Towards a signature pedagogy for design and technology education: a literature review

Abstract

Drawing on the work of Lee Shulman, this article reviews literature exploring the concept of signature pedagogies, which are described as having have surface, deep and implicit structures. These structures are complex and changing; concerned with habits of head, hand and heart. Emerging from professional education and now being explored in STEM and Humanities education, they are characteristic forms of teaching and learning that are common across a sector. Common themes emerge from within a range of disciplines including art, built environment, design, music, religious, social work and teacher education. These include the roles of the curriculum, the teacher, the learning environment, as well as capability, uncertainty and the challenges associated with signature pedagogies. Focusing on literature from design education, the paper explores the nature of signature pedagogy in design and technology, as a tool for professional discourse. The conclusions propose a discursive framework for design and technology education in which the structures are tied together by the three fundamental activities of ideating, realising and critiquing; more commonly thought of as designing, making and evaluating. The deep structure being project-based learning, undergirded by the implicit values and attitudes associated with design thinking; including collaboration, creativity, empathy, iteration and problem solving. Design and technology education has something unique to offer the broad and balanced curriculum through its signature pedagogies and the way that knowledge is experienced by learners.

Making tacit knowledge explicit: the case for online peer feedback in the studio critique

“…Researchers agree that tacit knowledge is built through experience and in design education is acquired through hands-on practice, learning-by-doing (Schön, 1983(Schön, , 1987 observing, dialogical learning and engaging in the process of action and reflection (Crowther, 2013;McLain, 2022;Shreeve et al, 2010). Given that students are only at the start of their learning journey to become "competent practitioners [who] usually know more than they can say" (Schön, 1983, p. 8), they often struggle with the largely implicit and intuitive nature of tacit knowledge acquisition (van Dooren et al, 2014;Venkatesh & Ma, 2019).…”

“…One way of making the implicit design knowledge explicit is the critique process in the design studio which is a fundamental characteristic of design education (Crowther, 2013;McLain, 2022;Shreeve et al, 2010) and part of the pathway of becoming, what Schön (1983Schön ( , 1987 termed, a "reflective partitioner". During a critique, students present their work-in-progress or final designs to receive explicit feedback.…”

A journey through course development

“…Signature pedagogies are important in course design as they lead knowledge acquisition and show the student how to analyse, evaluate and think critically in relation to the discipline (Shulman, 2005). Signature pedagogy often links to the core of the discipline, creating parallels to the related profession through the design of the course (McLain, 2022). As part of the workshops, the signature pedagogies identified as best suited to our student cohort and discipline for the new course is authentic learning, work integrated learning, social constructionist learning and student centred learning.…”

Signature Pedagogies in Collaborative Creative Learning in Advanced Music Training, Education and Professional Development: A Meta-Synthesis

“…Since the publication of Shulman's seminal work on signature pedagogies (2005), the concept has been applied in several disciplinary contexts (see Gurung et al, 2009;Chick et al, 2012) including the arts. For example, the idea of signature pedagogies has framed research and theoretical discussions concerned with architecture and design (Crowther, 2013;Caldwell et al, 2016;McLain, 2021), languages (Galina, 2017), literary studies (Heinert, 2017;Heinert and Chick, 2017;Clapp et al, 2021), dance (Kearns, 2017), theater (Kornetsky, 2017), visual arts (Sims and Shreeve, 2012;Motley, 2017) and music (Hastings, 2017;Love and Barrett, 2019).…”