so the real product of design technology wasn't that object, it was what was going on to actually create that project. It was the kind of silent, kind of noise around the. You know the different views.

David Spendlove: 21:39

So in this again, going back to many years ago, this device for grandma. Basically you've got all the different people, you've got the exam board, you know, saying this is great but knowing actually they've just contrived the situation. The teacher going this is fantastic, but equally they've just kind of colluded. The student going I've done this because it's my exam. The grandma saying I didn't really want this in the first place but I'm going to say I like this and I'm going to write in the evaluation.

David Spendlove: 22:05

You know, and you've got everyone kind of pretending, and you know, again, it's slightly cynical view, but we have this over and over again and I think it may well have been legitimate, even more than legitimate, in kind of the history of history of the subject, so that the 70s and the 80s and the 90s, you know when I was training and when I was delivering the subject, you know there wasn't the same level of concern. But you look at the trajectory of society now and the kind of concerns that we have over kind of consumerism and kind of the messages that we pass on to children, and I do think we have to consider, you know, what does it mean to improve the quality of life. And you know, when children are exposed to those kind of critical questions, inevitably some of their responses may be kind of superficial, because I think the reality is, I think we've just got to that that's. That's what the subject offers. It offers the opportunity to go that they normally go into this and assume that's your dog.

Alison Hardy: 23:13

It always has to make an appearance, at least you know, once every two or three weeks.

Alison Hardy: 23:25

So so, because I've got two questions for you. So you mentioned Steve, Petrina , Kurt and Steve. But it's interesting that those voices are difficult to hear sometimes, and that's not to diminish what they're writing. If you look at the, if you want to be crude, look at citations and you know and search as a way of metrics of looking at their involvement, inner-world involvement, that's wrong. You're not going to say why are these voices left on the outside? Is it just? It's just too difficult to shake the 1.0 and that's why 2.0 is needed.

David Spendlove: 24:09

Yeah, I mean, I think one potentially is. You know a lot of the stuff that gets attention in design technology. It has to be accessible. You know I'm not writing my stuff to be accessible, it's thinking out loud. You know I've done the kind of accessible stuff and I've done the kind of the CPD many years ago and this was intertwined with that. But you know this is a. This stuff that we're doing is written for an academic community and it's about being kind of thoughtful and considerate and challenging and then it's for things like this to make this more accessible. So I mean, again, you go through a trajectory. So Steve's stuff I think is brilliant, but it's just it is quite difficult for me to understand and you know Steve was one of the people I was most pleased to catch up with over well, immediately after the pandemic, because you know our work is in a similar area.

David Spendlove: 25:16

Steve Petrina, you know, I remember hearing Steve speak many, many years ago and actually thinking that's brilliant, because actually there's other people kind of talking about this in the same way or thinking about it in the same way, and you know, one of the things about this is that it also has to be considered. So let me just talk about the political side as well. I think this is something because I've just not just, but there was a book that we wrote in teacher education not long ago, yeah, and it's teacher education crisis, and hopefully you can divide it into it because it's a free download and so on. Yeah, and all my students are using it in their masters. So that is very much about. So my chapter is about political intervention, delivery of political intervention to disrupt the supply of teachers in exceptional ways, to do things that we just haven't seen before. But, yeah, was under the radar, and the almost exact opposite has happened in design technology, where the political level of intervention has been absolutely minimal and superficial. You know it's it's it's to the point of neglect. Design technology has has been left to kind of wither away Now.

David Spendlove: 26:50

You know, I remember being involved in the subject in the 90s and you know it was this hotbed of activity. There was stuff going on all around the country. There were people doing stuff, people had access to money sources and so on. And then you kind of fast forward now and you know people are trying to make, make something out of what really isn't there. And then, secondly, you've got this, this issue with the subject, which hasn't moved on in the time. So there's not been any kind of considered review, there's not been any kind of real curriculum developments that have gone on and, as a consequence, again that poses real challenges to the, the kind of the veracity of the subject. And then again, you know we don't have that alternative discourse then about what is the kind of materialistic assumptions about this, because actually what we talked about in terms of product, it also is again I mentioned this in the paper it's anti-democratic, it's exploited to exploit it, it's perpetual, rapid growth oriented, capitalist, and there are things that fly under the radar.

David Spendlove: 28:07

So, whilst the teacher doesn't necessarily think, oh, these are the things I'm doing, but that's what actually, you know, there's there's there's kind of an assumption that that's okay to do that. And again, I wrote in one of the papers about 2.0 being an activist, because I don't think you can be passive in technology, you know. But the nature of the subject, it is by the nature of you know, taking action. You're, you're making a decision and decision, whether you fully understand it or not, is is orientated towards the political and society and so on. And we, we had another statement in design and technology kind of policy about needs and wants. Yeah, technology, or designing technology, design and or technology 2.0.

David Spendlove: 28:58

You know, has has typically been oriented to the round needs and wants, and actually that's a very superficial view, you know, as in I need this and I want this and this is what we, you know, and actually it's not increasingly. We've talked about human centered, but if you actually take it further, you become Earth centered. You know needs are once. Your needs are once are not more important than an Earth centered approach, because needs are once is what's driving climate change and capital consumption, you know.

David Spendlove: 29:32

You know anti-cognocratic approach and abuses of power and so on, and again, a lot of this resides in the kind of the critical pedagogy paradigm where you know people have written extensively about the whole relationship of education and power and addressing inequalities. Again, you might not think or people may not think, well, that's not the role of education. But if it's not the role of education, then to be aware of what you're doing and the impact of that and how it might be reproducing inequalities through either naivety, ignorance or just kind of not being interested in that, I think you do have to take that on and again, you can see the tensions in that but also the real opportunity in designing technology.

Alison Hardy: 30:22

Yeah, as you're talking, it goes back to. One of your original points was designing. Technology was one of the most powerful subjects. To do that on the curriculum and creating a 2.0 that brings that to the foreground does place that as an essential subject on the curriculum, but in its current form, you can see, if you're looking at that earth-centered approach which, given the current state as you're pointing out, in 2024, it's not sustainable to continue in this vein. So we do this we have in these conversations.

David Spendlove: 30:56

But we're carrying on almost headlong into this kind of this doomsday scenario, doing the same as we've always done. There is that saying, and I think I can never remember if it's Baudier who talks about fish being the last to discover water. We need to discover in the subject the political ecosystems that sustain the kind of class systems, the disadvantages that the private children have opportunities. Again, every time the government is being asked about its performance over the last 15 years and they are typically pointing to education as being one of their high spots, and they talk about literacy. Okay, great, fine, brilliant, but at what cost? And it didn't need to be at that cost, because we know we've developed literacy through subjects. I was writing about this 20 odd years ago.

David Spendlove: 31:53

Developing literacy through the curriculum was very much what you were doing, and what we've done, or what government's done, is taken a very narrow focus. As we know again, they have a hierarchy of subjects which are not justifiable. The private children's are a breadth of prickly, so we're now talking about absence from school because children aren't engaged in a breadth of experiences. This hierarchy of subjects fails children. We have a system that simply fails children and we have a curriculum that doesn't recognize the plurality of skills and the diversity of pupils and the differences in knowledge and understanding that the breadth of the curriculum offers. And then we question, one, why we can't find any teachers and two, why we can't find children who should be in school when they're not turning up. And there is a kind of a complexity to this and often governments, and we understand why, but government will go for simple solutions.

David Spendlove: 32:56

But I do think and I'm writing something at the moment and one of the terms I've used is the kind of the boiling frog of capitalism where we wouldn't necessarily have recognized the subject as being kind of some of those things I've talked about Don't sound very pleasing or popular, but when you suddenly expose it and you go and you coy out as consumers' capitalist, exploitative, then you start to see it. And I dug out some books earlier. Just, these are old books. This is John Eggleston's design education. This is now nearly 50 years old.

Alison Hardy: 33:38

Yeah, I've got a copy of that on my shelf.

David Spendlove: 33:41

I was just looking to see if it mentioned politics, and it doesn't, but it skirts around it. And then this one which was an 80s publication, technologies, which was a very popular book at the time, which was Bob McCormick and Anita Cross, and again I was just looking to see, did we talk about politics? And actually we didn't. It was everything but. And actually what we're actually talking about now is exposing politics for what it is and thinking about what are the politics of the subject.

David Spendlove: 34:15

So this thing that I'm writing at the moment is about the politics in and on the subject, because what you've got in dynamics, you've got the dynamic within the subject and then you've got the dynamic on the subject. For instance, say, something like the training of teachers. You and I know this has gone incredibly messy and the training of teachers isn't going to be taking place in universities or if it is, it's going to be on the tightly controlled situations and actually some of the things I've been talking about may not even be possible in theater. So one of the things is is trying to understand and disentangle that politics of design, technology and politics in and again, in the absence of a voice for the subject, as in, you know who is advocating for it, because if government isn't advocating for it, it won't emerge. So what is it that's going to be that governments will want to buy into? And that's the challenging thing.

Alison Hardy: 35:22

So, as we come to the end, you've laid out a pretty strong case for it and you said that government, you know with government's key, so how, who should be involved in doing that and how could that happen, and any thoughts on that bit, the practical- side.

David Spendlove: 35:45

It's a really interesting one because, again, I'm not. I mean, it was interesting. When I presented this at a Pat, someone said, okay, so so what is this thing? Then I said it's like a good design problem. We don't have a solution. We're not jumping to solution. We're creating the space for people to think about what it might be and we're exposing some of the challenges that we are facing in the subject.

David Spendlove: 36:11

One of the things, again, I mentioned about the subject it's kind of unwittingly become this medium of unsustainable, anti-democratic, exploitative capitalist ideologies and you know we've got to just go. Okay, if that's the reality, what's the alternative? Now I think again and this wouldn't take long to start thinking about, it is okay. What would be alternative to that? However, the more difficult side is the ecosystem that sustains the subject, which I've written about previously, is it's kind of it's been torn away. I think the danger is that we try to recreate what we had, and I've said before, you know, the association looks like it's trying to almost recreate and make the same mistakes again. But they are, you know, they're caught up in something themselves which you know. How do they break that cycle? Membership focused, obviously, so they have to serve that membership and that membership wants to carry on doing what they want to do, then that's what it's about.

David Spendlove: 37:16

So I think it's going to be interesting. You know, and all of you you can hope for is one. Some of the, the genuine educational values that we've talked about, shine through. People aren't seduced by the, the kind of the previous narratives around production and consumption, because that was a very different model, I think. But you hope that people would be interested in some of the things that we've talked about within the context of material cultures and products and environment, because they're not going to go away, but what we should have and it goes back to, you know, technical literacy and those things. Again, we've been around the cycle and talked about those for many, many years but that that area may present more opportunities. Now, again, it comes down to political persuasion. This isn't good. Good ideas just don't win they. They need, you know, a certain number of influences. And again, going back historically, you know we always had people in the right places. We don't even know where the right places are these days.

Alison Hardy: 38:27

I was.

David Spendlove: 38:28

You know, think tanks seem to be, or think tanks and certain political groups. They think that's where political power resides and you would hope that some political force would want that. We're not hearing anything, you know, about design technology in new governments. The danger is that it just simply becomes vocational and people just assign the subject to a vocational stream, you know, and which is a very simplistic notion. So, again, I think, problematising it. I'm comfortable with the idea of problematising it, from which we develop a better understanding for an alternative to emerge. We don't have that yet and equally, you know, at the end of the day, this is just me jumping up and down and kind of fairing my head through these papers If people you know want to take them on, as you've kind of done with some of the work that you've been doing, you know, that's that's for you know, but you're challenging me now.

Alison Hardy: 39:30

I'm thinking I don't go fine, but that's what you're challenging me. I'm making notes and thinking right, I'm going to go back to my redesigning D&T team and say, right, we need to be thinking more radically about this and some of our debates need to be really pushing the boundaries and and not just going with the the obvious answers to those contentious questions that we've published. But actually what's a radical Answer to each of those questions? You know that might push people's thinking.

Alison Hardy: 40:01

It's a bit like it's been, like that scene and In the devil wears Prada, where she talks about the color of the belt and the jumper, I mean, and you have to have fashion that pushes and that that seeks its way through to normality. It's a little bit like that. If we, if you have the papers that the Ideas, the thoughts that people like yourself caught Steve and Steve Petrina all have, which are coming from academia, you know, are coming from that philosophical place, and which, yeah, teachers Don't necessarily have the space and the time and To read them and they are hard-going, those papers, some of them. That's why the podcast is useful, but you know, so in the, in the debates that we're having in our group, is well, why shouldn't one of us write something that's really extreme?

David Spendlove: 40:45

you know that really challenges which may well seek through and pervade Might emerge a little bit, but it might know somebody a bit more and you you kind of get that way of thinking, pushing stuff out on the extremes I mean, I don't know where my stuff fits in, but you know what you're doing is you're recentering what, what is, and the other side of it is, again, you know, going back to Writing this. You know there's an area which I've probably talked before about. This is the area of pedagogies, of discomfort, and pedagogies. Discomfort is all about that kind of pushing people into space they don't necessarily want to go, but also recognizing you can't just, you can't just do it, you got, you got to. Yeah, how you doing it. And that's why 2.0 is deliberately framed as A different space, because if we're talking about teachers going on Monday to do some of this stuff, you know that's, that's a different matter. But if we're talking about a future orientation of something, then you know that's where 2.0 fits in, because we go okay, forget about my year nine, this is what it should be.

David Spendlove: 41:52

At the moment, you know, teachers are concerned with so many different things and and the danger is, you know, you see, social media, it just gets wrapped up and caught in the moment and Not able to kind of think in a different space, whereas what we really need and it's the thing that is most lacking and it's the thing that I most desire when I was a teacher was just that bit of space to think okay, what? And? And again, you know we can serve a purpose in academia to kind of provoke us. Those questions and challenge. Then Part of the rule of universities are for we yeah, you know we're in in the independent space and we're given legitimacy to think, and you know it's not completely off the wall. It's based upon a history, based on, at the end of the day, it's based upon a passion for the subject.

David Spendlove: 42:41

I've seen amazing things. I still think it's capable delivery, brilliant things. I think there's a few areas that can achieve that. But equally, you know there has to be opportunities for us to rethink what we do. Because if we do try to reproduce what we've had, albeit embellished in a different format, it will fail again. And let's be brutal about it, let's hope it fails again. Because if we have something that simply reproduces inequalities and and consumption and certain kind of Political ideologies, without us even knowing it or being worthy, going back to the boiling from capitalism, then you know it should fail because actually we're not doing our pupils a service, or the subject or or the contents, potentially of the subject Merit in terms of what they should be achieving.

Alison Hardy: 43:39

I think that's a pretty powerful note on which to end, because you've, as usual, blown my head off and I'm sure you'll make people think, and I know you're writing a chapter for a book that's hopefully gonna come out later in the year. That was a secret.

David Spendlove: 43:53

Yeah, that's why I've been calling.

Alison Hardy: 43:55

Yeah, I'm writing a chapter for the same, but we're not saying what the book is or what it's for, so but yeah, but we've got that, that, all that, published. Also, you shared some of these ideas in lots of places and I've made some notes as we've been talking and about putting links up, so people can kind of see that evolution of your thinking around that, and I'll put some links up to Steven court and Steve's work as well, and I'm gonna do a follow-up podcast that'll come out on the Thursday when this comes out on the Tuesday with some other thoughts and that people might think of and To to add to, you have to subscribe to that content. You see, you don't get Thursdays for free. I'm Intercapitalism in that way.

David Spendlove: 44:35

I've got to pay for the podcast.

Alison Hardy: 44:36

So now I've just done the figures today about how much it costs me a year and stuff. I've got to get some income somewhere. So yeah, and I think so much, david, that was. That was great. I really enjoyed that conversation, as usual.