Bill Nicholl

We're All in This Game Whether We Like It or Not to Get a Number of As to Cs. Design and Technology Teachers' Struggles to Implement Creativity and Performativity Policies.

Education reform in England has seen many policies and initiatives introduced by central government. This article discusses two such policies, performativity and creativity. Performativity has been central to the governments agenda of raising standards and includes monitoring mechanisms such as Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted) inspections, performance management and school league tables, all of which are used to measure or judge the value or worth of a school or individual teacher. At the same time as policies on performativity have been implemented, policy makers have introduced a number of policies to encourage creativity in education. This article foregrounds teachers of design and technology (D&T) at secondary level (11–16 years), describing how they struggled to implement both strategies. Teachers valued creativity and thought it was an important part of the subject, but the pressure to be seen to be performing and getting favourable positions in school league tables and Ofsted inspections...

A study of university design tutors' perceptions of creativity

This paper describes the perceptions and views of creativity among a selection of the UK-based design tutors. The study presents the findings of research that has questioned a total of 16 design tutors in architecture and industrial design in a leading UK university that specializes in design education. The researchers adopted a semi-structured interview approach and collected a series of rich insights into how design tutors conceptualize creativity and how they perceive their role in developing creativity in their students. The findings show that design tutors clearly value creativity, but, at the same time, they find it very difficult to define and conceptualize. The results also show that the tutors were unable to articulate how they helped their students develop their own creativity. Moreover, the results reveal that the design tutors would value understanding creativity more in order to improve their teaching.

Joining up the DOTs: authentic teaching and learning in Design and Technology education

This paper reports on an innovative approach for teaching creativity in Design and Technology education based on the notions of authentic learning. Working with secondary schools in England and Ireland, the research team has been developing an intervention known as ‘Designing Our Tomorrow’ (DOT) which introduced students to the important principles of Inclusive Design (also known as Universal Design). Through interview and survey data, the team gained insights into students’ responses to the DOT intervention and they found that students’ creativity and empathy were enhanced following their engagement with the intervention materials.

Empathy as an Aspect of Critical Thought and Action in Design and Technology

User-centred approaches to design stress the importance of the designer understanding the needs and experiences of the user when designing products (Sanders E, Dandavate U, Designing for experiencing: new tools. In Overbeeke CJ, Hekkert P, (eds) Proceedings of the first international conference on design and emotion, 3–5 November 1999, Delft University of Technology, Delft, pp 87–92, 1999). How designers and others involved in designing have understood these needs has evolved since Taylor’s seminal work in the early 1900s. One emerging and influential user-centred approach to design over the last decade has been inclusive design. Researchers working in this field have developed ways of working or ‘signature pedagogies’ that allow them to think critically and empathise with users, to understand their needs from their perspective and to use this understanding to critically inform their own actions when designing, as well as educating others in the practices of inclusive design. I will discuss these signature pedagogies, arguing that they are crucial for developing critical thinking dispositions and engendering empathy when designing and educating others. I will then discuss how the signature pedagogies of inclusive design were successfully introduced into high schools in a number of countries.