The document discusses the DesignInSchools project, which used design thinking to promote literacy in schools.
Over 30 years, the project evolved to use design processes to help students make sense of issues and drive social change. Students worked collaboratively to identify problems, conduct research, develop design solutions, and create prototypes.
The principal observed that the project encouraged collaborative literacy skills like purposeful writing, describing, informing, persuading, clarifying thinking, exploring relationships, predicting, comparing, commanding, and entertaining. It allowed students to make meaningful connections between literacy and designing solutions to complex problems.
7. What they created as literacy outcomes
Purpose Writing Form
To record feelings, observations Interview notes, observation notes, surveys.
To describe Drawings, personal research notes, success
statements.
To inform or advise Design Solutions.
To persuade Design Specification.
To clarify thinking Analysis themes and solution names.
To explore and maintain
relationships with others
Group research, creation of the Implementation
Team.
To predict or hypothesise Research questions, prototyping, testing, data
creation and collection.
To make comparisons Data analysis – benchmarking v with prototypes
in place.
To command or direct Solution recommendations, physical prototypes.
To amuse or entertain Brainstorm prototypes – the tooth brushing task.
Suggest Justin and Mel open and make an intro like:
“This is a session about critical literacy with two outstanding educators, but those educators, like you, are in the final session of a humungous four day conference full of new and inspiring ideas. So in the idea of collaboration, and respecting the subject matter expertise of the education, this session will be introduced by us – the designers.
So grab a breath Wendy and Faith and then we’ll kick off!”
SLIDE 1 - WENDY
“When we started thinking about presenting at this conference about Design In Schools, we always knew that it was about more than a single literacy focused project. At our school, already heavily focuses on inquiry based learning and research, it has become a way of looking at everything we do from a slightly different perspective – that of design.
But the more we prepared and the more we reflected, we realised that this project and presentation wasn’t about design ‘coming into our lives’ as educators. It wasn’t even about looking to a new discipline and thinking about it in relation to literacy and education.
It is about realising that, for me, a literacy journey spanning 30 years had design as an ally. And that is what makes this work so powerful.
Critical Literacy encourages readers to actively analyse texts and offers strategies to uncovering underlying messages. It is about reading in a reflective manner to understand power, inequality and injustice in relationships. And it is about understanding attitudes, values and beliefs in a written, visual and spoken way.
This project – Design in Schools – allowed me, my teaching staff and the young people involved to examine their situation (based around an apparently dangerous car park) and reform their social situation. Students, through literacy, became agents of social change.
Authenticity. The project also provided a learning construct that doesn’t, but should, come around very often. It presented teaching and learning in an authentic and relevant setting. It used language to create meaningful interactions and asked the young people to express, through a literacy framework their (and their community’s) immediate and future needs.
If our task, as Nea Stewart Dore wrote in 1986 (at the start of my own literacy journey), is to socialise children into reading and writing so that they can learn, think, shape and extend their knowledge of language and the world, then this project certainly did that.
But it didn’t do that alone – it did that in collaboration with design.
JUSTIN
DMA is a Canberra-based specialist service design agency working with private, public, community and volunteer organisations.
What’s important to us
Making a difference to people's lives through services that may or may not even be noticed by them - for all the right reasons.
Creating change that is needed and that makes things better.
Bringing together a range of voices and disciplines who can make things happen - not just talk about it, but do it.
We have a strong track record
Working with people (staff, customers, community, change agents)
Deliver for strategic and operational areas
Co-designed service specifications for products and service delivery, for internal and external users.
Fourth Order Design – what does it mean?
1960s-90s IID, Stanford
Design in strategic application - a way of thinking differently about complex problems.
“Human-centred” design
Schools of Design – IID, Standford
1990s Carnegie Mellon, Dschool, IDEO
Application of Co-Design Practice in Aus/NZ public sector ATO, IRD – “administration” design, “service” design, User-centred design, UX design, interaction design.
Product design as “design thinking” well-established - IDEO
Emerging capabilities
Education Institutions – d.School
MEL
MEL
WENDY
You can see here some examples of the range of literacy ‘outputs’ that were created during the project:
Prototypes (both on paper but also physically altering the car park)
Signage and written text
Visualisations and maps
The literacy process really drew on our approach at the school:
Framing up the inquiry
Tuning In
Finding Out
Sorting Out
Going Further
Reflecting and Acting
Evaluation
Our guiding principles
Hope is not a strategy
Laughing children learn
No two people are exactly the same
Learning doesn’t only happen between 9 and 3
Real contexts lead to real learning
Learners need to lead
Curriculum should be inch wide and mile deep
Our learning assets
We are thinkers
We are communicators
We are collaborators
We are researchers
We are self managers
We are curious, capable inquirers.
The four resources model
Code breaker
decoding the codes and conventions of written, spoken and visual texts
Text user
understanding the purposes of different written, spoken and visual texts for different cultural and social function
Text participant
comprehending written, spoken and visual texts
Text analyst
understanding how texts position readers, viewers and listeners
WENDY
And you can see here how that translates to critical literacy outcomes.
MEL
Artefacts as meaning, each for a design purpose
Intent
Research
Analysis
Synthesis
Solution
Recommendation
Make Change
MEL AND WENDY
Interview style – insert your notes here
FAITH AND JUSTIN
Justin draws out the following reflections:
DiS Educator Impact
Inquiry-based framework to teach literacy
The importance of real context, real purpose
Student feedback – valued/empowered
Students alongside Justin and Mel as designers - legitimate job! Rose to the challenge
Range of literacy abilities and dispositions - naturally differentiated (incidental not accidental)
Multiple roles as text users/participants/analysts – supported by collaborative approach
4 resources; code break (interviews), critical text users (surveys/anecdotal evidence/myth busting) and the need to research, analyse and draw insights gained from data
Impact of word choice in clarifying the intent and framing the inquiry question
Complex language features and technical vocabulary – evident in across all areas
Confident and informed communicators (tradeshow)
Observations/data collecting – listen and view without judgement/open to multiple perspectives
Students participated in a range of texts, as they comprehended data, graphs and maps
Influence different signs/messages have on the experience of people using the car park
Better equipped to ensure literacy learning experiences are rich and authentic (I know what it looks like)
WENDY
BLANK SLIDE
Myths – how do you explore it
Service Owner – what services do you want to design