Pedagogy And design thinking

The following page highlights many of the pedagogical strategies that are utilized throughout the Building for a Sustainable Future website.

• Design Thinking

• Gradual Release of Responsibility Model

• Anti-oppressive Education

• Culturally Responsive Pedagogy

Utilizing these pedagogical concepts will allow for a deep understanding of content, and will empower your classroom to create, build, and make towards developing a sustainable future. Lastly, we follow up with how our project can address the digital divide, and provide access to meaningful, and empowering learning opportunities.

What is Design Thinking?

Design thinking is an iterative process involving empathy, this process challenges assumptions and stereotypes, aims to redefine issues, and develop creative solutions to prototype and test. Design Thinking as a concept to frame education has become more common in recent years with the British Columbia Applied Design, Skills, and Technology curriculum which uses the IDEO Design Thinking terminology (IDEO, 2018) of Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test; while also adding the classroom-specific steps of Making and Sharing into the process. These processes are clearly defined within the content section of the Curriculum User Guide.

Gradual Release of Responsibility Model

This project is aligned to the gradual release of responsibility instructional framework. The intention of the design of the website is to provide teachers and students with the skills in order to develop the appropriate skills.

This model features four components (Fisher & Frey, 2008),

1. Focus Lessons: This includes expected learning outcomes, and the purpose of the lesson.

2. Guided Instruction: Utilizing questioning strategies to facilitate student understanding, more effective if completed with smaller groups. Focus is around releasing the responsibility to students while scaffolding instruction to ensure students are successful.

3. Productive Group Work: Work in collaborative groups. This allows students to be accountable for their own contribution to the project/assignment. It also allows students the opportunity to consolidate their understanding before applying it independently.

4. Independent Learning: Applying what you learned in the class and outside of class. Within the classroom this can be utilized as a formative assessment piece to indicate whether or not reteaching of a concept needs to occur.

Our website design as a teacher resource utilizes this model to release control of the content and skills of implementing design thinking and makerspace pedagogy into the hands of educators. As a student resource, the lessons follow a similar layout promoting the release of control to the students. This leads to exploring makerspace and sustainability from a student-led perspective.

Anti Oppressive Education

The anti-oppressive education framework (Kumashiro, 2000) includes four approaches to anti-oppressive education.

1. Education for the Other: This involves recognizing that education is an oppressive structure for people who are oppressed. As educators, we are responsible for providing students with a safe space.

2. Education about the Other: This empathy-based form of education provides students with the necessary information about the other to move towards cultural competence.

3. Education that is Critical of Privileging and Othering: This form of education encourages educators to teach about oppression and how to overcome it.

4. Education that Changes Students and Society: This consists of instilling the desire for change within our students.

Anti-Oppressive education is essential within this project as many projects that develop from a design thinking model involve a "problem to be solved". Because our project utilizes the United Nation's Sustainable Development Goals as inspiration for these issues to be solved, it becomes easy to place western culture and western knowledge as superior and label others as "problems to be solved". It is crucial to include various ways of knowing and have an understanding of who is being represented and how they are being represented to ensure cultures and groups of people are not stereotyped or viewed as deficit.

Culturally Responsive Pedagogy

The positioning of our resource through culturally responsive pedagogy (CRP) focuses on the idea, "academic knowledge and skills are situated within the lived experiences and frames of reference of students, they are personally meaningful, have higher interest appeal, and are learned more easily and thoroughly" (Gay, 2002).

Emily Roland provides a graphic on how to teach for transformation breaking down Culturally Responsive Pedagogy into many principles. The following principles can be found within our project:

• Cultural Sensitivity: Gaining knowledge of other cultures represented into the classroom and instructional materials.

• Reshaping the Curriculum: The curriculum is integrated, interdisciplinary, and student-centered. Utilizing topics that are relevant to the students backgrounds and cultures.

• Student-Centered Instruction & Active Teaching Methods: Students are participating in a collaborative and student-centered environment, and are encouraged to direct their own learning.

• Culturally Mediated Instruction: Infusing curriculum and content that is socially appropriate, including diverse ways of knowing, and understanding. Understanding that there are multiple viewpoints or ways to solve and address a problem.

• Teacher as Facilitator: In an active learning environment, the teacher acts as a guide and advocates for the students to connect their knowledge to the learning experience.

We believe that these pedagogical practices will enhance engagement within the program. Some of the work will need to be done by each individual teacher and adapted for the needs of each individual classroom. By utilizing these principles students will be represented in the learning. Student-choice and providing students with the opportunities to direct their own learning will encourage the students to participate and become active creators.

Addressing the Digital Divide

Our project aims to tackle two stages of what the Nielson Norman Group (2006) identifies within the digital divide. The digital divide refers to, "The fact that certain parts of the population have substantially better opportunities to benefit from the new economy that other parts of the population" (Neilsen, para. 1).

The three stages of the digital divide include: