Our Educational Design Concept

We strive to integrate best pedagogical practices from a range of schools of thought into the design of lesson materials and aim to support educators in using a variety of tried and tested approaches and perspectives in education.

Unfortunately, discourse in education is often characterized by a battle between different camps swearing by a particular pedagogical approach, such as the value and need of direct instruction on the one hand, or the value and need of project-based, experiential, authentic experience and critical reflection on the other hand.

In contrast, the “multi-pedagogical” or “reflexive pedagogy” view promoted by Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis considers all of these different pedagogical approaches as playing an important role in learning - this is because learning involves different processes - different ways of knowing - including direct experience, conceptual understanding, critical reflection, and appropriate and creative application of the learned, all of which can best be cultivated by different pedagogical methods and approaches. 

The point of good education is not to choose one over another and disregard the rest, but to choose the right approach for the right moment in the learning process, and to weave them all together in the best way such that learning is maximized. 

The different knowledge processes that can be involved in learning and that require different pedagogical approaches are presented in the following diagram:

Global ESD is using Design-Based Research to develop Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) programming.  Design-Based Research (DBR; DBR Collective, 2003) is an approach within education science that seeks to develop layers of generalizable design principles for teaching and learning, through the iterative implementation and evaluation of these principles across real-world school contexts, through long-term collaborations between researchers and school-based educators, and with an emphasis on pragmatism and workability in real world contexts (Anderson & Shattuck, 2012 ; Cobb et al., 2003; McKenney & Reeves,  2018).  

More specifically, we are advancing Design-Based Implementation Research (DBIR; Fishman et al., 2013) as a framework for investigating the persistent problems facing evolution and sustainability education from a systems perspective that accounts for multiple levels of educational design issues and engages students and educators as active participants in the re-design of systems level solutions to these complex challenges. 

Working with educators and school-based curriculum designers helps us further refine and extend materials and guidance, so that educators across subjects, grade-levels and cultures will be empowered to teach and learn about human evolution, behavior and sustainability in a way that enriches their classrooms and their lives.

• Anderson, T., & Shattuck, J. (2012). Design-Based Research: A Decade of Progress in Education Research? Educational Researcher, 41(1), 16–25. http://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X11428813 

• Cobb, P. A., Confrey, J., DiSessa, A. A., Lehrer, R., & Schauble, L. (2003). Design experiments in educational research. Educational Researcher, 32(1), 9–13. https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X032001009 

• Cope, B., & Kalantzis, M. (2015). A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies. Learning by Design. (B. Cope & M. Kalantzis, Eds.). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137539724

• DBR Collective (The Design-Based Research Collective) (2003). Design-Based Research: An Emerging Paradigm for Educational Inquiry. Educational Researcher, 32(1), 5–8. http://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X032001005

• Erickson, H. L., Lanning, L. A., & French, R. (2017). Concept-Based Curriculum and Instruction for the Thinking Classroom (2nd ed.). Corwin.

• Fishman, B. J., Penuel, W. R., Allen, A. R., Cheng, B. H., & Sabelli, N. O. R. A. (2013). Design-based implementation research: An emerging model for transforming the relationship of research and practice. National society for the study of education, 112(2), 136-156. 

• McKenney, S & Reeves (2018). Conducting Educational Design Research. 2nd edition. Routledge.

• Stern, J., Ferraro, K., & Mohnkern, J. (2017). Tools for Teaching Conceptual Understanding, Secondary. Designing Lessons and Assessments for Deep Learning. Corwin.

• Wiggins, G. P., & McTighe, J. (2005). Understanding by design. Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (2nd ed.). Alexandria, VA, USA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD).