Understanding Design and Technology in Primary Schools

Cases from Teachers' Research

Les Tickle

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN: 9780415130325
• eBook ISBN: 9781134792153
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Teaching design and technology to young children has set new challenges for primary school managers, teachers, pupils and parents. Through the use of frank and detailed case studies, this book reveals the teaching aims and methods adopted by teachers, the issues they face in making their work effective, and the experiences of their pupils in learning design and technology. Extensive first hand evidence of classroon experience is provided by the teachers. The collection describes how action research can be done. It then provides practical examples of teachers introducing changes in the curriculum, in their teaching and in their use of evidence in monitoring teaching, as a result of this kind of research. Student teachers, teachers, parents and curriculum managers will all benefit from the insights offered by this wealth of practical accounts.

Chapter 1
Design and technology in primary schools

Les Tickle

Some of the first-hand experiences of teachers who have introduced design and technology into primary schools in recent years make up this book. The kinds of experiences they have encountered in their endeavours to effect design and technology teaching, and some of the practical issues which have arisen in doing so, are their central focus. The ways in which they have tackled problems through reflective and systematic thinking about curriculum implementation and development - their own research into their teaching and their coordinating responsibilities - provide the basis of the stories which are told. They convey the practical realities of teachers tackling the design and technology curriculum, the teaching strategies demanded by it, the collaboration with colleagues which it sometimes presumes, and the coordination of curriculum activities within a school. They also convey the kinds of problems and issues which have arisen for teachers, and the reflectiveness brought to bear upon those issues, in the search for understanding how best children might learn, and be taught.

Before introducing the individual stories, I want to set the scene for the teachers’ chapters with a brief résumé of the development of design and technology as a primary school subject, and its changing nature during the recent period of innovation. This broader picture is important, because it displays something of the extent to which the challenges faced by teachers, in acquiring subject expertise and developing teaching strategies appropriate for young children, can be read as a collective professional problem. The later chapters, not surprisingly, do convey a sense of solitary activity and personal responsibility, and that is the way teaching often feels. But collectively, and set in the context of educational change, they become very evidently part of a shared response to the widespread experience of primary school teachers.

Design and technology for pupils in Key Stages One and Two in all primary schools in England and Wales is a legally enforced foundation subject of the national curriculum. In the early 1990s it was even described by some politicians as being the ‘extended core’ subject, putting its status almost on a par with maths, science and English. In one sense that is something of an amazing development, given that the subject came into the national policy framework for the primary curriculum only in the mid- to late-1980s. It was not, suddenly, a new subject which had been invented, but rather the elevation of a set of slow moving ideas to formal recognition. In another sense the amazement might be that, in a nation which led the way in industrialization and product development, design and technology took such a long, slow climb even to get in to primary schools. In that climb there were movements and shifts of direction within the subject itself, as it was formulated and remodelled.

The latest model is the result of the Dearing review (DfE 1995; SCAA 1995) which is described below, but it is worth putting that particular version into context. The value of doing so is, partly, to demonstrate that curriculum proposals, including those which resulted from the Dearing review, are the product of human interactions with all their strengths and frailties, ideals and compromises, powers and influences. Another purpose is to show that what we have in the current policy framework is a documentary model, a model whose relationship with the experiences of classroom life can be judged when reading the research reports which make up the following chapters of the book, or when thinking about one’s own experiences in the classroom.

Both of these points are especially important in the case of design and technology. The detailed content and assessment criteria for each subject are established, within the framework of the Education Reform Act 1988 (amended by the Education Act 1993) as Statutory Orders. The power to amend these requirements lies with the Secretary of State for Education, and the nation was promised that the January 1995 Orders would not be changed for at least five years, in the interests of assuring some stability in the curriculum. In April 1995 however the Schools Curriculum and Assessment Authority published Key Stages 1 and 2: Design and Technology the New Requirements (SCAA 1995). Its opening statement indicates an acknowledgement of, and perhaps even infers a desire for, the internal dynamic of curriculum change in design and technology:

In its present form, D&T is a relatively new and developing subject, changing rapidly both within and beyond education. The (statutory) requirements have been written in as non-prescriptive a way as possible, allowing teachers to decide how they will best be met in the light of their pupils’ particular circumstances.

(SCAA 1995: 1)

What we have is a documentary (legal) curriculum prescription with a (promised) five-year minimum life, imposed on teachers who are expected to be at least adaptive, and perhaps creative, in ‘getting to grips with the new Order’. The attempt to reconcile legally enforceable prescription with the perceived dynamic of design and technological developments is no surprise, given the history of the subject and the school curriculum.

The background of learning, teaching and curriculum design which would fit the family of what we now call design and technological activities is summarized in Tickle (1987). It is largely one of the attempts to develop technical education in the secondary sector. There the tensions between academic study for entry into higher education, and practical studies for manufacturing occupations, were and still are acute (Goodson 1983). The universities and examination boards maintained the status of traditional academic subjects, to the detriment of more obviously ‘vocational’ ones. In primary schools the continued emphasis on ‘the basics’ of numeracy and literacy meant that even science teaching was in a parlous state as late as the 1980s. Design and technology had filtered down rather falteringly from the secondary sector (DES 1978; 1983; 1985a).

The final quarter of the twentieth century provides a picture of a dawning realization, at various levels in the education system, that the dearth of attention to technological education was a mistake. Curriculum development projects were sponsored to test out new kinds of activities or develop the more conventional craft syllabuses in schools. The schools inspectorate began to pay attention to the lack of practical and problem-solving dimensions of the curriculum. National monitoring of standards, from 1974 developed by the Assessment of Performance Unit of the Department for Education, included design and technology along with maths, science and English. This was indeed a new dawning, not only about national economic needs, but also about the supposed nature of so-called academic and practical curricula, and about the educational potentials of non-traditional subject content and activities for pupils.

I have described some details of the dawn chorus previously (in Tickle 1987: 6–28), in particular showing how craft, design and technology emerged through the mists of the 1980s. Its early versions as a national curriculum subject, in draft proposals and ministerial ‘Orders’, are rather complex, and need not be repeated here, except to indicate some of the consequent issues for teaching.

When it was eventually implemented within national curriculum legislation it had four attainment targets: Identifying Needs and Opportunities; Generating A Design Proposal; Planning and Making; and Appraising (i.e. evaluating). Tensions in defining specific content included the difficulties of teaching craft skills while allowing children to make decisions about the projects they would undertake. The place of home economics, business studies, and information technology remained problematic. Precisely which realms of scientific, technological, aesthetic, and technical skills content should be introduced at what stage was also hard to define. There was an intrinsic pedagogical problem of reconciling the acquisition of concepts with their application - how far might children learn concepts from making things, or make things without prior understanding in order to learn concepts from practical experience? Similar issues surrounded the question of how problem-solving processes could be pursued and developed, in association with the knowledge, skills and understanding which may be prerequisites to the conduct of problem solving.

Such questions were especially poignant for primary school practice. Attainment target one, which said that pupils should be capable of identifying and stating needs and opportunities for design and technological activities, through exploration of a range of design problems in the home, school and community, seemed so obviously ‘out of order’ in relation to young children. How could five and six year olds, for example, perceive such problems, appreciate possible solutions to them, and carry out the solutions? How could teachers of such young children encourage, respond to, accommodate and cater for a class full of individual design projects? Because of these and other difficulties arising from expectations placed on teachers and young children, curriculum ‘Orders’ were no sooner introduced than they were subject to revisions. The general turmoil, and sustained hope of a workable solution at the turn of the decade - into the 1990s - was summed up by John Eggleston:

In 1989 Margaret Parkes’s Technology Working Party report enjoyed more accolades than all the others put together. Visionary, revolutionary and inspiring were some of the adjectives used. Three years later technology education seems in crisis and the adjectives most often heard are demoralised, unworkable and even disastrous…. The pressure of teachers for a simpler, more practical and accessible subject has been shared by government, employers and many parents.

(Eggleston 1992)

The simpler proposed version, published in December 1992, reduced the four attainment targets to two, Designing and Making, and formally introduced the mechanism of using designing and making tasks (DMTs, quickly to become known as dumpties), as what John Eggleston called ‘the heart of Design and Technology’. Before these amendments were introduced as formal Orders to replace the first version, the whole of the national curriculum came into dispute, and the full review chaired by Sir Ron Dearing was established. A period of continuing dawn mist followed. The old Orders were still legally enforceable but overthrown by general acceptance of the new proposals. Yet the new proposals were subject to the same kind of review as the rest of the national curriculum subjects, in an intention to slim it all down and make it manageable. Some of the dawn mists evaporated in January 1995 with the publication of the details of the Dearing review, for implementation in September of that year, including the details for Design and Technology (DfE 1995).

It is in that context of innovation, rapid change, review, and modification that the research projects of these teachers were devised, and the chapters of this book written. Each results from a first and exploratory journey into the territory of teacher research. They were carried out in a range of different types of primary schools, with different age groups, dealing with different topics, and are written from the perspective of various kinds of teaching responsibilities. These chapters are organized alphabetically in the order of author surname. Teacher research as a means of developing teaching is a matter which I have also written about elsewhere (Tickle 1987; 1994). The ways in which the teachers did their research will be evident in each individual chapter, and will illustrate how the core ideas of teacher research were applied in each case. Some of its principles are set out in chapter two, in the form of a step-by-step practical guide, for readers who are interested in doing their own research.

Martin Bayliss provides an account of a technology coordinator’s attempts to persuade colleagues to introduce design and technology teaching through the science curriculum, in order to solve the overcrowded timetable and gain a foothold in his school for cross-curricular teaching. His story is one of personal commitment to a particular set of ideas, which he was willing to introduce in his own classroom as a means of leading by example. His review of the innovation and of the premise on which it was based is a testament to the value of reflective thinking and willingness to take curriculum evaluation seriously, not only in relation to practice but to the aims, ideals and assumptions which underly the way the curriculum is organized.

Sue Cooke reports details of an investigation into the working of a group of children in a rural primary school, in which she sought to identify the reasons for their failure to complete their work, and/or the poor quality in the completion of it. It is also much more, for it records graphically the trials of a teaching head intent on carrying out research which will help her to understand the problem she had identified, and perhaps to solve it. The key elements of the research, though, relate to her Year 6 children’s experiences of, and attitudes towards, the acquisition and use of ‘making’ skills, planning of projects, time allocation and management, and the use of criteria in judging what they make.

Helen Deacon examines how a single technology task set for the whole class, but with opportunities for different responses to suit individual needs built in to the nature of the task, is completed by a mixed ability group of ten year olds. The use of the single open-ended task, aimed to encourage children to work at their own levels of ability and allow them to develop and increase their personal skills, is evaluated through the question: why don’t the products reflect the teachers’ anticipated varying levels of design capabilities?

Sarah Humphreys records her exploration of the criteria that children use to evaluate commercially manufactured products, and products that they have designed and made themselves. This is a case study based on children’s evaluations of electrically operated, working toys. It is also a record of the experiences of a novice teacher-investigator, struggling with the arguments, ideas and frustrations of teacher research, especially with the analysis of data which she collected from the activities and ideas of the children.

Rosemary Jackson summarizes an investigation of the phenomenon of pupils copying from each other in the classroom, and the reactions it provokes among children in Key Stage 2. The chapter defines different aspects of copying and their effects on, and perceptions by, children and teachers. An analysis of observation notes and interviews provides the basis for the development of policy and an action plan concerning copying in designing and making activities.

Sue Lusted describes in her own terms how she changed from a teaching style which required all children to produce identical objects, to an approach in which children were expected to use their own ideas, and in which they could achieve individuality in their products, within the guidance of a classroom project. It is an account of a self-reflective teacher concerned about the potential consequences of delegating decision making powers to pupils, about losing control of the quality of the work produced, and about adapting from previously ‘proven’ practices to new teaching strategies.

Andrew McCandlish studies children’s technological drawings at the beginning of Key Stage 2. Classroom data is analysed to show how children regard their drawings, and the mental images used by them as starting points for recording their ideas. It provides a revealing study about the children’s awareness of what they visualize, and what they draw, and the differences between these.

Annette McMylor describes her aim of encouraging cooperation among her pupils, and examines the apparent lack of a friendly, cooperative spirit in the classroom. The difference between her aspirations and what she perceived to be happening led to this study of how the children worked, who they worked with, and whether design and technology activities help towards fostering a more cooperative learning environment.

Kevin O’Grady provides another research reponse to the call for activities which involve children working in groups. He examined, through a study of Year 2 children, the criteria they use when selecting work partners for design and technology activities. His initial impressions that they did not choose work partners because of their perceived design and making capabilities were checked out against a range of evidence which had not previously been considered. Strategies of intervention which he sought to adopt for encouraging informed choices of partners are reported.

Gillian Oliver reports research which examined how she and colleagues in a first school began to teach design and technology, and how the author began to tackle her role as coordinator of the subject. That task was begun with an audit of the technology which was being taught, and in particular how resources, curriculum knowledge and teacher confidence affected what was being offered to the children. An agenda for change and development was created on the basis of the evaluation, and negotiated with the staff.

Candy Rogers shows how she thought she was providing opportunities for children to make choices in the reception class. She set out to observe and record the choices her children made when engaged in design and make tasks, and the reasons why they made them. Through observations and interviews the author was led to reflect on, and examine, the constraints she put on the children, and the reasons for them. A re-evaluation of teaching strategies led to changes in practice, and in the ways in which children’s choices operated in the classroom.

John Seaward describes the ways in which a class of children nearing the end of Key Stage 2 use evaluation as a sub-process in their problem-solving activities. Classroom research was conducted to try to understand the capabilities of the children, and the chapter explores issues raised by the...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Figures
• Tables
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1: Design and technology in primary schools
• Chapter 2: Developing design and technology teaching through research
• Chapter 3: Combining design, technology and science?
• Chapter 4: Effective completion of technological tasks
• Chapter 5: Mixed ability children and the single open-ended task
• Chapter 6: Views and values
• Chapter 7: Copying
• Chapter 8: Change from rigid teaching
• Chapter 9: Mental images and design drawing
• Chapter 10: Working together
• Chapter 11: Early years children, designers, and partner choice
• Chapter 12: Technology teaching at dove first school
• Chapter 13: Children’s choices
• Chapter 14: Measuring success
• Chapter 15: Food and design technology where do we start?
• Chapter 16: ‘Seeing the light’
• Chapter 17: Positive discrimination is there a case?