In the last three decades, the emphasis on STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) continued to increase as a potential solution to overturn declining numbers of students choosing careers in STEM disciplines. The emphasis on STEM continues with increasing number of STEM centers in the UK or MINT (mathematics, information technology, natural sciences, technology) centers in Germany. STEM literature emphasizes on supporting design, for instance Turkish Ministry of National Education made several updates in the elementary and middle school curriculum to add design based thinking into the curriculum. 2023 Vision aims to add design studios in all schools,and the Council of Higher Education (YÖK) also added design based thinking into teacher education. On the other hand, European reports underline the lack a coherent agreement to support design based pedagogy. Departing from this need, teacher education programs will share thinking about how to leverage design to improve coherence and relevance of instruction In this project. The biggest difference of this project is to change the emphasis on completing the design products to creating a learning environment around design products. Previous studies focused primarily on completing design products. This project aims to change the emphasis on the teaching environment created around the design products. By looking at its nature, the project is the first of its kind about design based pedagogy. The project will offer guidelines for teacher education programs and teachers by presenting activities supporting interdisciplinary thinking and offer assessment strategies to measure design based pedagogy. The project will start with creating the Booklet of Design Based Pedagogy. Then the project will shift to Practical Applications of Design Based Pedagogy and Online Learning through eTwinning projects. When creating the Booklet of Design Based Pedagogy, the main goal will be to offer a common framework and set of activities to implement design based pedagogy. The partners collaboratively create the booklet that will include three steps: (1) Reviewing Design Challenges and Design Products across European teacher education programs, (2) Supporting Scientific and Engineering Practices with Critical Thinking, (3) Assessing Design Based Pedagogy. Reviewing design challenges and design products across European teacher education programs will help to picture the existing practices across European teacher education programs. In the next step, activities that support critical thinking when engaging with scientific and engineering practices will be created. Finally, partners will work on creating tools for assessing the design based pedagogy. After reviewing the existing practices, the booklet will offer guidelines to implement design based pedagogy with critical thinking and ways to assess design pedagogy. After creating the booklet, partners will focus on practical applications of the design based pedagogy. To reach out a bigger audience, partners will focus on practical applications in two different ways: (1) Applying design based pedagogy in teacher education programs, (2) Applying design based pedagogy in eTwinning projects. When applying the pedagogy of design, four different teacher education programs will test the activities and these results will serve an important role to finalize project activities. Then all partners will start reaching out to teachers through induction programs to create eTwinning projects.Induction programs are part of teacher training in Europe. To reach a bigger audience, teachers from all European countries will be able to access the project activities. All partners will connect with local teachers, and teachers from all European countries will be able to access project activities. Besides offering a common framework of design based pedagogy, the project will also offer online learning for teachers in a rapidly changing world. As schools and universities started doing classes online in 2020, the project will aim to prioritize online learning and implementation. Finally, the project team will present how design based pedagogy can be supported in teacher education programs and schools. This final step will show how design based pedagogy can be implemented coherently in teacher education programs and schools. By the end of the project, European teacher educators will design a coherent framework and set of activities for design based pedagogy, test the framework and activities in teacher education programs and schools. In addition to picturing how design based pedagogy can be learned in teacher education programs, the project will also present the pathway to implement a coherent design based pedagogy in schools through induction programs.
Our main goal was to offer a common framework and set of activities to implement design-based pedagogy in teacher education because most of the design pedagogy focused on engineering prior to our project. The partners collaboratively created a booklet that included three steps: (1) A Review of Design Challenges and Design Products across European teacher education programs, (2) Supporting Scientific and Engineering Practices with Critical Thinking, (3) Assessing Design-Based Pedagogy. All chapters in this booklet provided a short overview of the literature to make it clear that a focus on developing design-based pedagogy is missing in teacher education. After reviewing the existing practices, the project offered guidelines to implement design-based pedagogy with critical thinking. We tested this framework in two steps: 1- Applying design-based pedagogy in teacher education programs 2- Applying design-based pedagogy in schools through eTwinning projects. We successfully completed these implementations and started to create academic outcomes (e.g. ESERA paper) to share our results with a broader audience. Our framework also received attention from other scholars in Türkiye, and it was also applied in a course in ODTÜ.
P2D project (Progression and Pedagogy of Design [P2D]: Contextualizing Design-based Pedagogy in Teacher Education Programs) was built on a new framework called Design-based Pedagogical Content Knowledge (DPCK). DPCK was a four-year journey to search for ways of supporting design-based pedagogy in teacher education (Delen et al., 2020). The idea of DPCK was to build a coherent framework that could be implemented in other universities and classrooms. P2D project took these ideas further by emphasizing the need for design-based pedagogy in teacher education. Previously, no study examined how to create an activity framework that can be used in teacher education programs and schools. Departing from this need, we first created a common framework by having numerous meetings with our colleagues. Our activity framework became a guideline to plan design-based activities in teacher education. Also, in previous design studies, the critical thinking dimension was missing. Therefore, this framework supported students' critical thinking skills as they engage in design. We tested how this framework can be applied in four different countries to understand teachers' and students' challenges.