Primary and Secondary Approaches
Design Thinking's Effect on Middle School Student Empathy in English Language Arts
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Kim Starkey
The purpose of research is to determine whether design thinking in the context of English Language Arts has an effect middle school student empathy. For comparison, students participate in combinations of the school's adopted curriculum, Reader's Workshop utilizing the book Wonder, and/ or design thinking. Design thinking is hypothesized to increase empathic tendencies, as measured by a survey, writing prompt, and participant interviews, most due to its focus on human-centered creation and investigations into problems which students in their grade may face. The researcher expands on tools gathered from Maureen Carroll's work at the school to elucidate how one might utilize design thinking in any classroom as a tool to increase student empathy while students participate in rigorous, relevant, and engaging curricular material.
Children's Dreams Turned into Real Design Objects: Toy Design as a Social Responsibility Project
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Didem Kan-Kilic
“Collective Act” is an elective course which was opened for design faculty students in İzmir University of Economics/Turkey to prepare a social responsibility project that can meet the needs of the society by concentrating on the knowledge, experience, and capabilities of the designers in the social and collective direction of the design. The main aim of this course is to analyze the needs of local environments to create interactive design project. In the frame of this course, design faculty students from departments of Interior Architecture, Architecture, Industrial Design, Visual Communication Design, and Fashion Design turned the dream toys of children into reality. Eighteen children who are in need were chosen from the elementary school in İzmir/Turkey and asked to draw their dream toys. Design faculty students took verbal descriptions of the children during drawing process. The dream toy drawings of these children were turned into three dimensional design objects as part of this course and toys were manufactured at the workshop area in the university. As a final, these toys were given to these chosen children as report card gift. With the help of this course, we aimed to help develop the relationship between designer and person in need. This project taught design students to work collaboratively with other disciplines and produce a project for people in need. In addition, the students learned how to solve problems during design process and develop design management to finalize the project.
Integrating Design Thinking in Teacher Education: Teacher Students Develop Learning Scenarios for Elementary Schools View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Sabine Hoegsdal, Anne-Marie Grundmeier
Creativity, problem-solving skills, and the ability for collaborative work are considered as key competences for mastering the challenges of the twenty-first century. Children are born with natural creativity and curiosity, but worldwide it can be observed, that these talents decrease throughout their school careers. Therefore, an interdisciplinary team with expertise in design and pedagogy investigates, whether Design Thinking in elementary schools could be a method to foster children’s creativity, problem-solving skills and collaborative work. International studies on design thinking in secondary education show promising results. Initial findings of our surveys with teachers and pilot teaching units in German elementary schools show that both the process and the principles of Design Thinking enable children to achieve a goal-oriented form of independent learning and creative problem-solving. Teachers show open-mindedness towards Design Thinking and see a high potential for its application in classroom. The main challenge will be to provide teachers with a solid understanding of Design Thinking, which enables them to apply it in a self-sufficient way, to develop confidence in their own creative capabilities and in an open learning process. Based on these findings, teacher students of the University of Education in Freiburg were trained in Design Thinking by a designer and developed learning scenarios for elementary schools. Next steps will be to implement them in classrooms and to evaluate their potential in terms of fostering twenty-first century skills with qualitative methods of empirical social research. Our paper presents the learning scenarios and discusses current results.
