Knowledge as Design.
This is David Perkins’ metaphor, which implies that knowledge has a purpose and is purposeful and meaningful. Those of us who have been teaching for a while are Perkins fans because he got it right in 1986, with his seminal work Knowledge as Design. We follow Kieran Egan because we believe in his practical premise that schools should inspire imagination in students. We’ve read Edward Tufte’s Envisioning Information (1990) and Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative (1997). We’ve been following the ideas of Don Norman in his books, Design of Everyday Things (2002), Design of Future Things (2007), Living with Complexity (2010). Norman offers valuable insights about “just noticeable difference, in human-centered technology” that we can apply to our teaching methods and instructional design.
Design Thinking.
This current edu-buzzword refers to what many of us have been doing for years at the Harkness table, guiding students towards rigorous and systematic critical inquiry. Design thinking refers to a creative and systematic process for solving problems, not unlike the scientific method. Here’s Don Norman underscoring that critical thinking and analysis are important factors in this process.
“What is design thinking? It means stepping back from the immediate issue and taking a broader look. It requires systems thinking: realizing that any problem is part of larger whole, and that the solution is likely to require understanding the entire system. It requires deep immersion into the topic, often involving observation and analysis.”
Tim Brown of IDEO and Roger Martin write about design thinking and integrative thinking. We’re scaling down their ideas so that that high school students can practice and become adept at seeking collaborative solutions to complex problems. Because the problems students will face as they enter the workforce and become global citizens will be problems of varying magnitudes of complexity. The gyre of plastic and marine life in the Pacific. Diminishing food supplies. Alternative energy sources. Refugees crossing borders. Education.
We’re visiting schools like Beaver Country Day School to learn about their collaboration with MIT’s NuVuStudio. They use “the design studio approach” to give students experience in innovation. Don Buckley’s 8th grade pilot “Tools for Schools” at The School at Columbia is a partnership with NYC firm Aruliden + Bernhardt Design. Students engage in a rigorous design process that involves both STEM and project management skills to imagine and build a prototype of a desk, chair, or locker for their own learning spaces. I sat on the assessment panel the day the kids presented their big ideas. Ideas that were practical, sustainable, wise, and fun. Desktop whiteboards, ergonomic high chairs that swivel and rock, lockers that are the equivalent of a student’s bedroom.
Educating the Imagination.
The focus: educating the imagination. Educating kids to develop creative solutions. To innovate. To re-mix and mash-up. To think about and parse complex problems in creative ways.
A teacher’s mission is always about instructional design. A lesson conveys information through a purposeful design and an infrastructure. A teacher is a master at re-mix and mash-up, at shaping, molding, and presenting content to students. The French word for this is bricolage, a powerful word in literary theory.
A teacher is a master bricoleur. And bricolage is a wonderful metaphor for creative, collaborative learning. Learning that is cobbled together from many sources, from many minds.
Bricolage. Bricoleur.
As a grad school semiotics student at Columbia University, I first discovered the term in Levi-Strauss’ The Savage Mind (1962). In this anthropological context, bricolage referred to the spontaneous imaginings of mythopoetical thinking. Since myths have no authors, we are all bricoleurs. In Writing and Difference (1967), Jacques Derrida examines the term and broadly concludes that every discourse is a bricolage, a patchwork. Educator Seymour Papert uses the term in contrast to analytic thinking. Papert sees bricolage as a type of tinkering, a cobbling together akin to play. He presents the notion that such imaginative work is play.
The distributed, decentralized, non-linear, cobbled nature of the web — of social media, of information networks such as the twitterverse, of web spaces like wikis and blogs — allows us all to tinker and play. Within an enormous community of learners, we mash-up, re-mix, and cobble together ideas. We are nodes in multiple networks, multiverses of learners.
In this vast and limitless noosphere, the sphere of human thought, like the students we teach, we test incomplete ideas, float them out into space, build on others’ ideas, tinker, cobble, work, learn, share, and play.
Welcome to 21st century learning.
Key metaphor: Bricolage|Bricoleur
Key word: Design
lateralthinking 