Transformative Teaching

Abstract

We are in what might be termed the knowledge era, where both students and educators are experiencing increasing complexity, diversity, uncertainty, and change. How we create and shape knowledge, as a capability, is key to student’s resilience, ownership of ‘knowing’, and freedom to grow (Covey, 2004). This is a paper that focuses in on one aspect of a design for remote design studio learning, which was situated in a School of Design during 2020, and has since become a model for a range of large-cohort delivery pilots during 2021/22, then a suite of new modules for delivery in 2022/23. The paper discusses the connection between the framing of the learning journey, bringing together insights on reflexive practice as a designerly way of learning (Cross,1999) in the remote studio, and how this empowered students to evaluate their work as learning, for themselves. It points toward the relationship between the framing of learning and the creation of new discursive design tools to provoke and sustain self-evaluation capability. Learners must be enabled to tackle problems in new ways that make sense in new contexts, to maintain a balance between productivity and creativity, and collaborate across different contexts (Staron, Jasinski and Weatherly, 2006). Knowledge is non-linear and non-routine, more intuitive, opportunistic, networked. It is less driven by a pre-determined path or mindset. It is critical that we reconsider the form that the ‘frame’ takes, and how that is applied around any learning so that it creates an opportunity to re-view the learning experience as part of a bigger ‘learning ecology’ (Siemens, 2003).