DESIGN THINKING IN FUTURE TEACHERS TRAINING

Abstract

Innovation in education entails not only the incorporation of technological tools and applications, but also the implementation of methodologies that could break the inertia and incorporate processes of Divergent Thinking. Future teachers must be creative professionals capable of developing professional activities to improve and not only to replicate the social experience in order to create new learning experiences. In this way, the main aim of our work was to explore how the use of Design Thinking Methodology improves learning processes in a group of 75 college students of the Primary Education Degree. This group of students, divided into 21 smaller working groups, created different educational videos and multimedia design projects through Design Thinking methodology. They were also encouraged to use Social Networks (specifically Instagram) to present and publicize the progress they were making on their work, in order to obtain feedback from their classmates. All the projects developed were related to three thematic areas: Art for everyone; Attention to diversity and Making great neighborhoods. At the end of the creation process, we analysed the students’ perception of how the design thinking methodology helps them through their learning process. Based on an ad hoc questionnaire, the impact of the use of Design Thinking in the learning process and its influence on variables such as motivation, communication, creativity, among others, was studied. The results show that the use of this methodology had a positive impact on practically all the variables, facilitating and optimizing the learning process of future teachers.