Greetings,

Don Norman asks “How can we teach large numbers of students in project courses economically?”

As I see it, Don’s question is connected to design’s signature pedagogy.

Lee Shulman (2005) maintains that professional education has characteristic forms of teaching and learning called signature pedagogies, which prefigure a profession’s work culture. For example, in medicine, the signature pedagogy is bedside teaching, a group of novices follow a senior physician in their daily clinical rounds, and the senior physician involves the novices in a discussion of patients’ conditions and treatment regimens. In law, the signature pedagogy is case dialogue method, in which an instructor involves the students in quasi-Socratic dialogue about the aspects of particular court cases or rulings. The class room is arranged in a semi-circle so the students can see each other; instead of didactic lecturing the instructor engages students individually through exchanges of questions and answers. Similarly, in teacher education and psychology, the signature pedagogy is the clinical practicum where student gain experience in practice under the supervision of an experienced professional.

Studio-based teaching and learning is design’s signature pedagogy. Studio-based teaching and learning in design includes several components; the learning environment, the project, the brief, the desk review, and the crit (see: Donald A.  Schön, 1985; Shreeve, 2015). Together, these components produce the conditions that enable students to have an educative experience in design thinking and practice.

Don adds “we are not speaking of lecture courses, for there is a huge amount of experience in large lectures within academia.” So, I would revise Don’s question as “How can we deliver studio-based teaching and learning to large numbers of students economically?”

Delivering information about the project and the brief to 300 students is a pretty straight forward communication design problem. There are many existing learning management systems that easily deal with communicating syllabus information to thousands of students. 

The learning environment component is a spatial design problem. In the traditional design studio environment, each student is allocated their own desk for the semester, but shared learning environments are more common these days. An apparent solution might be to design a large learning environment that distributes the 300 students among 20 boardroom/seminar style tables with associated furniture and displays. However, connected to the learning environment is the knowledge management problem of replicating the desk review component at scale.

The desk review component of studio-based teaching and learning is tricky to deliver at scale, because the desk review is a social activity of learning by doing and discussion, rather than learning by accumulating facts. A desk review is a dialogic teaching and learning activity in which the teacher and student participate in a discussion about the student’s work in progress. The student arranges their drawings, models and project materials on their desk and the teacher offers questions and comments to prompt the student to reflect on their decisions and to try out alternative courses of action. The dialogue does not merely describe the work the student has already completed, it also uses discussion to frame the design problem in new ways and uses drawing and making to test new solutions on-the-spot. In a desk review, drawing and talking are done together in practice that Schön (1985; 1992) called a reflective conversation with the materials of the situation. 

A significant problem in replicating studio-based teaching and learning to a cohort of 300 students is making the desk reviews time independent. For example, if the 300 student studio class is timetabled for an 180 minute session, and if you have 10 teaching assistants, then that would give each teaching assistant approximately 5 minutes of desk review time per student. First, giving 30 x 5min desk reviews in a row is exhausting for the teaching assistants. Second, its inefficient for students since they may end up waiting almost three hours for five minutes of feedback. 

One approach to making the desk reviews time independent is to change the design studio social structure from centralised teacher-to-student desk reviews to decentralised peer-to-peer design reviews. If students deliver desk reviews to each other, then they do not have to wait for their turn discuss their work with an other. This approach raises the issue of knowledge, minds and learning. How can two novice designers teach each other to become advanced designers?

This problem arises if we use a folk theory of minds and knowledge that assumes that students’ minds are like empty containers, that knowledge is a kind of stuff and that learning is about experts filling up the novices' empty mind-containers with bits of knowledge-stuff. This metaphor implies that peer-to-peer design reviews cannot work because if one student’s mind-container is empty then they do not have any bits of knowledge-stuff to put in the other student’s empty mind-container. This is a version of the learners paradox that is traced back to Plato’s Meno.

In my view, second-order cybernetic and dialogic models of knowledge development support the peer-to-peer learning approach. Recent scholars of the dialogic model of learning include, W. Edwards Deming’s (2000) system of profound knowledge, Nonaka and Takeuchi's (1995) theory of organisational knowledge creation, Bereiter's (2002) theory of knowledge building, and Tsoukas (2009) on dialogic knowledge creation. From this perspective the question to ask is: what is it in dialogue that allows new knowledge to emerge? According to Tsoukas (2009) knowledge creation originates in the individual’s ability to exercise judgement in drawing novel distinctions. First, each interlocutor reflexively understands their own utterances, prompted by the utterance of the other. Second, a productive dialogue leads to reconceptualization through conceptual combination, conceptual expansion, and conceptual reframing. 

In my view, the problem of teaching large numbers of students in project courses economically may be resolved by framing the issue as a knowledge management problem concerning making desk reviews time independent. One solution may be decentralisation and peer-to-peer learning.

Best,
Luke



Bereiter, C. (2002). Education and Mind in the Knowledge Age. London: Laurence Erlbaum 
Deming, W. E. (2000). The new economics: for industry, government, education. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.
Nonaka, I., & Takeuchi, H. (1995). The knowledge-creating company: How Japanese companies create the dynamics of innovation. New York: Oxford University Press.
Schön, D. A. (1985). The design studio : an exploration of its traditions and potentials. London: RIBA Publications for RIBA Building Industry Trust.
Schön, D. A. (1992). Designing as reflective conversation with the materials of a design situation. Knowledge-Based Systems, 5(1), 3-14. 
Shreeve, A. (2015). Signature Pegagogies in Design. In M. Tovey (Ed.), Design Pedagogy. London: Routledge.
Shulman, L. S. (2005). Signature Pedagogies in the Professions. Daedalus, 134(3), 52-59. 
Tsoukas, H. (2009). A Dialogical Approach to the Creation of New Knowledge in Organizations. Organization science, 20(6), 941–957. doi:10.1287/orsc.1090.0435

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Luke Feast, Ph.D. | Industrial Design | Senior Lecturer | Faculty of Design and Creative Technologies | Auckland University of Technology | New Zealand | Email [log in to unmask] | +64 9 921 9999 ext 6017 


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