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Design expert’s participation in elementary students’ collaborative design process

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Abstract

The main goal of the present study was to provide insights into how disciplinary expertise might be infused into Design and Technology classrooms and how authentic processes based on professional design practices might be constructed. We describe elementary students’ collaborative lamp designing process, where the leadership was provided by a professional designer. The video-recorded lessons on lamp designing and the “Lamp Designing” view of the project’s database constituted the data sources of the study. A data-driven qualitative content analysis was conducted for categorizing the scaffolding activities of the designer. The results indicate that the designer’s participation opened up the world of designing for the students. This enabled the students to engage in embodied design practices, and to gain new insights of the professional mechanisms of designing. Having the professional designer working with them, provided students with the opportunity to gain the full potential that solving complex design problems can offer to learning.

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Notes

  1. All proper names are pseudonyms.

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Acknowledgments

The present study has been supported by the Academy of Finland (under project no. 1217068) and the Finnish Cultural Foundation. We would also like to thank the designer, the class teacher, and the students for their participation in the study. Pirita Seitamaa-Hakkarainen, the designer, and the teacher co-designed the lamp designing project through repeated cycles. Kaiju Kangas assisted and was responsible for video recording of the project. Kaiju Kangas and Pirita Seitamaa-Hakkarainen developed the method of analyzing the data, and they wrote the present article, together with Kai Hakkarainen. We wish to thank Hal White for editing the language and Otto Seitamaa for translating the excerpts from Finnish.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Teacher Education, University of Helsinki, P.O. Box 8, 00014, University of Helsinki, Finland

    Kaiju Kangas & Pirita Seitamaa-Hakkarainen

  2. Department of Education, University of Turku, P.O. Box 9, 20014, University of Turku, Finland

    Kai Hakkarainen

Authors
  1. Kaiju Kangas
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  2. Pirita Seitamaa-Hakkarainen
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  3. Kai Hakkarainen
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Correspondence to Kaiju Kangas.

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Kangas, K., Seitamaa-Hakkarainen, P. & Hakkarainen, K. Design expert’s participation in elementary students’ collaborative design process. Int J Technol Des Educ 23, 161–178 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10798-011-9172-6

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