Pedagogical Possibilities for ICT

Project method: learning by designing

Among many proposals for revitalizing general education, the learning projects advocated and corroborated in the last century by John Dewey, Jean Piaget, Jerome Bruner, and Seymour Papert are among the most promising. The trouble is that such learning projects cannot be introduced in a form that the traditional school recognizes: as a ready-made set of precisely defined tasks or particular objectives, operations and procedures given in advance. Instead, these projects have to be found, discovered, invented, or designed in the course of a class.

To benefit from this project method, both teacher and student must acquire some generic skills rarely taught in an ordinary school. Different authors call these skills the design mode of thinking and looking at things, the designer’s approach to problem solving, and designerly ways of knowing. Mastering and exercising those skills would eventually lead to the formation of The Design (or Third) Culture, mediating the much-lamented rift between the two cultures of C. P. Snow – the Techno-Scientific and Humanistic-Artistic.

We invite readers to take part in detecting, unearthing, and cultivating the elements and principles of design in learning. This involves conceptualizing its problem situations, generating options, making choices, conducting mental experiments, finding acceptable solutions, and evaluating probable outcomes before actually implementing them. From this standpoint, design can be seen as an innovative intellectual technology waiting to be converted into a powerful technology of education.

For a start, let us consider what makes, or might make, school learning really interesting, attractive, and successful for students and teachers alike.  True teachers do something more than just transfer information. In receiving any source-material, teachers make it a part of themselves by re-exploring, re-interpreting, and re-constructing its form and content in a personal way. Examining the phenomenon of inner speech, Vygotsky (1986) pointed out that a child, assimilating a certain notion, re-works it, and during the process of re-working, expresses the peculiar features of his own thought. V. S. Bibler, a contemporary Russian philosopher and educator, adds that in inner speech, an individual transforms the socialized and relatively static images of culture into a culture of thought, dynamic and personal. (Bibler 1996) Especially interesting is Bibler’s remark that in such cases an inner speech becomes future oriented and serves as “the mould for creating new, non-existent yet, but just possible images of culture”. We could say that true teachers act as designers of both the «images of subject matter» to be presented in the classroom, and the tools to be used by students in order to transform given images into a personal culture of thought. In this way, they enable students to develop their own abilities to learn.

By initiating communication and interaction regarding the design of the learning process, a true teacher learns no less than the students, who, in fact, are teaching themselves and one another. These and other aforementioned theoretical concepts of modern reform-minded pedagogy can be summarized in the practical recommendations in the final sections of this chapter.

Division of Higher Education: ©UNESCO 2005