Research pitch becoming an essay

Follow-up to Research pitch version 1 from Inspires Learning - Robert O'Toole

I started out this evening with trying to rework my research pitch. This seemed to be going well, but quickly morphed into a full-blown essay. I've added on to this some considerations and speculations regarding reflexivity and design (linking Schön and Archer). That gives a good indication of where the rest of the essay (and the research) is going...

Design

Designers, it is claimed (Brown, 2008), employ a powerful set of strategies for discovering opportunities and problems, abstracting from experience to form reusable “design patterns”, creating and testing physical and mental prototypes based upon their discoveries, and translating this creative-experimental learning into repeatable, scalable and robust end products. This is, increasingly, achieved through a participatory and inclusive methodology, aiming for results that represent the full range of present and future stakeholders (through a kind of democratisation of design). This approach has been called “design thinking”, a fashionable phrase that fails to communicate the rich and diverse assemblages upon which it depends (Kimbell, 2009). Designerly activity combines academic and technical cognitive processes with embodied, reflexive, aesthetic, spatial, social and performative techniques [find qoute from Brown, possibly in podcast]. Projects that draw upon all of these complementary activities may require the collaboration of individuals with sometimes quite different ways of thinking and acting.

"...creativity research has tended to focus on divergent (concrete and reflective) factors in adaption such as tolerance for ambiguity, metaphorical thinking, and flexibility, whereas research on decision making has emphasized more convergent (abstract and active) adaptive factors such as rational evaluation of solution alternatives." (Kolb, 1984: 32)

[in different kinds of space]

David Kelley of the IDEO design company has described these as Ten Faces of Innovation (Kelley and Littman, 2008). These capabilities are increasingly being applied to complex and contested socio-technical domains, through participatory and community owned design projects, with ever greater ambitions (from product and service design, through large municipal developments, to global political and social change). In such work, designers aim to create a joined-up, flowing, intuitive, empowering and fulfilling experience for a diversity of participants. Negotiating between the individual and the collective. But at the same time, while working within the massified contexts of global capitalism, consumerism and public-policy, designers have a remarkable ability to retain and express something of themselves and their own very human joy in experiencing great design.

[examples]

Learning

Learners in higher education, we are told (through the cumulative advice of theorists and policy makers), should be creative and analytical, independent and collaborative, intellectual and practical, reflective and active, free-thinking and enterprising, global and local, specialized but with transferable generic skills. What else? X-ray vision and an aversion to Kryptonite? [what is driving this - for example, WSJ article]. The reality of student life is often thus: to be a subject of contention and seemingly contradictory demands. [add something about joined-up-ness and the aesthetic experience of being a student]. The miracle of higher education is that many students do so well in dealing with these complexities. Indeed, some students positively thrive upon them, and continue to do so with impressive results in their post-graduation existence. [existing practices, new practices (MAs)]

[examples]

[Re]Designing Learning

My research aims to discover the factors that contribute to [long term, collective] student success in negotiating and exploiting such contentions and complexities, with particular concern for issues raised by "trans-disciplinary" and "trans-cultural" learning, and contentions over the academic and the professional. [add something about the problem of identity and interdisciplinary and intercultural issues in HE, marginalisation, gender - Becher & Trowler, Hobbs].  Why are some students so skilful at navigating their way through and profiting from these challenges? What is it that enables some students to develop a strong personal identity (style even), and at the same time fit with often conflicting demands? [How might such students re-design for sustainability the educational, societal and technological context in which they live?] My initial focus is on masters courses that are based in the arts and humanities (specifically 3 courses at Warwick), but which more freely and contentiously cross methodological and cultural boundaries.

Perhaps there are similarities between how these successful students operate and how designers think/work? If so, we may be able to use these lessons to enhance the capabilities of other students, across similarly challenging and formative contexts (most notably, at transition points in the educational journey). Or alternatively, we may discover that such approaches only work for a small sub-set of students, perhaps with some common (or un-common) acquired or inherent peculiarity. It could also easily be the case that common circumstances within educational infrastructure, practice and culture act to suppress the growth and expression of these capabilities – for example, the available learning spaces may be inappropriate.

To frame and investigate these ideas, I draw upon a wide range of relevant studies, personal experience as a teacher, student, designer and technologist, and ongoing research using a variety of methods undertaken within a contention-rich higher education environment (Warwick University) [i'll re-structure the rest of the essay to develop these three inputs - the existing literature, personal experience & position, my investigation in the field].

Literature - key works

The work of the philosopher Donald Schön provides a substantial starting point. In Educating the Reflective Practitioner, Schön reports upon his investigations into the teaching and learning of designerly practices (especially architecture). Most important, he argues, is the encouragement of design strategies like “breaking the discipline” – that is to say, starting with a well known approach to a problem, so as to probe its unique characteristics, and then finding ways to break out of that “discipline” so as to respond to the specificity of the situation at hand. This is not simply procedural. It’s not the kind of process for which we could easily write an expert system computer program. Knowing when and how to “break the discipline” requires a more artful and creative judgment, and a constant reflexive questioning and self-monitoring. More formal approaches to design often rely upon the application of an abstract description of a solution to an abstract class of problem – the “design patterns” approach. Again, the key move made by the designer is in knowing when and how to deviate from the pattern. Designers use many strategies to guide them in this. Collaborative and participatory design approaches make things more complicated (with a need to understand when an abstract mode is being employed just as a strategy or starting off point, and when the time is right to improvise). The key is to have an effective reflexive view on the process. The ability to move between abstract patterns and singular cases is of great importance in design and in learning. But there is more to be discovered, especially concerning the ability to go from the abstract to specific designs, on to action in realistic settings, and then back out via observation to further abstraction.

In her recent work on “reflexivity” and personal-social advancement, Making Our Way Through the World (Archer, 2007), the sociologist Margaret Archer provides evidence for four “modes” of reflexivity. The modes work more or less to enable the movement along three stages to personal-social achievement (very designerly!). Archer describes this as (Archer, 2007: Kindle location 1190):

The four forms are (Archer, 2007: Kindle location 1245):

Each form has obvious implications for the way in which an individual is able to create and fulfill personal and collective projects. Perhaps designerly reflexivity is closely associated with one of these modes. Perhaps it is a super-charged variant of one of the modes. Or perhaps, there is something more meta-reflexive about it? – an ability to move, as needed between different modes of reflexivity?

Some notes from Professor Archer's book...

"To focus exlusively upon semantic and syntactical ellipses ignores Peirce's insight that the more multi-media 'booty' is incorporated from the outer world, the richer the life of the mind becomes." (Archer, 2007: Kindle location 1000-1002)

"Reflexive though is synonomous with internatl conversation because reflexivity is not a vague self-awareness but a questioning exploration of subject in relation to object, including the subject as object, one which need not have any practical outcome or intent." (Archer, 2007: Kindle location 958)

"It follows that every subject practised every mode of reflexivity to some extent, but that the vast majority (93 per cent) showed an inclination towards one modality in particular.

In sum, this indicates that the reflexive process is a multi-faceted activity for everyone. All subjects use all of its facets in some of their mental deliberations, despite the fact that for nearly everybody one facet was dominant." (Archer, 2007: Kindle location 1255-1257)

_________

Brown, T. Design Thinking, Harvard Business Review, June 2008.

Kelley, T. and Littman, J. The Ten Faces of Innovation, Profile Books, 2008.

Kimbell, L. Design-as-practice and designs-in-practice, online at http://www.lucykimbell.com/LucyKimbell/Writing.html, 2009

Robert O'Toole : 28 Oct 2010 00:11 |  Tags: Ideation |  Comments (1) |  Report a problem