Teaching and learning engineering design through active socio-technical contexting

Abstract

Understanding teaching and learning as an interactive process through which language skills are built, the authors are experimenting new strategies to foster learning within the Software Engineering and Interaction Design disciplines. This paper reports on those experiences and on the role that contextual cues and the social synthesis of engineering situations may have played in the learning processes. We also analyse the role that educational tradition may have played upon students’ expectations, reactions to novel situations and adherence to active learning models. The authors present a methodological framework for the advancement of learning experiences understood as socio-technical contexts where intellectual instruments are to be actively developed as integral parts of those contexts. This framework focuses on the synthesis of learning experiences through a process of co-evolution in a model of context (representing the disciplinary approach and possible learning trajectories) and on models of instruments representing the language or skills that are being developed within that context. As the skills fill the zone of proximal development within the context modelled, new contextual cues, instruments and challenges may be added to expand the development zone. This does not need to happen in a teacher-student hierarchical relationship, and may be managed as a multidirectional community process.