CHANGE FROM WITHIN: USING DESIGN THINKING TO BUILD A FUTURE PROOF LEARNING ENVIRONMENT BOTTOM-UP

Institutes of higher education can and should play an important role in civil society and exert a positive impact on different stakeholders. This role is not limited to educating critical and knowledgeable public citizens and skilled workers, but it also pertains to contributing research-driven solutions for the complex social, environmental and economic challenges we are facing today. This is even more true when it comes to educating undergraduates to become inspiring, innovative and future proof teachers. Certainly teachers are key-players in our ambition to educate children to become the new generation of decision- and policymakers and the architects of our future civil society.

It is therefore paramount for teacher education (Greenhill, 2010) to stay ahead or at least keep up with increasing digitalisation, higher demand for transferrable skills, knowledge about sustainability in all its aspects and numerous other big societal changes and demands. These ever-changing demands require a new learning environment for prospective teachers: a redesign of the learning space to accommodate an innovative approach (Fisher, 2005) to second order teaching (Murray & Male, 2005). However, because of the complexity of these rapidly changing demands in a VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous) world and because teacher education involves “teaching about teaching” (i.e. second order teaching), preferably by the motto “teach as you preach”, tailoring teacher education to 21st century needs proves to be a wicked problem.

In this paper we will show how we used design thinking to address this problem, which displays the three properties making it suitable for design thinking, according to Thienen, Meinel & Nicolai (2014):
(i) there are many stakeholders involved (students, teacher educators, teachers, alumni, pedagogical counsellors …) and their views on (teacher) education are volatile;
(ii) solutions are not correct or false but should meet these stakeholder’s needs more or less well and
(iii) the process of problem solving needs to be productive without ultimate criteria of success.

Persona were used to empathize with different stakeholders, storyboards and storytelling to define their needs (i.e. the problem) from different perspectives, mind mapping to come up with “tools” (i.e. solutions) which teacher education should provide to respond to these needs, lego prototypes were built of learning environments that would allow to develop these tools, finally both the ideas for tools as for learning spaces were tested during interviews with school leaders and confronted with literature and study visits. Based on the results, changes to the infrastructure and learning space are expected to act as a catalyst for alternative methods of future proof second order teaching. By testing and adjusting the setting, we aim to measure its effect on the teaching methods and develop bottom up an evidence-informed dynamic concept for a more future proof teacher education and a prototype for a flexible learning environment that goes along with it.