Mapping D&T Knowledge: Beyond Conceptual and Procedural

In this episode, I delve deeper into the forms of knowledge that underpin design and technology education. Building on McCormick's conceptual and procedural knowledge framework, I propose a more nuanced approach that considers design knowledge and technological knowledge as existing on a spectrum.

I explore how these knowledge types can be visualised as intersecting axes, creating four quadrants that help teachers plan their curriculum more effectively. This framework isn't meant for pupils but serves as a planning tool for teachers to develop knowledge systematically over time.

Drawing on Vincenti's work on engineering knowledge, I highlight the importance of design criteria and design instrumentalities – the tools and procedures used when designing. These elements are crucial for pupils to build their repertoire of skills and understanding as outlined in the National Curriculum.

The reality of diminishing teaching time for D&T presents significant challenges for delivering the curriculum comprehensively. This framework offers a way to make informed decisions about what to include and exclude whilst ensuring pupils' design and technology capability continues to develop.

How might you use this knowledge framework to review your current planning? Could mapping your curriculum against these knowledge types reveal gaps or opportunities for deeper learning? Join the conversation and share your thoughts on how we might better structure D&T knowledge in our teaching.

Look out for the next episode where I'll be discussing the often-overlooked but central role of values in design and technology education.

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.

Chapters

• 9:11 Introduction to Design and Technology Knowledge
• 40:19 Exploring the Nuances of Design Knowledge
• 14:15:51 Building Design and Technology Capability Over Time

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. At the end of the last episode, I left you in a bit of suspense after going into quite a bit of detail about McCormick's views of the forms of knowledge for design and technology being conceptual and procedural knowledge, and I do think those work. But then I left you with this idea that might there be another way of thinking about it, and that's what I'm going to talk about this week, and so I think the conceptual and procedural is almost not nuanced enough for design and technology, although, as I said, I do think it works, and I think Bob McCormick makes a much more articulated view of it than I do.

Alison Hardy: 1:04

And there has been a lot written about the forms of knowledge in design and technology from different places. You know, back in 1994, jenkins was talking about that. There's been limited effort. Bob McCormick wrote his paper in 1997. Morrison Love wrote a paper in 2017 about an epistemology of technology education, and others have written about design knowledge and also about technical knowledge. Owen Jackson and Stieg wrote about that as well. But it's how do we make sense of that, and I've looked at how do we make sense of that and I've looked at how I might make sense of that, because procedural and conceptual does work, but I think, as I said, there's more nuanced ways. Let's dig in to this. If we look at the fact that there is literature that is around technological knowledge and some of the places where this is written about is in international journals for design and technology education, and they're written by authors that are not situated in England and I'm again, I'll be very careful there because David Morrison Love is in Scotland and the subject is quite different not completely different, but a bit different in Scotland, as it is in Ireland as well. So when we look at different articles and different things that have been written, we need to kind of take that into consideration. That where does design sit?

Alison Hardy: 2:42

And if you've listened back over episodes right from the start of the podcast conversations with Eddie Norman and things that Eddie did on his own on the podcast, eddie talked about what is design knowledge, and so we've got this design knowledge and technology knowledge, and that for me resonates more strongly than purely using conceptual and procedural, because we hear about conceptual and procedural knowledge and it comes from a very strong philosophical base. But in other school subjects and we're talking here I'm talking here about design and technology. So therefore I'm coming at it from the position that I think there is also design knowledge and technological knowledge, and you can't see this. But I'm sort of drawing a spectrum, a horizontal x-axis, with design knowledge at one end and technological knowledge at the other, and in the middle I think, there's a crossover. I think there's a spectrum where you have kind of hard design knowledge and hard technological knowledge, and then you might have a bit in the middle, I think, where it's more difficult to categorise.

Alison Hardy: 3:59

But if we then take conceptual and procedural, we could those, for example, on a y-axis, intersecting the design knowledge and technological knowledge, x-axis. So we've got um a, a north you could say, if that's another way you want to think about it of conceptual knowledge, a south of procedural knowledge, west of design knowledge and an east of technological knowledge. And then what that does for me it divides it into four quadrants where everything that's above the x-axis is about knowing how and no knowing knowing why. Sorry, this is really hard, this is really hard. And the below is knowing how it's, the procedures, the processes, the methods and the skills, and where above is about the yeah, the knowing. That is another way of putting it and it's probably a better way. You know, knowing about the work of designers, knowing how products work and why they work, and below, as I said, is more around the skills. So, if you think about those four quadrants and again, you've still got this interplay, because we need to remember, when we think about forms of knowledge, types of D&T knowledge, categories of D&T knowledge, we can talk about these different headings, but in essence, I think they remain the same. What they're doing is they're helping teachers in their planning. These are not I repeat again, these are not categories, types or forms, labels that are for pupils, they're for teachers to use. They're for teachers to think about how are they developing that knowledge over time? Okay, so, and in different moments in time, a teacher might be focusing more on, say, for example, how to design, focusing more on, say, for example, how to design, which I think also includes how to communicate your designs, but methods of generating design.

Alison Hardy: 6:13

I talk about design, fiction, some of the work I've done in the past. That's a method that designers use. So you could say, we could analyze, we could learn about how designers have used this design strategy of design fiction. That would be above the x-axis and below the x-axis would be you teaching pupils how to do it and the pupils using it and knowing how to follow the process. It's not necessarily a strict process of design fiction as a strategy to both generate and develop design ideas. I'm hoping that's kind of making sense. It's for you as the teacher to decide.

Alison Hardy: 7:03

That might be a focus in one lesson, whereas another lesson you might be looking at using the pedagogical approach of product analysis to look at how a product works and why, why it works like that, what makes it work like that. So that just gives you some overview of this idea of an X and Y axis Conceptual, procedural on the Y, design technological on the X. So where does this kind of found and how do we maybe unpick this? So to me, design knowledge is about learning about how to design and learning how others have designed and what their outputs have been and their processes OK. So I think that's really important and I think you can look in the National Curriculum in England. You'll see examples of that, that and when we think about knowing how to design, I think we might look at some work from engineering which an author did to think about what engineers know and how they know it.

Alison Hardy: 8:21

Again, I think we're going to approach that with caution then about. It's about engineers, it's not about designers, but there is a crossover. It's about being aware as well that there are very many different fields to our subject of design and technology. It's not like well, I can hear mathematicians going. Well, there's different aspects to maths. There's different fields and subfields of maths. Going. Well, there's different aspects to maths, there's different fields and subfields of maths.

Alison Hardy: 8:49

But design and technology again referred to some of the work by eddie norman and ken baines, where they talk about the spectrum of the fields that are in design and technology and or technology that feed into and shape this subject of design and technology, which is why we have this breadth of knowledge that people talk about in the subject, which then, if we think about, we've got to teach all of it not even possible. What we lose sight of is a depth of knowledge to the subject and referring back to this idea that actually children are learning everything, things, how to do things about things, in order to influence and change the made world. That's what they're doing Design, the technology capability Go and listen to an earlier episode of that. So, vincenti, I'm going to get that wrong. All right, apologies if anybody's offended by my mispronunciation.

Alison Hardy: 9:50

You know what engineers know, he, and it's been used in a number of different design and technology pieces. He talks about different categories of design knowledge, some of which are appropriate, some of which aren't. But a couple of them that I think are really useful to design and technology is about criteria for designing and that's about the purpose of the product, the specification. Um, you know, pupils design using criteria. We can see that in the national curriculum in england. They they use criteria, they develop criteria. You know that's a a designerly activity and they need as a piece of knowledge about the act of designing is that we design to criteria and we develop criteria. And then another aspect that Vicente talks about is design instrumentalities, which is about the how to design, the procedures used when designing, and you know we can think about that, as I've talked about all the design fiction. We can think about different forms of sketching as an instrument for designing. It's a communication tool.

Alison Hardy: 11:05

Sometimes children are communicating to themselves in those design strategies, but they need to be taught them, they need to practice them and they need to use them. They need to select them and to be able to use those in a structured way. So I think those are two or a couple of. And you might have a look at Vincenzi's book you'd have to pick it up secondhand, maybe on the world of books, but you can look at that and think about how does that? How am I thinking about that in my planning? When am I giving children criteria? When am I enabling them to develop criteria, think about criteria and so on? And also, when am I teaching them design instruments, design tools to be able to build, as it says in the national curriculum, build and apply a repertoire of knowledge and skills and understanding in order to design? Okay, when do I sort of formally teach those and when do we give our children to practice them? So that's the design knowledge.

Alison Hardy: 12:07

I'm not going to talk about the conceptual design knowledge. I think that kind of speaks for itself, knowing about the work of designers. But technological knowledge, and again it's you know, go back to this, this middle bit, this fuzzy bit in the crossover of the X and the Y, where we can't say it's definitely technological knowledge, it's definitely design knowledge. But if we think more about the technological knowledge, children think about the pro and taught and learn the processes used in the making, the development, the realization of their ideas. Okay so, and that includes the testing and the evaluation. So that's the other side, and so we need to think about when we're teaching, that is is, how do we develop that? And, in the context again, these skills, these procedures that are in the technical aspect, as I might put put them, we have to think about when they're being taught, why they've been taught, how you're making connections with helping the children make connections with previous knowledge, build new knowledge, and when they get to practice it and when they get to select it and use it.

Alison Hardy: 13:26

Okay now, I know that is really ambitious to think about all of that when we hear some dreadful stories about the amount of teaching time that some schools are giving design and technology. I met with Tony Ryan last week and we had a long conversation over quite a few hours and he shared some stories about schools only having 12 hours of teaching for the whole of Key Stage 3 in design and technology. How can we, how can anybody be realistically expected to teach the Key Stage 3 curriculum and build on what's been happening in Key Stage 2? I'm not thinking about preparing for Key Stage 4. Let's think about that quite differently. So I appreciate that you know I'm sitting in an ivory tower when I'm talking about this, but I think these categories are useful and I think that might start to.

Alison Hardy: 14:18

You know I'm going to come on this in a future podcast about how do you then build that? How do you build that up over time that develops pupils design and technology capability, and I think that's where teachers as professionals need to select which pieces dodgy word that in this context, pieces items, sections, units of design and technological knowledge, conceptual and procedural knowledge that they will teach, ensuring that children's design and technology capability is being built over time. So I think at the moment teachers are having to make some really tough choices because of the limited time, but I think by having that framework for thinking about knowledge, then I think that might help you think about and reason and rationalize about what you bring in and what you leave out, because you know you're building up children's design and technology capability over time and in a future episode, when I start talking about pedagogy and sequencing knowledge, then we'll start to think maybe a little bit more about what the literature says about that, but I hope you found that interesting, maybe a little bit thought provoking. You might want to disagree. I've given you some reading you might want to explore. But next I'm going to talk about values the place of values in design and technology. It was really dominant in some of the early editions iterations, iterations, iterations of the national curriculum. They've maybe faded away, but I really think there are. They are central to children's design and technology work. So that'll be next time. Anyway, if you've got any thoughts, do let me know. Thanks for listening.

Alison Hardy: 16:14

I'm Dr Alison Hardy and you've been listening to the Talking D&T podcast. If you enjoyed the podcast, then do subscribe on whatever platform you use, and do consider leaving a review, as it does help others find the podcast. I do the podcast because I want to support the D&T community in developing their practice, so please do share the podcast with your D&T community. If you want to respond to something I've talked about or have an idea for a future episode, then either leave me a voice memo via Speakpipe or drop me an email. You can find details about me, the podcast and how to connect with me on my website, 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.