Designing Spaces: The Invisible Pedagogy of D&T Classrooms

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How can the design and layout of a D&T classroom shape students' creativity and comfort in the space?

In this episode of Talking D&T, I continue the discussion from my recent chat with Alice Hellard and Derek Jones about design studio pedagogy. Their ideas got me thinking about the important role of physical space in design and technology education.

I consider how the D&T classroom can either welcome or intimidate students, especially as they move from primary to secondary school. Drawing on my own experiences and observations, I question whether starting with strict health and safety rules might work against the creative atmosphere we want to create.

I explore the link between our values as educators and the learning spaces we design. I talk about the importance of classroom layout, sharing stories about moving furniture around to encourage teamwork and the potential of flexible learning areas.

Key points include the idea of 'collaborative competition' in design education and finding a balance between safety and creating an environment where students feel free to experiment and take risks.

For D&T teachers and other interested listeners, this episode offers plenty to think about regarding how to match our physical spaces with our teaching philosophies. International listeners might find interesting comparisons with their own educational settings.

I suggest taking a fresh look at your teaching spaces. How do they show what you believe about design and technology education? More importantly, how do your students see and use these spaces? Chat with your colleagues about this – you could even take a photo of your classroom and discuss how it supports your teaching approach.

What small change could you make to your D&T space to better reflect your values as an educator?

Acknowledgement:
Some of the supplementary content for this podcast episode was crafted with the assistance of Claude, an AI language model developed by Anthropic. While the core content is based on the actual conversation and my editorial direction, Claude helped in refining and structuring information to best serve listeners. This collaborative approach allows me to provide you with concise, informative, and engaging content to complement each episode.

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Chapters

• 0:54 Design and Technology Classroom Environment
• 9:51 Promoting Inclusive Design and Technology Settings

Transcript

Alison Hardy: 0:55

I hope you enjoyed listening to the conversation I had with Alice and Derek and I think at the end of that conversation I commented about how little I'd said. I mean, it was just such a joy to be in the presence of of two experts and two like really deep thinkers about pedagogy and values in terms of design and, for Alice, design and technology. I really enjoyed it and so I didn't want to stop the flow. But what I was sort of left with and it was kind of come from previous conversations I'd had with Alice was about the space, the physical space that there is in design and technology, that how do children feel when they come into that space? Do they feel part of that space? And Derek sort of touched on this when he talked about design studios at university or design studios in workplaces where he'd been. And I related when I was at Brunel, the design studio space there and how I felt excluded from that, that it wasn't for me. So I wondered whether children had a similar feeling when they walked in, particularly when we're looking at that transition from primary into secondary. Some might feel excited, some might feel daunted, and how do you prepare them for that very different space that they might not have experienced before. And then also, how do you integrate them into that way of thinking? And so that got me thinking about teacher persona and style.

Alison Hardy: 2:37

And I see quite a lot in conversations with teachers around, particularly around secondary, how the first lessons are about health and safety and how to be safe in the classroom. And I do get it and I get that fear of responsibility of these young people in a room where there are so many things that could go wrong and cause injury. But it made me wonder about whether starting with health and safety maybe doing it too assertively or overtly might well actually undermine the very ethos style I'm going to use grand words like philosophy, about what the teacher believes about design and technology. They kind of get undermined if we start from this sort of quite scary space of health and safety. It is about keeping children safe. I understand that, but I wonder if there's ways and means of doing that that kind of align with what we believe about the subject and maybe that needs to be considered about how we make them feel part of that space. And also, you know the intimidation of walking into a space that they're unfamiliar with. With um, you know new things around, how do we make them feel that this is a space where they can fail, where they can try things, where actually coming with fresh, new ideas is central and it's really important? So that was one side of it that got me thinking.

Alison Hardy: 4:23

And then another side of thinking was about coming back to some of the work that I've done on values previously and how that work that I've done on values previously and how that relates to what we do in a classroom and in a space, how we own that space as educators, how we take hold of that space, and then think about how that reflects again what we, what we believe, um, and I think that's that's really important, because then that starts to think about pedagogy and the pedagogical choices that we make. And so I think, as as educators and that's where I would say I am, I'm deliberately trying to avoid it's very easy for me to slip into the language about being a D&T teacher, because I'm not and haven't been for a long time is thinking about our values, what we believe about education, and checking that out and questioning it and seeing how that manifests in the spaces that we work in. And Alice talks about that, about, um, you know, children's autonomy and having choice and where they have control and where they have freedom is really important to think about, about values. So I think there's two things there about how do we, how do we as educators, how do you as a design and technology teacher if that's who you are and you're listening how do you bring people into your space? You know children that into your space, your space, into that learning space and it's it's unfamiliar and it's new to them. But you want them to feel like it's their space, not necessarily that they belong I think that's a that's kind of possibly an ambition, sometimes too far but that they feel that it's a space where they can design and where they can make and they can experiment and test ideas. But equally, how does that space reflect what you believe about the subject and whether that actually might exclude some people, make them feel part of it, make some people feel less part of it, and how does that then affect your pedagogical approach?

Alison Hardy: 6:29

And myself and sarah davis we used to have quite a lot of conversations about table layout and and such. I find it a challenge when I was teaching about having rows, because to me design and technology is about collaboration, about having that space to, to talk about ideas, and and Derek talked about I think he used the word um collaborative competition, where you need to be able to see other people and what they're doing, not because you're copying, but because it's prompting you to think, and that's why having things around that inspire and that children can question is really important to me as an educator. And so, yes, sarah, and I used to talk about you know how do we lay out the spaces, how do we lay out the rooms? And I know when I was teaching, I'd be regularly going into my rooms and rearranging the table, slinging them around to try and organise them into group space, to bigger group space and so on, getting the children to move their stools or their chairs around. So we had different ways of interaction, because I think for me that was really important as part of my pedagogy and at the university.

Alison Hardy: 7:40

You can imagine that most of the spaces are around desks, single desks, two desks but we were really excited when, at Nottingham Trent, something came in called scale up I can't remember what the acronyms are, but it came with these really big round tables and so we could have up to 10 students round a table, and some of these spaces were big enough to have 80 to 100 students in. They could be split into smaller rooms and made into bigger rooms. That flexibility and that pedagogy is really important and space creates that um. I like the idea of round tables because it um allows people to move closer together and move further apart as well, to have some privacy at certain points, but also to to bring things together and I think that is a really for me, a really crucial um philosophy around design and technology education, including around when children are modeling and making things and realizing their ideas.

Alison Hardy: 8:38

Having that um, that space, and Matt McLean and I were asked by the DfE a few years ago to create an idea for a new design and technology space, a new pedagogical space that built on the ethos of what design and technology was about, and we couldn't get. We couldn't get round tables because, because of what we were trying to get the tables to do, we wanted them to be multi-purpose in terms of where they could be clean spaces for designing if we wanted to have pure, clean spaces and where there could be vices and and other things that were attached that made modeling, making and so on possible. So I suppose this this is really about thinking about how space includes and excludes, how it reflects what we believe and whether it does reflect what we believe. And if it doesn't, does it make us feel uncomfortable? What can we do about it? Can we look at that space through other people's eyes? And I've been into schools where there's like masses of stuff on the walls and I I find it overwhelming and I'm thinking as a child. Would you know? Would you know where to look, what to look at what you want that to do?

Alison Hardy: 9:45

Um, we used to, at nottingham trend, when the students were doing their sort of design projects.

Alison Hardy: 9:52

Um, you know, they're sort of what we would call um synoptic studies, which was like the, the summation of what they'd learned.

Alison Hardy: 10:00

Um, you know, we try and give them, help them create a space that was theirs, but equally didn't exclude working with others, because that was a really important philosophy of ours. And again, I think that extends itself to booklets and sketchbooks and loose bits of paper and children having boxes to put things in or to share them in, and so on. Um, and I think that that language, again of Derek's, of collaborative competition, is really powerful, is really good. So hopefully that's given you some thinking about space, about inclusivity, about values, about what you believe about the subject, how that's reflected, and having conversations with colleagues about those spaces. So if you've got pictures of what your teaching space is like and you want to have a conversation or share it, annotate it, then please feel free to do that. I'm always interested to see what people do in terms of design and technology, what they value and their pedagogical approaches and choices and how we include children in a design and technology learning space. As ever, thanks for listening.