Currently attending the Digital Media and Learning Conference, I was surprised to learn during several panel sessions that there is a whole range of projects using design elements in child education. There were some out-of-school projects mainly with museums with the aim to produce digital exhibition artifacts. The Smithsonian in Washington, DC, the YOUMedia ArtLab@The Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC, The Field Museum in Chicago, and the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco all participate in an initiative led by the New Learning Institute, aiming at putting “young people in the role of designing experiences for other young people”.
There are three reasons why I have to challenge these approaches (on the basis they were presented in the panel) from a design (thinking) perspective:
First, applying design in a young school kids education setting is still in the beginning and subject of many academic studies.
Second, in each of the cases presented, the aim was to produce a digital media artifact. Yet, the appropriate solution to any given problem can only be developed by following the process, considering constraints and redefining the problem. Thus, finding the right medium should be part of the challenge
Lastly, I know from my own experience that collaborative design is a messy and sometimes frustrating process. It is hard enough to get the hang of it being an adult, and it has proven to be much harder for younger people who often ask for guidelines and are still learning the necessary reflective thinking and abstraction skills. Over and over has it been discussed that teaching design (thinking) to non-designer adults requires much more than presenting them with a one-day power point presentation. However, none of the educators seemed to have had any design (practice) background or formal design training, and yet they were teaching it.
And yet – all of them reported mainly successes, high-quality results, kids starting to reflect upon their work, deeply engaging with subject matters, feelings of ownership for their projects, increasing self-motivation and social skills. Even with disabled kids, the interactive, team-based learning approach applied in museums produced allegedly great results. Funding for such projects in the US seems to be not an issue as even big educational publishing houses (Pearson) are ready to invest.
Of course the experiences reported weren’t entirely smooth. We heard about disoriented kids, teams falling apart, bureaucracy coming from decision makers hesitant of relating kids-produced work to their institution. But isn’t this only a reflection of the process’ very own toolkit and mindset, as in fail early and often? Without failing, educators will never find out which elements will work in their communities, which constraints kids need to be given in order to find just enough guidance they need to feel self-confident to carry on on their own.
Other cases where design elements were used in an education context presented at the conference were actually taking place in a high school context. Teachers at the iSchool in New York use the design process in order to tackle a specific problem together with the kids while school curriculum content was included more or less by accident. The iSchool seemed to provide a designer’s dream environment for teaching 21st century skills along the lines of the connected learning/connectivism framework.
I feel that these, I’ll call them design-driven education success stories, remind us analytics-loving Germans that, one of the drivers of innovation is a Bias Towards Action. Even if this action involves kids. By allowing them to get going and fail, without worrying too much about whether or not this has been done before, educators in the US are taking a very valuable action.
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