Design and technology in England's national curriculum

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Introduction

England's National Curriculum web site, retrieved 19:57, 25 November 2011 (CET) defines 2 key stages for the primary curriculum and 2 key stages for the secondary curriculum. For secondary education 15 subjects are listed for key stage 3 (i.e. 11 to 14 year olds) and 8 subjects are listed for key stage 4.

Design and technology is one of the key stage 3 (11-14 year olds) subjects. The others are: Art and design - Citizenship - English - Geography - History - ICT - Mathematics - Modern foreign languages - Music - Physical education - Science - Personal, social, health and economic education and religious education.

The current keystage 3 design and technology program

Design and technology key stage 3 (PDF) is mandatory (statutory content) and it is defined as “In design and technology pupils combine practical and technological skills with creative thinking to design and make products and systems that meet human needs. They learn to use current technologies and consider the impact of future technological developments. They learn to think creatively and intervene to improve the quality of life, solving problems as individuals and members of a team.”. Interestingly, there is no explicit link related fields such as ICT, Mathematics or Art and Design, except some vague recommendation in the Curriculum opportunities: “g. make links between design and technology and other subjects and areas of the curriculum.”

For the sake of its novelty, we will reproduce both the set of key processes and the longer practical range and contents list. The former is defined as the essential skills and processes in design and technology that pupils need to learn to make progress.

Pupils should be able to:

  1. generate, develop, model and communicate ideas in a range of ways, using appropriate strategies
  2. respond creatively to briefs, developing their own proposals and producing specifications for products
  3. apply their knowledge and understanding of a range of materials, ingredients and technologies to design and make their products
  4. use their understanding of others’ designing to inform their own
  5. plan and organise activities and then shape, form, mix, assemble and finish materials, components or ingredients
  6. evaluate which hand and machine tools, equipment and computer-aided design/manufacture (CAD/CAM) facilities are the most appropriate to use
  7. solve technical problems
  8. reflect critically when evaluating and modifying their ideas and proposals to improve products throughout their development and manufacture.
- Key processes, retrieved 19:57, 25 November 2011 (CET)

This list includes mostly rather high-level strategic meta-cognitive skills and as far as we can tell does not guarantee per se any kind of result.

We found the probably less important Range and content list more interesting, since it also identifies more concrete subject areas and activities. This section outlines the breadth of the subject on which teachers should draw when teaching the key concepts and key processes.


a) The curriculum should include resistant materials, systems and control and at least one of food or textiles product areas.
In each product area the study of designing should include understanding of
b) users’ needs and the problems arising from them
c) the criteria used to judge the quality of products, including fitness for purpose, the extent to which they meet a clear need and whether resources have been used appropriately
d) the impact of products beyond meeting their original purpose and how to assess products in terms of sustainability
e) aesthetic, technical, constructional and relevant wider issues that may influence designing, selection of materials, making and product development.
The study of making in food should include
f) a broad range of practical skills, techniques, equipment and standard recipes, and how to use them to develop, plan and cook meals and single or multiple products
g) how to plan and carry out a broad range of practical cooking tasks safely and hygienically
h) healthy eating models relating to a balanced diet, the nutritional needs of different groups in society and the factors affecting food choice and how to take these into account when planning, preparing and cooking meals and products
i) the characteristics of a broad range of ingredients, including their nutritional, functional and sensory properties.
The study of making in resistant materials and textiles should include
j) a broad range of techniques, including handcraft skills and CAD/CAM, and how to use them to ensure consistency and precision when making single and multiple products
k) the behaviour of structural elements in a variety of materials
l) how to use materials, smart materials, technology and aesthetic qualities to design and make products of worth
m) how to prepare and assemble components to achieve functional results.
The study of making in systems and control should include
n) the practical application of systems and control in design proposals
o) electrical, electronic, mechanical, microprocessor and computer control systems and how to use them effectively
p) using systems and control to assemble subsystems into more complex systems
q) feedback and how a variety of inputs can give rise to a variety of outputs.

The reader also might consult the (long) list of key concepts

Interestingly, food plays an important part in the subject list. Again, other design disciplines like music or visual arts are not addressed in the document, i.e. its left to the teachers to integrate or not. We don't see this as a problem, since choices will have to be made anyhow, but we just would like to point out that "design and technology" could be addressed differently. Associations, like The Design and Technology association also advocate "where necessary, reduce prescription, since "too much content can limit teachers‘ ability to exercise their professional autonomy in order to meet the needs of individual pupils and to achieve the required depth in learning". (Response to the national curriculum Review, retrieved 20:33, 25 November 2011 (CET). In addition, the same association also suggests to identify essential content acrosss 'all subjects.

Also, we have the (not supported) suspicion that some teachers may resort to baking cookies, a bit of embroidery or sewing and playing with Legos, i.e. neglect the very difficult task of teaching both difficult technology and creating innovating designs. Such problems could not be overcome by adding more prescriptive elements to the curriculum, but rather through teacher training and teacher-led innovation. The review response of the D&T response we cited above includes a quite extensive literature of good practise that we shall summarize below.

The 2011 review

England has one of the most centralized school systems of the world and it seems that there is a will to give more autonomy to schools and even individual teachers. In the "National Curriculum Review - Call for Evidence", Section E, explictly states: “Please bear in mind in considering your responses that removing a subject from the National Curriculum would not mean that that subject was not important, or that schools should stop teaching it. Instead, it would mean that it is not necessary for the Government to specify in a statutory Programme of Study precisely what should be taught in that subject, and that decisions should instead be made at local level, by individual schools and teachers.”. In addition in early 2012, there will be a call for detailed suggestion of new programmes of study.

The response from the The Design and Technology association

The Design and Technology association gave a detailed response that includes academic evidence for the usefulness of "design and technology". The assocation based their response on a panel of input from both academics and industry leaders. For sake of simplicity we will not use double quoting, i.e. quotes below were taking directly from the report and not the original.

A first line of arguments in favor or teaching design and technology is biological and anthropological. “The hand is the cutting edge of the mind. Civilisation is not a collection of finished artefacts; it is an elaboration of processes. In the end the march of man is the refinement of the hand in action.” (Bronowski, 1973). Sir James Dyson's (2010) "ingenious Britain" calling for more polymatsh “young people capable of using head and hands”, arguing that ““Hands‟, in that they can solve problems, have no fear of failure, and follow their theories through into practice by actually making things.”. Dyson is an industrial designer who invented the bagless cyclonic separation vacuum cleaner.

Design and technology is then examined with respect to its role in the larger STEM area (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) and it is argued that design and technology does not have but should have the same priority as science and math (Dyson, 2010). “Design and Technology is the only subject in the current National Curriculum that embodies this activity and provides learners with the opportunity to change their environment. From KS1 onwards D&T provides a rich mix of practical, technical and academic approaches which prepares pupils to live and work in an advanced technological society (Ofsted, 2008). The learning of science and mathematics is of course necessary to support this endeavour, particularly with regard to technical aspects of the subject but whilst these are necessary they alone are not sufficient for the task.”.

Perspectives on technology education

“The discussion about technology can easily become a narrow one if it is limited to frustrated technology teachers defending the position of technology education as an independent school subject. One could seriously ask the question if teaching about technology in a separate subject is the only option for developing technological literacy. [...] In fact, the difficulties that technology teachers often have in moving away from the past in which this dedicated school subject with technology in its name was focused on the teaching and learning of handicraft skills mainly. There was certainly a value in that, which somehow must be kept active, but the contribution to technological literacy was fairly limited in that type of technology education.” (de Vries (2011: 1))

As far as we can tell from our own personal experience, this describes pretty much the current state of technology education in the French lower secondary schools, i.e. the subject matter called "techno". In the past (and that means in most systems today) “it was often taken to be the processing of materials by means of tools and machines.” (de Vries, 2011:2).

According to de Vries, 1996 “Gardner (1994) shows how Francis Bacon already defended the thesis that technology should be applied science and that we find this opinion time and again in later literature. It is then suggested that there is a more or less straightforward path from that scientific knowledge to the technological product. This opinion for some time functioned as a paradigm for the philosophy of technology.”

For the moment, we dont' have enough knowledge to really support the claim that the current paradigms about technology education stress its integrating role between various domains like science, technology, (visual) design, ethics, economics, etc. It also could be argued that engineering disciplines themselves mutated into "design sciences". The problem now arrises that "design can not be taught in the abstract" (nothing that is abstract really can). Not surprisingly and international delphi study came up with the following figure:

De Vries et al. 2010 Concepts and Contexts in Engineering and Technology Education: a Modified Delphi Study and Expert Panel Report

Links

Official
Organizations
Journals
Conferences
  • Pupils’ Attitudes Towards Technology (PATT) conference, Delft, the Netherlands in 2009.
  • First American Society for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Technology Education Research Conference
Talks
For teachers

Bibliography

This bibliography was bootstrapped from The Design and Technology association's Response to the national curriculum Review, retrieved 20:51, 25 November 2011 (CET)

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