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Teaching as design science#

See also: teaching

Laurillard, 2012#

Teaching is a design science. Like the professions of engineering, architecture, computer science, and medicine, it is not only trying to understand the world but to make the world a better place. Unlike these professions, however, it has not, traditionally, been treated as if teaching is meant to be anything other than a craft-amateur enterprise, where every teacher works alone with their students to do the best they can, given their initial training (p. 225)

One reason for this move is that to move L&T forward in higher ed - esp. in how it uses technology - it needs to better of way of "harnessing and consolidating" the knowledge and practice of teachers "by looking at what it means to treat teaching as a design science" (p. 210). i.e.

Chapter 1 proposed that teachers acting as design scientists would observe four basic precepts, to

  1. keep improving their practice,
  2. have a principled way of designing and testing improvements in practice,
  3. build on the work of others,
  4. represent and share their pedagogic practice, the outcomes they achieved, and how these related to the elements of their design.

Digital technologies and the need for design science#

People are fond of pointing out that the nineteenth-century traveller would be astonished by our banks, factories, and operating theatres – all transformed by new technology – while the classroom has hardly changed. However, bankers, industrialists, and surgeons have had huge resources devoted to developing the specialised systems they need for transformation. Teachers have not. Yet it is a much more tractable problem to model the activity that moves a credit from one account to another than to model the activity that moves a mind from confusion to understanding. Governments provide education with the tools developed for industry and commerce, but who is there to help teachers and lecturers work out how to use them to transform teaching and learning? This is only feasible if we harness the work of individual teachers who, every day, in all sectors, discover and test new ways of using digital technologies for (p. xiv)

References#

Laurillard, D. (2012). Teaching as Developing Pedagogical Patterns. In Teaching As a Design Science: Building Pedagogical Patterns for Learning and Technology (pp. 210--258). Taylor & Francis Group.