Knowledge in D&T: More Than Just Skills and Facts

In this episode, I explore what research tells us about knowledge in Design & Technology education. Understanding the nature of knowledge in D&T is crucial for effective teaching and curriculum planning, so I examine both procedural and conceptual knowledge, exploring how they connect and what this means for our practice.

Following our previous discussion on D&T capability, I analyse the relationship between these knowledge types, drawing from Bob McCormick's 1997 paper and wider literature. Through examples from textiles and materials, I demonstrate how procedural knowledge extends beyond following steps to understanding interconnected processes. Looking at tasks like using a sewing machine, I discuss how teachers can build pupils' procedural knowledge over time, helping them develop both technical competence and the ability to select appropriate processes.

I challenge some common approaches to teaching theory and discuss how conceptual knowledge encompasses categories and relationships rather than just facts. Using examples from my teaching - including a memorable lesson about bronze - I consider how we might better structure our teaching of materials and their properties.

For D&T teachers, this discussion offers insights for curriculum planning and sequencing. Whether you're developing schemes of work or considering progression, these ideas could reshape how you approach building pupils' knowledge and capability.

What's your take on knowledge in D&T? How do you balance procedural and conceptual understanding in your teaching?

• Examining the importance of knowledge in D&T education 
• Differentiating between procedural and conceptual knowledge 
• Discussing the interconnected nature of different teaching procedures 
• Highlighting the role of literature in shaping understanding 
• Challenging traditional views on skills vs knowledge in D&T 
• Illustrating practical examples of knowledge in action 
• Reflecting on the implications for effective curriculum planning

Mentioned in the show

Hurrell, D., 2021. Conceptual knowledge or procedural knowledge or conceptual knowledge and procedural knowledge: Why the conjunction is important to teachers. Australian Journal of Teacher Education (Online), 46 (2), 57–71.

McCormick, R., 1997. Conceptual and Procedural Knowledge. International Journal of Technology and Design Education, 7 (1), 141–159.

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 my research, thinking and 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.

Chapters

• 0:06 Design and Technology Knowledge
• 8:26 Procedural and Conceptual Knowledge in Design
• 20:06 Concepts and Classification in Design

Transcript

Alison Hardy: 0:06

you're listening to the talking dnt podcast. I'm dr allison hardy, a writer, researcher and advocate of design and technology education. In each episode I share views, news and opinions about dnt. So this is the second episode in the series that I'm doing about what does the research say? About what is good dnt? And last week I spoke about the curriculum focus for design and technology. What does the curriculum do? What's it? What's it building up in pupils according to the literature? And I shared some stuff last week about design and technology capability as a construct that has sort of faded away in D&T but has more recently come back and I think it's a really important one. So do go back and have a listen to that episode. But I talked about that. Children's design and technology capability is built up over time by them drawing on the bank of knowledge that they have. That grows over time in design and technology. So I'm going to do two episodes. That's what I've got planned.

Alison Hardy: 1:16

Knowing me, I might end up doing three About what we mean by knowledge according to the literature in design and technology. What do we mean by knowledge according to the literature in design and technology? And I'm going to be very upfront. So this is my interpretation. Somebody else might look at it and say that's not what they agree with. That's absolutely fine. Um, somebody else might say, oh, but you didn't make a reference to x, y or z allison. It's a piece of literature. I'm not. I'm not going to refer to everything that I've read about what people write about. What is design and technology knowledge?

Alison Hardy: 1:47

I just want to pick out some of the main themes, but before I sort of wade into some of the key literature that I've looked at, I want to step back and think about why is it important for us to think about in design and technology and I'm obviously mainly talking from a context of England and I'm talking about you know there has been a drive maybe less so at the moment through different changes in national bodies in England about focusing on curriculum and curriculum purpose and the place of knowledge and knowledge rich curriculum. I don't think that's ever going to go away, but it's not kind of maybe so dominant in the media in terms of what teachers, teachers read. I don't mean as in the media, as in national media, but I mean more as in media that teachers would engage with and different bodies that are instrumental in developing school curriculum. It was a real key thing and are instrumental in developing school curriculum. It was a real key thing and it was seen as being a fundamental part of children's learning. Michael Gove sort of talked about it in the early 2010s and I think in some ways in design and technology, we were slow to catch up.

Alison Hardy: 2:59

I mean there was quite a bit of work done around it but because we weren't necessarily referring to the published literature, it was quite difficult for I felt, for me to get a get a handle on it. So when I did start to look at the literature, that really helped me and because we didn't really engage with the literature, I think we then latched on to some very strong arguments and some very sound arguments about the way knowledge is structured and probably how knowledge is structured in other subjects, and I did a couple of podcast episodes about substantive and disciplinary knowledge, which Christine Council talks about very clearly and really articulates brilliantly around history curriculum and history education, really articulates brilliantly around history curriculum and history education. Um, and I think to an extent it can fit in with design and technology. But I struggle and if you go back and listen to the episodes, I've added a a new introduction to say I'm kind of not quite sure this fits so that that led me to go and look at the literature and think about what does our literature in design and technology, our research, say about this and how can I make sense of this? And one of the things I think is really key to remember is I'm making sense of this as an academic and as an ex-design and technology teacher, and if you're a teacher listening to this, you're making sense of this for your curriculum planning that the structure of knowledge and design and technology is not relevant directly to the children that you teach.

Alison Hardy: 4:35

It's, it's a tool, it's an instrument, it's a way of thinking about the curriculum and design and technology that is useful for your planning, to think about how you are sequencing learning in design and technology over a period of time that develops children's design and technology capability, and I think that's really key. So I'm talking about curriculum and I'm talking about intent, how we build up design and technology curriculum, and one of the ways we do that is through sequencing children's development and growth in their knowledge that they have. That relates to design and technology. I'm not talking about pedagogy, I'm not talking about how we teach it. I'm not talking necessarily about even how children learn. I'm just talking about how we categorize it, how we organize it and therefore how that might lead into sequencing learning to develop children's design and technology capabilities. So I think it needs to be really clear that well, for me anyway, that this is not so much about pupils understanding the structure of D&T knowledge, but it's about you as a professional understanding it and as a but I keep saying it you might agree or disagree with what I'm saying, that's absolutely fine, and you can critique what I'm saying. I'm presenting a particular view. My view that's come through doing quite a lot of reading and analysis of text about this. That's developed me into a way of thinking that's come through doing quite a lot of reading and analysis of text about this. That's developed me into a way of thinking that's helped me think about curriculum in design and technology.

Alison Hardy: 6:14

So I think also I want to before I go into this in great detail is some people again might disagree with the terminology, the language that I'm using when we talk about knowledge. And what do we mean by knowledge in design and technology? Because I can hear people going what about skills? What about skills Alison? So I'd be very careful here to keep consistently using this word knowledge. But I am not refuting that a part of knowledge in design and technology are skills. But again I'm going to come back and clarify there's the skills that are for beyond design and technology and there are skills that are within the curriculum of design and technology and then there might be a crossover. It's not a a solid boundary between the two, it's a permeable boundary, so things can go through either way.

Alison Hardy: 7:16

But when I'm talking about skills in the context of knowledge in design and technology, that leads me on quite nicely to Bob bob mccormick's paper from 1997. So we're going, we're going back a while and that's partly because it's actually quite difficult to find, uh, more recent papers around this. Um, bob mccormick was a, to me, a great researcher around design and technology, very pragmatic, practical, very philosophical, and much of his work was backed up with empirical work, you know. So he did research in the field at Open University and this paper of Bob McCormick's is called Conceptual and Procedural Knowledge. Corbix is called Conceptual and Procedural Knowledge and his paper goes in to his views about this and he draws on an extensive range of literature and I have to say it took me several times of reading this over several months, to be honest, to really grasp his meaning and also develop my own meaning.

Alison Hardy: 8:26

Because I think we have to be very careful when we look at papers that we have to accept. We have to kind of not accept them, but we have to debate with them and critique them and think about how they align with our own beliefs and our own understanding. And I think the more that we engage with this sort of literature, the stronger our views are grounded in something that then we can, uh going to use kind of quite um assertive language, combat arguments from other school subjects that say, no, no, no, that's not how knowledge is in design and technology. And I think if we come at it from our literature base and we read more from our literature and we we synthesize that um it, we and we have more examples, that helps us, um, combat other people trying to say, oh, but it's like this in design and technology, when they don't have an understanding of design and technology. So bob m McCormick talks about procedural and conceptual knowledge and I'm not going to go into the great details of his paper, not today anyway.

Alison Hardy: 9:34

I might come back to it. I kind of really like his paper. I don't agree with all of it after I've done some further reading. But what I want to kind of think about to begin with is what do we mean by conceptual and procedural knowledge? And one of the things that I want to think about is so we talk very factual knowledge and I think those are covered within McCormick's terms of conceptual and procedural.

Alison Hardy: 10:15

So you can hear that the procedural is about procedures and we do an awful lot of, you know, the knowledge in design and technology is procedural. So whether that's learning and practicing and using a piece of knowledge, that's about communication. So isometric sketching and the steps that you go through to do an isometric sketch, that's a procedure. The procedure of stitching with a sewing machine, a straight stitch to make a seam, is a procedure, a procedure of um doing something on CAD. It's, you know, it's a step by step, it's a skill, and then you have to practice it to get better at it, and I think that's something that's really important. That is sort of, I want to say, forgotten about, but I don't think it's actually forgotten, I think I think it's more about time constraints, um, this opportunity to practice um these procedures.

Alison Hardy: 11:24

And I think there's something else there, about procedural knowledge as well, is that we've got to be very careful to think about that. It's not just learning the steps as a series of actions, because we've got to be very careful. If we're teaching that to children, then they they execute them, possibly with little consideration. And if we think back to design and technology capability about children developing this ability to take some of this knowledge procedural knowledge, for example, as I'm talking about at the moment and select to use it in response to a design context, if they're only taught to execute it with little consideration, then they're going to struggle to make that movement of it in their toolbox of knowledge into them selecting it, which is one of the key aspects of design and technology capability in how they respond to a context. And so, as a teacher, you need to give them that space to not just here's the step by steps and for them to execute it and to practice it, but for them that they have to have a familiarity with it and think about the rules that might that might govern that procedure and how that procedure might be interconnected with others or embedded within others.

Alison Hardy: 13:00

So I've talked about the skill of using a sewing machine. I mean, it's a podcast. I'm actually sat here sort of pretending like I'm holding the fabric and holding it going through with a straight stitch on the sewing machine. But that's embedded within a whole load of other procedures around the threading of the sewing machine. That you have things in the right place, so you have the top and the bottom thread so they can interlock. That you lock the foot into place, so you have the top and the bottom thread so they can interlock. That you lock the foot into place so the fabric can be fed through. That's another procedure that it can then be, you know, finished at the end and finished at the beginning to lock it.

Alison Hardy: 13:36

So just having that familiarity of executing the running stitch, the straight stitch on the sewing machine, is insufficient for those children to take that over time. To begin with, as they're developing their deintercapability, it might be that they only have an aspect of the interconnected procedures that were involved in doing that straight stitch. But over time you've got to build up as a teacher those interconnected steps and I think as a teacher you've got to think about at which point and when do they need to know those different interconnected procedures and how it's embedded and how it links with, and also when they can disagree and challenge that and think about how they might stretch and adapt that. So this thing about procedural knowledge is about skills. But I think to use the word skill is almost too superficial because that takes away some of this embedded nature of procedures and how they are interconnected, and I'll share the paper that I've got that from.

Alison Hardy: 14:57

This idea about procedures being interconnected and embedded and how this opportunity, this necessity of, of practicing, is not just knowing the sequence but having familiarity with and knowledge of it. And which I suppose, is where product analysis comes in, is if we're, you know, showing children about this process of a straight stitch on a sewing machine. They need to see the application of it in a garment or an artifact and to be able to critique it and understand it in terms of, again, that's, it's embedded nature. It's embedded nature, it's embedded within a product, it's not a standalone thing. I mean I'm not even touching onto the health and safety procedures that are around this whole idea of this procedure of using a sewing machine to do a straight stitch.

Alison Hardy: 16:02

So I think Bob McCormick talks about procedural knowledge, um, and I think that's a, it's a discussion to have and I think you know the skill of teachers, whoa, using that contest um, contested word, skill, um, and you know teachers have skills, um, and that's why you know we teach, you know, at the, we teach student teachers procedures of managing a class and organising a demonstration. That's a pedagogy. But the teacher's skill and again I think this develops over time teachers have a capacity to have a capacity to think about. How are they and I'm not going to use the word scaffolding here to me is wrong, okay, how are they building up children's procedural knowledge, those different layers of knowing the sequence, executing it, being familiar with it, developing their ability to do it, but also understanding how it interconnects or is embedded within other procedures. And so I think, teaching to think about how they are building that up over time. Now, that might happen in a lesson. I think that's a way of thinking that might help teachers think about, in terms of pedagogy or the skill of the teacher, the pedagogical content knowledge.

Alison Hardy: 17:39

What you do as a teacher is thinking about cognitive loads or thinking about demonstrations. I'm starting to touch here on on pedagogy. It's really difficult to keep curriculum and pedagogy separate, but I think you know you do, you do, as a teacher, need to think about what is that subject content knowledge in terms of procedure. So having having some discussion around that and thinking about how you're building that up over time and then this comes into when I'm going to talk about sequencing is how do you think about when and where you teach those different things about what you know that they've done before? So then, if we think about conceptual knowledge, so then if we think about conceptual knowledge, now we can get very focused here on I always say this wrong, but I think it's declarative, declare, declarative, that kind of factual knowledge, and I think that's kind of too limiting. You know, when Gove was talking about knowledge, it was felt and very much, a very powerful and to me quite right critique of some of the National Critic Movement has been that it's a whole series of facts which are declared and becomes a pub quiz, for want of a better phrase. But maybe that is right as a way of snapshotting that and summarizing what that is.

Alison Hardy: 19:09

We lose the sight that again the concepts are interlinked. And so I know Hilda, ruth and Torben have talked about, you know, knowledge in design and technology and they talk about concepts and myself and Sarah Davis have done this, and you know Sarah comes from a background of textiles I come from a background of industrial design about the amount of time we had to teach our undergraduates you know, materials, knowledge and the procedures within that. We had to think about what are some of the similarities. And we and we were taught we would talk about concepts and and this comes from a classic design and technology book which was primarily about resistant materials, and the K born and cave book. I think I'm sure there's another author in there, but I can't remember at the moment um, they talked about these concepts of wasting.

Alison Hardy: 20:06

You know, when we cut material and we get rid of some shaping because we're starting to finish it off, forming into different shapes, joining and finishing, and sarah and I would have you know, living life on the edge me and Sarah would talking about what do we what? Where are those similarities between woods fabrics, cotton, different types of fabrics cotton is a different joining techniques and from for cottons for man-made fabrics, for woven and for knitted, for example? For you know, hardwood, softwood, manufactured board, veneered board, um ferrous metal, non-ferrous metal, and so on and so forth. So so one of the ideas, um, within one of the papers I'm going to share in the show notes, is that a concept can be defined as a mental representation that embodies all the essential features of an object, a situation or an idea, and to me they then go on to talk about that they help us to classify phenomena. So you know, this is where me and Sarah are talking about shaping or joining.

Alison Hardy: 21:15

It's a classification, classification of phenomena permanent, temporary, um, you know, basting, pinning um, but we might see some as temporary, but they are enduring um. Permanent, they're glued um, but we know that if we put going back to my, my straight stitch um, that's permanent, but also it can be temporary, because I can take that apart, because I can reuse the material. But if I use a, a particular type of glue that might affect the surface of the material, then that that makes it different. Anyway, I'm kind of going off into the sort of subsections of the category, but. But these things all belong together because they are joining and they, these, these concepts of classification, help us start to think about, as a teacher, think about planning, about things that are included or excluded. We talk about ferrous metals and non-ferrous, so therefore iron is included in the ferrous but aluminium is excluded, and that that helps them, because you start thinking about what are the characteristics and there may well be sub-characteristics.

Alison Hardy: 22:25

You know I've talked a little bit about, you know, joining permanent, temporary. But then there might be, as I said, other subsets within permanent, where they are, um, some permanently affect the surface of the material and some, some don't. Okay, um, so that allows for life cycle and thinking and repurposing and reusing materials. And again, within temporary joints, there might be some, like basting, that are temporary, to hold while you're then doing a further method of joining. But then there might be some that are temporary, like a nut and bolt, that are actually meant to last longer but you want them to be able to be constructed without having to use something that's wet, like an adhesive, um, if that makes it's kind of a cleaner joint but it might not be as strong, but it might be more appropriate to use a nut and bolt and then that kind of starts to link through to the property.

Alison Hardy: 23:30

So this whole thing to me around concepts, is around categories, is around generalization from specific instances. But again, if I teach these things in isolation and I now look back at some of the teaching I did in the last school I taught in, I remember this lesson I kind of despair. I was taking a theory lesson and if you've listened to the podcast, you'll know that I kind of shudder now when I think about theory lessons. But that's another story, not going to go there at this moment. About different types of metals, right, and so we did the usual non-ferrous and ferrous and then we did alloys and pure. Another category, more concepts. Are they design and technology? Probably probably not. We could say we're borrowing from science. That's absolutely fine, but just to know those things.

Alison Hardy: 24:28

Yes, I ended up going on about bronze and I could not for the life of me, remember what the um, what the materials were that made up bronze. I think it took me three lessons to go back, but I think that's more because my way of thinking about these concepts of categories of materials was more about their physical and mechanical properties, which is why, for me, the chooser charts that are on that have come from nuffield you know this, I'm talking 20 years ago um and again came from Hilda Ruth and formerly as David Barlicks, uh, in the Nuffield materials and it's on um Hilda and Torben's um blog. You can get these free resources, but the chooser chart, because understanding these concepts in design and technology is one thing is understanding, you know bronze, goodness, goodness knows why. I know I was trying to teach children about bronze, because when we use bronze in dnt but actually what I was giving it as was an example of an alloy, about how we modify materials to give them different properties, which makes them more adaptable for a particular purpose. And so for me that links back to design and technology capability is, if I just teach my brand that bronze yes, it's a concrete example, yes, of a fair, of a non-ferrous alloy good lord, I still can't even remember it, um, and I can give them a representation, I can talk about a brand's model, but then how do I take that into the abstract? What are the properties? Well, it's about its decoration. It's about the fact that it doesn't rust. Has it got copper in it? Goodness, goodness only knows.

Alison Hardy: 26:14

I'm kind of losing the plot here. I shouldn't have started on this one. It's highlighting my uh, limitations of my understanding of metallurgy. But then I did fail at the end of my second year at university and had to restit that model on metals. But anyway, there we go. Oh, we've eaten far too much about myself, um, so, but what I'm trying to say is that's where concepts I think are really powerful in design and technology.

Alison Hardy: 26:39

And again, it's not about teaching children. We're now going to understand about the concepts around. You know non-ferrous alloys. It's more that you use the concrete example to represent a category, that then you can take it into something that's abstract and they can take it into something that's abstract. That then, when the children learn about another metal or another material, they can help it. It helps them make connections. Okay, because it is all about connections. If I go back to the procedural and the embedded and all the interconnected in the conceptual knowledge, it's about the connection of the relationships and so it's kind of about these principles that underlie it.

Alison Hardy: 27:29

And again it goes back to why am I teaching about bronze? Bronze is actually irrelevant. I could have taught them about oh, I don't know, my mind's gone completely blank now about non-ferrous alloys, but I could have taught them about another one that would have given the same example. That added to them their bank of knowledge. That then would have fed into them having this toolkit of knowledge that when they face the context they can select one. They could go well, that bronze isn't right, but it has some of the characteristics and it has these physical and mechanical properties which mean that it's harder than copper and but it it has a shine, it doesn't rust, so I want it to be something that I can put outside, but actually it's quite expensive. So they can start to weigh up. So they might not know the precise metal, but they know the properties and I think that is much more significant in terms of their design and technology capability than it is being able to define particular materials, which is one of the challenges I have around the qualifications in england, around GCSEs and A-levels, with the minutiae of material knowledge that needs to have, which loses sight of the concepts, which I think is much, much more powerful in design and technology. So that's where I wanted to get to today. I hope you found that interesting.

Alison Hardy: 29:04

Craig, I didn't realise I'd been talking for half an hour on this. I think it is hard, hard, but I think it's really important for us to explore this and understand what we mean um and understand. Understand the, the interconnection, the categories, the fact that things are embedded, and teaching these things in a disjointed way. For one, we know the literature says and we know um, the cognitive science. We don't have to agree with it all. We're not trying to agree with it all. But the idea about schema, about children making connections with other things, which again is one of my challenges about theory lessons if it's not connected. I think about this metals lesson that I was doing. Oh god, it was painful. Um, you know, if we don't teach this, if we ourselves as teachers don't understand the connected nature of this knowledge, this conceptual and procedural knowledge in design and technology, then we can't structure that over time, that then children in a way can see this connected nature of knowledge and design and technology to understand, to be able to critique a product, but also then be able to make selections of materials and processes. So I'm going to leave you with that and, just to give you a hint, next week I'm going to move away from conceptual and procedural into two other categories of knowledge. I wonder if they might work better or they might just be different to conceptual or procedural. But anyway, I hope you've enjoyed that. I've enjoyed having the conversation kind of with you by myself to explore. Come back to me if you've got any questions. When I get some headspace I'm going to do a follow-up episode for subscribers with maybe some more examples. Thanks for listening. Episode for subscribers with maybe some more examples. Thanks for listening.

Alison Hardy: 30:51

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. The dnt community in developing their practice. So please do share the podcast with your dnt community. If you want to respond to something I've talked about or have an idea for a future episode, then either leave me a voice memo via speakpipe or drop me an email. You can find details about me, the podcast and how to connect with me on my website, drallisonhardycom. Also, if you want to support the podcast financially, you can become a patron. Links to SpeakPipe, patreon and my website are in the show notes. Thanks for listening.