Uncertainty, learning design, and interdisciplinarity: systems and design thinking in the school classroom

This paper explores aspects of learning design for design thinking within a small (circa 100) remote rural secondary (12-18 year old) school in the Highlands of Scotland. It introduces action research school teachers and final year (17-18 year old) pupils which explored how “real world” learning experiences can be brought into the classroom. It does so by joining two areas that are often treated as distinct practices. These are, the use of system theory and community development approaches to identify and map complex issues (Bell and Morse 2012), and the use of ideas from co-design to include non designers in the design process (Sanders and Westerlund 2011). The paper takes a grounded approach to the application of these ideas, simply asking “do they work”, and then “what”, “how” and “why”. In exploring those questions the paper tries to be open and transparent about learning design as a messy, uncertain and emergent process