All entries for Wednesday 17 November 2010

November 17, 2010

Plan – iteration 2

Follow-up to Contents for a designerly research project from Inspires Learning - Robert O'Toole

The complete essay/report is now online at: http://www.inspireslearning.com/portfolio

Learning is Design[ed]: on the vitality of designerly liberal arts education

Overview

My claim is that arts and humanities education acts as an essential breeding ground for graduates who are capable of solving seemingly intractable social, technical and political problems. This quality results from the blending, deep within the learning experience, of difficult contentions and challenges, powerful formal and informal techniques and opportunities, and an ethos that balances risk-taking with care and consideration. I argue that there are parallels with the increasingly successful “design thinking” movement (coming from business schools and commercial design companies). Through analyzing and refining these parallels, arts and humanities education can be enhanced further.

A three-part hypothesis

My guiding hypothesis starts with the assertion that "contention" in education is good. I use the word "contention" in both its everyday form, and in reference to Bruno Latour's claim that "matters of concern" drive personal, social and technological development through an interaction of actors, networks and theories (actor-network-theory, defined more substantially below). Educational "oppportunities" (formal, informal, curricular, extra-curricular) that live a contentious life are especially valuable. Perhaps more so than well-specified, cohesive, programmatic systems (although they serve different purposes).

The second part to my proposition is that some such educational "opportunities" actively deal with contention in ways that are at the same time useful, productive, risky, safe, well-founded and innovative. They achieve this, I claim, through a designerly self-reflexive nature embodied in their chosen pedagogical methods, forms of community and relationships, ways of thinking (epistemes), learning spaces and technologies. These tools and methods allow for an accomodation between learning and disruption, an accomodation that escapes the obsessive aesthetic of joined-up-ness, micro-specification and clarity. Such opportunities and methods are, I claim, especially common in certain types of arts and humanities degree courses.

Finally, the third part of my research hypothesis: a particular combination of capabilities develop (deliberately or accidentally) from these contention rich opportunities under certain conditions. Some of these capabilities and conditions are described by Donald Schön in his Educating the Reflective Practitioner (1990). But there are many more. The capabilities enable "solving seemingly intractable social, technical and political problems". These capabilities combine skills (physical and cognitive), attitudes, strategies and knowledge. There are many techniques to be investigated. Some more familiar examples are:

Lo-fi prototyping (sketching, paper prototypes, open-space learning performance techniques etc)
Storyboarding (hand drawn or with PowerPoint)
Improvisation
Flash-fiction
Mind mapping
Bricolage

These techniques play an important role in capabilities including:

Framing and reframing problems
Establishing a starting point for investigation
Building to think
Finding, applying and modifying appropriate design patterns
Discovering, connecting and exploring contrasting personal and cultural perspectives
Critical reading and editing
Making research inclusive and participatory
Communicating to a variety of audiences

Often within collaborations that bring together potentially opposing viewpoints. The result of this is that some students are, as described above, especially successful in dealing with complex uncertain, contended problems and domains.

Questions and methods

Key research questions are, therefore:

What specifically are these capabilities?
Under what conditions do they develop most effectively?
What might inhibit successful acquisition of these capabilities?

The enabling and constraining conditions are of several inter-related kinds, including:

Pedagogical
Cultural
Sociological
Psychological
Aesthetic
Administrative
Technical
Spatial

Thus requiring a trans-disciplinary approach. For example, the sociologist Professor Margaret Archer has shown how different people use quite distinct modes of "reflexivity" (approximately "internal conversation", defined more fully below). In her book Making Our Way Through the World (2007), Archer reports upon the results of an extensive research project in which she found four common "modes of reflexivity": communicative, autonomous, meta-reflexive and fragmented. Individuals were seen to be strongly biased towards a single mode. If the "reflective" in Schön's Educating the Reflective Practitioner (1990) is dependent upon the individual's prefered mode of reflexivity, then we might count individual preferences for reflexive mode as a key enabling or constraining condition. This study must therefore examine, survey and observe reflexivity in action in both learning and design.

others - Andy Clark, Becher & Trowler, Deleuze & Guattari, De Landa

In defining and understanding these capabilities, I will draw parallels with and connections between these educational capabilities and the designerly capabilities that are increasingly highly valued in commercial and public sector projects - the kinds of capabilities that are being identified as essential components of service and product design. The parallels will be shown to result from a strong similarity between the kinds of ill-structured, non-linear or "wicked" problems (Buchanan, 1992) encountered in many "real-world" situations, and those found in arts and humanities educational contexts. Of particular interest are projects that aim to design community-sensitive, "glocalized" (Immelt, Govindarajan and Trimble, 2009), and emotionally durable (Chapman, 2005) products and services. Similarly, cases that involve rapidly evolving, unforseeable, non-linear problems (in which intervention adds to the complexity) - for example, the banking crisis. Problems that are best addressed through agile and imaginative collective acts of creativity and innovation. My study will use the academic works described above to bridge the space between learning and design. The design dimension will be given greater precision and clarity. This will be used to examine learning and learning opportunities. I will go so far as to argue that we can call these capabilities and practices designerly, and that arts and humanities learning may be thought of as being designerly in nature.

Explain the scope of the study - arts and humanities HE and how it may go much further (up, down and out).

"This anti-democratic kernel in the object of study [business] has an unsettling effect on business-school scholarship as it tries to honour the university traditions of free speech, creativity and open enquiry while influencing private enterprise."

"The contradiction this produces allows critical voices to emerge and intervene, perhaps through a scholarly critique..."

Stefano Harney, deputy director of the School of Business and Management, Queen Mary, University of London, The Heart of Good Business (18/11/2010)

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storyCode=414296&sectioncode=26

Explain the practical outputs that it aims to create.

Explain core concepts: contention, discipline, tribes and territories, intractable (“wicked”) problems, interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, student as producer, student as performer, globalized/glocalized, creativity, reflexivity, quality, continuum of experience, disruption, design, good design, function, aesthetics, designerly, design method, participatory design, emotional design, empathic design, design spaces, reflective practicum, ideation-inspiration-implementation, design thinking.

Explain my three part structure and timescales.

Part One: Designing a designerly academic methodology – to be completed July 2011

Explain purpose, rationale, structure and methods.

Details of likely chapters.

Details of interviewees, surverys, literature to be used.

Ethical considerations – participatory research/design.

Part Two: Observations, experiments and learning designs – July 2012

Explain purpose, rationale, structure and methods.

Ethical considerations – participatory research/design.

Examples of possible activities.

Part Three: A handbook of designerly liberal arts education - July 2013

Explain purpose, rationale, structure and methods.