D&T for the Next Generation

The book Design & Technology for the next generation was published in 2007 through funding from the Technology Enhancement Project with the intention that a copy should be given free of charge to every qualifying design & technology teacher for the following three years. For various reasons this intention was not met. The result was a very limited print run and despite the fact that the book was well received and found its way on many Initial Teacher Training and Masters Courses reading lists it became difficult to obtain and is now virtually unobtainable. To our mind this is a shame as the authors contributing to the book were, and still are, at the forefront of scholarship concerning the purpose, teaching and learning of design & technology education. Hence we are making available free to download PDFs of all the chapters in the book as we believe that they will provide useful reading for all design & technology teachers at a time when the subject is being challenged to modernise particularly in response the introduction of a new single subject GCSE being first taught in September 2017.

 

The chapters in the book are as follows:

• Cover
• Title Page
• Foreword by Richard Green
• Contents
• Introduction by David Barlex
• Justifying design & technology by David Barlex
• Philosophical reflections on the nature of design & technology by Marc J. de Vries
• 2020 vision – on the politics of technology by Stephen Petrina
• Designers on designing by Malcolm Welch
• The politics of technology curriculum by Steve Kierl
• The place of sustainability in design & technology education by Margarita Pavlova and James Pitt
• Vocationalism – friend or foe to design & technology education by John Dakers
• Developing your own curriculum by Nick Baldwin and David Barlex
• The pupil as designer by Malcolm Welch
• Creativity in design & technology by Marion Rutland and David Spendlove
• Problem-solving in technology education:
the role of strategies, schemes & heuristics by Moshe Barak
• The role of technical knowledge in design & technology by Gwyneth Owen-Jackson and Torben Steeg
• The role of making in design & technology by Frank Banks and Gwyneth Owen-Jackson
• Useful assessment for design & technology:
 formative assessment, learning & teaching by Stephanie Atkinson and Paul Black
• Mind (not) the gap…Take a risk: 
Interdisciplinary approaches to the science, technology,
 engineering & mathematics education agenda by Dov Kipperman and Mark Sanders
• Gender & pedagogy by Patricia Murphy
• Implicit theories & pedagogy by Wendy Dow
• Design & technology: seeing both the wood & the trees by Peter Toft

At a time when all creative subjects are being marginalised in the structure of GCSE option choices, it is particularly important that design & technology teachers are able to argue convincingly for the place of their subject in the education for ALL young people up to the age of 16+. Not in terms of a narrow vocational argument centred on the economic necessity of skills required by industry, which will inevitably only apply to a minority of young people, but in terms of an induction to a culturally significant area of human activity that has shaped successive civilisations across history.