Practical oracy in design and technology

Practical subjects such as design and technology, naturally involves spoken language to communicate ideas and thoughts with others in any design process. As such, D&T very much uses practical oracy, with the need for pupils to use spoken language effectively and confidently for purposeful talk in various real design contexts. This article will explore how oracy can be embedded in D&T in an authentic and meaningful way, with practical ideas and strategies of how this can be implemented. 

The importance of oracy in D&T

Oracy is key to communication in a design process that pupils may be working on in D&T. This might include for example, speaking with clients or users, talking to their peers in a design team or other design professionals or experts (this might be the classroom teacher, technician or others outside of school).

Spoken language is also key in the following activities in D&T and can be developed in meaningful and practical ways that adds to pupils’ D&T capability, such as:

• Developing design language: enriching pupils’ technical vocabulary such as being able to describe properties of materials, e.g. “tensile strength”, or adjectives to describe design like, “obtrusive”.

• Focus groups: encouraging group talk and collaboration when feeding back on designs and ideas, getting pupils to feel confident with explaining their ideas in a succinct way. This also helps pupils’ ability to listen to what others say and communicate to understand and empathise with others’ needs, wants and values. 

• Team design work: opportunities where pupils work together on design tasks and need to give and share information, give instructions and discuss different components with each other that they may be working on in a design process.

• Interviews with users or experts: feeling confident to see the views and perspectives of others, listen to their thoughts and ideas and discuss with them their needs and requirements. 

• Design critiques: critically thinking about and giving feedback on design concepts and having the language to confidently assess how well a design meets requirements and give their own views and opinions.

•  Discussing a design process: being able to tell a story about a design process and how they have reached the point where they are at.

Practical ways to develop oracy in D&T

In addition to the above activities, D&T teachers might also think about building their pupils’ oracy through bringing together all of those elements through real-world situations such as pitches and presentations to designers and industry experts. School competitions and challenges - Design Ventura and the V&A Innovate National Schools Challenge, both provide opportunities for pupils to pitch and present and get feedback and questions on their designs. Both provide schools with resources to help scaffold pupils to do this. These give opportunities to explicitly teach how we communicate ideas as designers, not only through sketches or models, but also through our ability to talk and tell a story about a design or product. This also provides practice for different types of talk such as explaining ideas, discussing decisions or justifying a process.

Similarly, peer feedback and critical conversations through design crits can also be useful in developing confidence to discuss design. As mentioned earlier in this article, pupils often need to be explicitly taught how to do this, being given structure to conversations through starting points and prompts and also ensuring that pupils have the design language they need to confidently do this. Conversation prompts for scaffolding dialogue can be useful here – below shows some examples of how we have scaffolded this talk for pupils. Vocabulary choice might also be supported to develop design language and specialist technical vocabulary for talk through use of word banks, as seen below.