Abstract
This chapter examines the origins and singularity of Design Thinking as a humanistic discipline that can be successfully exploited in education. It explores the pedagogical potential inherent in Design Thinking strategies to foster creativity, critical thinking skills, and deep learning in content subjects taught through the medium of an additional language in CLIL settings. The author contends that Design Thinking will ultimately empower content teachers to rethink their teaching techniques repertoire, to redesign their CLIL practice, to cultivate inquiring minds in their classroom, to give students memorable learning experiences, and to equip them with core 21st-century competences related to creativity, critical thinking, teamwork, and intercultural awareness. Design Thinking strategies prompt learners to think out of the box and seek alternative answers to learning tasks, whilst cultivating LOTS and HOTS in Bloom's taxonomy and ensuring learning progression along both the content and language pathways.
TopIntroduction
Design Thinking is a versatile mode of inquiry that originated in the world of product designers in the United States back in the 1970s. It seeks innovative solutions to complex problems in a wide array of situations so as to meet the needs of users in different contexts, including education. Design Thinking is a highly systematised process consisting of five non-lineal phases: empathy, definition, ideation, prototyping and testing. There is a huge pedagogical potential inherent in Design Thinking for human-centred learning experiences that seek excellence and deep learning. It prompts educators and educational researchers to rethink 21st-century schools and to redesign the curriculum, learning spaces or scenarios, processes and tools at school. In actual fact, there are at least four fundamental lessons to be gained from the practice of Design Thinking on the part of product designers (Brown, 2008): (a) empathy, or the ability to literally share someone else’s feelings or experiences by imagining what it would be like to be in that person’s situation, which is of paramount importance in education; (b) the development of non-linear forms of thinking, that is to say, both analytical and integrative thinking; (c) a framework or mindset to cultivate creativity, optimism and experimentalism in class; and (d) an acute awareness that collaboration is the true stuff of growth at school and in life in general.
In bilingual education programmes, Design Thinking might be of pedagogical relevance in settings where Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) is implemented. CLIL is not synonymous with bilingual education, but a content-driven approach to bilingual education where an additional language apart from the mother tongue is used as a language of instruction for students to access and assimilate curricular or disciplinary content. Both the additional language and students’ mother tongue coexist in the classroom as tools of communication and as means to access discipline-specific content. There are at least two fundamental ways in which Design Thinking can help teachers optimise CLIL: on the one hand, by encouraging them to rethink CLIL settings when it comes to making macro-level decisions concerning curriculum design and the vision of CLIL in a particular school, and, on the other hand, in the realm of micro-level decisions, by improving actual classroom practice through methodology, which is the art of teaching effectively. The benefits to be gained from the practice of certain Design Thinking strategies in CLIL teaching are manifold, as teachers may have more pedagogical opportunities to foster cooperative and dialogic learning; cater for diverse students’ needs, interests and learning styles; scaffold and integrate content and language learning in creative and effective ways; and instill in students values like solidarity, constancy and effort.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Design Thinking: An extremely versatile human-centred mode of inquiry or approach to innovation that originated in the world of product designers at Stanford University in the 1970s. It seeks solutions to problems and challenges in as diverse realms as products, services or experiences, including education.
BICS vs. CALP: Cummins’ (1979 ; 1981 ) well-known dichotomy between Basic Interpersonal Communicative Skills and Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency, i.e., the ability to understand and produce oral and written messages for everyday communicative purposes and for academic purposes, respectively. BICS is largely the concern of foreign language teaching, whereas CALP is the main concern of CLIL.
Deep Learning: In contradistinction to surface or superficial learning, deep learning is inextricably associated with long-term retention of pertinent and solid knowledge, based on a thorough and critical understanding of the object of study, be it curricular content or not.
Creativity: The capacity to generate precious ideas or actions that accomplish and change things in the world for the better.
Critical Thinking: A set of skills that allows individuals to discriminate between essential and non-essential information and establish relationships between seemingly unconnected phenomena or ideas in the process of knowledge construction, all of which leads to deep understanding and learning.
HOTS: In Bloom’s taxonomy (1956), revised by Anderson & Krathwohl in 2000, HOTS stands for Higher-Order Thinking Skills (analysing, evaluating, creating).
LOTS: In Bloom’s taxonomy (1956), revised by Anderson & Krathwohl in 2000, LOTS stands for Lower-Order Thinking Skills (remembering, understanding, applying).
Academic Literacy: The ability to code (produce) and decode (understand) discipline or subject-specific messages, both in writing and in speaking.
CLIL: Content and Language Integrated Learning, a content-driven approach to bilingual education where an additional language other than the mother tongue is used as a language of instruction for students to access curricular or disciplinary content.
Scaffolding: Temporary measures or mechanisms in the form of teacher’s help, peer interaction, methodological strategies or materials, offered to students in the learning process so that they can accomplish more than they would on their own, while stretching their thinking potential and expanding the domains of their Zone of Proximal Development ( Vygotsky, 1978 ) so that they become more autonomous learners.