Greetings Hatice,
Thanks for your post. I think I may have an example that is relevant to your question.
Over the last few years I have tried out some small changes in my undergraduate industrial design courses that I believe may have provided the opportunity for greater student participation and democratization (Feast, 2020). Basically, what I tried to do was to use discussion as a way of teaching (see f.ex: Brookfield & Preskill, 2005). In particular, I wanted more student-to-student discussion.
For example, one small change I implemented has to do with how I used discussion seminars as way for students to engage with design theory articles for a studio course. Usually, a discussion seminar involves a teacher and a small group of students all sitting around a large table. Typically, the teacher leads the students through a guided reading of the article or chapter. The teacher might provide some context, point out important passages, explain difficult concepts and so on. At the end, the teacher might answer a few questions from students and, if you’re lucky, there might be some discussion. (If there’s very little discussion, then teacher usually blames the students for not having read the article).
The small change I made was to remove the teacher from participating in the discussion. Instead, only students sat around the table. A teacher was present in the room but they had to sit in the background and stay silent. Prior to the seminar, the students had been supplied with a short list of critical questions about the article. The discussion seminar began when the teacher placed a copy of list of critical questions on the table. It was up to the students to decide how they would use the remaining seminar discussion time.
What happened? Well, mostly, the students used the time to discuss their different interpretations of the article with each other and debate their different answers to the list of critical questions.
Overall, I believe the change was a success. I’ve also had some success in adapting this approach for teaching “hard skills.” The change wasn’t just about removing the teacher, it was more about reframing the aim of my teaching from delivering content to creating an experience. In the paper I also discuss some of the implications for teacher identity.
Best wishes,
Luke
Brookfield, S. D., & Preskill, S. (2005). Discussion as a way of teaching: Tools and techniques for democratic classrooms (Second edition. ed.). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Feast, L. (2020) Design Education for the Knowledge Society: An Action Research Study of Implementing a Liberal Arts Approach to Industrial Design Education, in Boess, S., Cheung, M. and Cain, R. (eds.), Synergy - DRS International Conference 2020, 11-14 August, Held online. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2020.193
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