Teaching Design – Infrequent Newsletter #12
Project Based Learning & Social Justice in Design Education
Dear design teachers/learners and bibliography-lovers,
Thanks for subscribing (or staying subscribed) to this mailing list and following the research project!
This newsletter edition #12 is curated in collaboration with Pras Gunasekera. We met at the Hurra Hurra – International Festival for Design Education in the 21st century at Burg Giebichenstein Halle, back in October 2019. The festival was mainly student-led and had the aim of facilitating peer-to-peer (between students, teachers and designers) engagements about what 21st century design education could and should be.
Since then, we have continued exchanging about our experiences of design education, holistically; from designing teaching and learning, to facilitating to assessing. More recently we began discussing social justice oriented design education and the realities and competencies asked for on the job market, in the 21st century, in a pre AI driven world. We started to ask ourselves whether and in what ways social justice design education and meeting the skillset expectations of the 21st century job market can go hand in hand. Is student expectations of learning specific skills/ creating a portfolio in contrast to social justice educators agendas of facilitating learning for critical consciousness and to empower students, or is it an either or situation? During one of these conversations the teaching and learning framework of Project-based Learning (PBL) came up as an approach that Pras had been implementing in his teaching and learning and whilst designing curriculum.
When Lisa first heard Pras talking about PBL she was sure that she was already teaching in a PBL style: students working in teams on specific semester (or two-semester) long projects with/for »real life« clients and/or initiatives with a concrete brief, which as it turns out is only partly PBL.
The theme of this newsletter emerges from our ongoing discussions and is meant to be a conversation starter around the potential of PBL as framework to teach/learn social justice in design education and follows the question:
In what ways could PBL be a useful framework to facilitate social justice within design higher education?
For the purpose of this newsletter and with an aim to align readers on PBL and social justice theory, we felt we should start from definitions (we invite perspectives or definitions of your own).
What is PBL and who do we refer to when writing about social justice?
In PBL students define a project through a problem question and explore this through engaging in a design process, problem-solving, investigative activities and working autonomously. Typically in collaborative groups and with support from facilitators over extended periods students work toward developing tangible artefacts e.g., products or presentations (Jones et al., 1997; Thomas et al., 1999). This approach positions learners as active agents who negotiate meaning through sustained inquiry rather than passive recipients of predetermined knowledge.
The counterpoint to PBL is didactic instruction, where knowledge is ›transmitted‹ directly from teacher to student through lectures and structured lessons. Students validate their learning through exams that presume singular correct answers. Brazilian activist and educator Paulo Freire critiqued this »banking model« (Freire, 1970) of education as maintaining hierarchies and upholding oppression: it deposits information into students who merely store and retrieve it, foreclosing the possibility for developing a critical consciousness needed to transform existing power structures.
When we write about »social justice« we refer to bell hooks’ understanding of social justice. For hooks, social justice is neither an abstract ideal nor a single-issue political project, but an embodied, relational practice directed against what she calls »imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy« – the interlocking systems of racism, sexism, classism, and colonialism that cannot be dismantled in isolation from one another (hooks, 1984). Crucially, she locates the reproduction of these systems not only in institutions but in the everyday structures of human relationships, arguing that a culture of domination sustains itself through the very ways we love, care, and connect – or fail to. Social justice therefore requires what she describes as an ethical practice of love: a collective commitment to building relationships free from domination (hooks, 1999). Education is a fruitful site where this transformation can become possible. Drawing explicitly on Freire, hooks understands teaching not as the transmission of knowledge but as the practice of freedom – a process through which both students and teachers unlearn conditioned hierarchies and reclaim the capacity to think critically and act collectively (hooks, 1994).
Design education can address the principles outlined above as it seeks collaborative engagement with diverse communities in order to create meaningful design outcomes. Outcomes of the PBL approach have the potential to resist evaluation as simply ›right/wrong‹ or even ›good/bad.‹ They can irritate, provoke, pose new questions, interrupt assumptions, or initiate unforeseen processes. They do not need to end with a design outcome per se, but artifacts that are project specific (these could be new ways to collaborate with communities or new ways of sharing creative assets). Design education aligned with critical pedagogy acknowledges this generative instability: outcomes become sites of ongoing negotiation within specific contexts, communities, and temporalities.
Interestingly, we haven’t found any papers specifically bringing together social justice and PBL in design education during our research. So for this newsletter we’re sharing with you just a small selection of resources from different fields that we find relevant, and focus on sharing our ideas and contextualizing them and their potential for the field of design education.
During our conversations we also discussed the problematic neoliberal framework PBL is grounded in, and if/how to overcome it/by re-appropriating the concept. Instead of solving this question alone we decided to stay ambivalent and sceptical and to open up the discussion and share it with you; the Teaching Design community. If any readers out there have come across any good resources uniting these two fields, please do share!
We write from a German teaching context, though we’ve also been exposed to British, Swedish, and broader European educational environments across both state and private institutions. Our perspective is that of facilitators – designing and delivering teaching and learning experiences contextualized in »the now.« We’ve been teaching continuously since 2017.
With curiosity and 💜
Pras and Lisa
Design Activities
Education is highly dependent on the understanding of positionalities from student to facilitator. This also becomes apparent in the context of PBL and social justice led design teaching/learning. Facilitators hold power and we believe they must recognize their positionality with humility.
So before you embark on reading this newsletter we invite you to think about your own positionality using the Situated Knowledges Booklet generously shared by Karoline Buer and Fredrik Eive Refsli – two engaged design educators from Kristiania University of Applied Sciences. Whilst there are a number of ways to reflect on and frame your own positionality, we think this booklet provides a great starting point to map and understand your situatedness and biases.
→ Download the printable PDF here.
To learn more about why positionality is relevant in teaching/learning contexts, we recommend this paper: Takacs, David (2003). How Does Your Positionality Bias Your Epistemology?, in: Thought & Action, The NEA Higher Education Journal, Sommer 2003, pp. 27–38.
→ You can find the text here.
Added to the bibliography
Carvalho, C. and Bauters, M. (2021). Technology Supported Active Learning. Student-Centered Approaches. Chapter 3: Project Based Learning in Higher Education, pp. 31–57.
This chapter is a good starting point giving an overview to PBL and its core components (a nuts and bolts approach) as well the advantages and differences between traditional approaches to project work. It is one that I (Pras) share with all new cohorts starting at CODE University of Applied Sciences in Berlin, to give them some foundational knowledge of the pedagogic framework they will be working in (and have signed up for). My approach has been to organise students into project-based working groups, tasking each with presenting an assigned section of the chapter as a way of sharing and exchanging knowledge across the broader cohort.
Some of the key aspects I take note of as a facilitator are the phases of PBL – from framing a question to drive a project, upholding sustained inquiry, to the development of artefacts or public products that are contextually specific. The relationship between educator and student in a PBL context shifts to one of collaboration and knowledge sharing – a difficult relationship for some students to fully embrace, especially if they have recently moved into Higher Education from a didactic learning environment.
An area of friction I have experienced with many student groups is a lack of engagement with sustained project inquiry – that is a continual engagement with the project’s context and collaborators that will ultimately enable the development of well situated public artefacts that respond well to the question framed.
Given that CODE is situated within the digital ›tech sector‹, I have found that there can be a ›knee jerk‹ (and I want to frame it as this) response from students to be ›agile‹ (or to move fast and break things) – which in my view, if not practiced fully and taken literally can result in relationships with communities/project partners that are extractive rather than collaborative. When project problems are explored only superficially, the creative artefacts that follow are not only limited in scope but also risk bypassing proper informed consent and the equitable sharing of creative assets through Intellectual Property Rights (IPR).
→ Here’s a link to the publication.
Chiki, J., Sallar, G. (2021). Teaching Social Justice Through Project-Based Learning in Engineering. In: Ozaki, C.C., Parson, L. (eds) Teaching and Learning for Social Justice and Equity in Higher Education. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham.
This introductory text makes a strong case for the necessity and benefits of social justice education. It describes a concrete seminar, offers practical examples alongside their theoretical grounding and reflection, and provides a solid outline of PBL principles that appears in the project summary’s first paragraph.
The paper focuses on two approaches. First, STEMj »using STEM skills to understand social injustice and then to act to remedy those injustices« (p. 102). This approach builds from a foundation of disciplinary skills towards understanding and reducing social injustices. Second, the transgressive STEM teaching model (from hooks’ Teaching to Transgress, 1994), »where students should ›transgress‹ boundaries of race, gender, and class towards a position of liberation using collaboration between students and instructors to spark enthusiasm for learning« (p. 103). Particularly useful are the detailed tables that function almost as scripts for applying PBL within social justice education contexts.
What distinguishes this text is its expansion of skills typically associated with PBL. Beyond conventional outcomes, it emphasizes amongst others »critical consciousness through self-reflection over time and through community« (p. 102), analyzing and navigating group dynamics (p. 102), and building confidence and empowerment for underrepresented students (pp. 100–101).
Adah Miller, E., Makori, H., Akgun, S., Miller, C., Li, T., & Codere, S. (2022). Including teachers in the social justice equation of project-based learning: A response to Lee & Grapin. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 59(9), pp. 1726–1732.
This meta-level paper operates without a concrete case study but provides valuable resources. Whilst it doesn’t reference PBL explicitly, its focus on participatory approaches and offers ethical frameworks for working with communities and diverse classrooms. It frames approaches to developing PBL with social justice on three levels – institutional, local, and interactive – presented in a straightforward table. The work requires diverse student cohorts alongside diverse educator/facilitator cohorts to succeed.
The authors address a fundamental challenge: how can educators/facilitators help students recognize the importance of social change work over projects that maintain the status quo? This connects to Makori’s observation that »Social Justice involves the transformation of and redistribution of power. It transposes top-down structures of agency, resource distribution and knowledge« (2021, p.1727) – a critical point when working with student groups perceived as privileged, despite their essential contribution.
The paper differentiates between two scales of community work – larger and local – and considers what frameworks each requires. It proves particularly instructive in identifying challenges and traps: »deficit perspective« (p. 4), »saviorism« (p. 5), and »extractivism« (p. 7). There’s emphasis on social skills and »cultural competencies« necessary for conducting social justice work justly (pp. 7–8).
The type of social justice »lens« proposed matters according to the authors: locality and connection drive student engagement. One approach involves providing »critical counter-stories« (Solorzano & Yosso, 2001) that link high-status, seemingly inaccessible responses to social issues to localized social justice concerns like poverty. This moves from macro to micro (what we think is a key skill of a designer). Ultimately, connecting students with broad social justice issues requires framing PBL locally. Crucially, educators must maintain local community connections or broker these collaborations themselves, hence the authors stress the need for a diverse facilitation team as well as student body.
ongoing Open Call
We invite contributions from you; design educators, students, alumni, researchers, pedagoges, enthusiasts and others to submit and share the sources which are reference points and/or inspiration to your practice! Your contribution will be published in our infrequent newsletter and in our text-based bibliography.
→ Find out how to contribute here.
Info
Teaching Design started as a collectively gathered bibliography focusing on design education from intersectional feminist and decolonial perspectives. Since its launch in September 2019, it has expanded into conversational formats, workshops, a temporary library and a space for reflections, which all has led to the platform in its current form.
Currently the bibliography as well as this newsletter is curated and edited by Lisa Baumgarten unless mentioned otherwise.