Abstract
Teachers in their practice make choices grounded in their teaching experience resulting in what could be labelled design solutions. An identified problem is that these design solutions stay at the level of individual solutions and do not reach the teaching community. The aim of this article is to study how teachers´ design solutions can be systematically captured, organized, and communicated through design patterns and a pattern language. Building on participatory design we have together with teachers used and adapted the concept of design patterns and pattern languages as a way of capturing, documenting and communicating design problems and solutions to these. This structured approach led to the teachers seeing connections and interrelations between problems, and that a solution to one of these also helped in alleviating other problems. The formulation of design patterns and proposed pattern languages thus gave the teachers an overview of their practice that would otherwise be difficult to obtain. The content of the design patterns show what problems that are dealt with by the teachers through their design solutions. The structure of the final pattern language shows how problems and solutions are connected to larger goals for the teachers, such as improving the communication with students, as well as the importance of sharing good examples between colleagues.
Highlights
Technology of today has penetrated the everyday life of people and promises of the use of these in teaching and learning are being echoed in the research community
Design patterns and pattern languages Design patterns were originally introduced by Christopher Alexander to capture and communicate recurring design solutions within the field of architecture (Alexander, Ishikawa, Silverstad, Jacobson, Fiksdahl-King & Angel, 1977)
Comparing how the larger group of teachers received this instruction and task as compared to when we initially introduced the concept of design patterns to the team of teachers participating in the workshop series, it all seemed to run more smoothly this time
Summary
Technology of today has penetrated the everyday life of people and promises of the use of these in teaching and learning are being echoed in the research community Teachers are in their practice and preparation of learning activities engaged in what could be characterized as designing for learning (Selander, 2008). Questions pertaining to appropriation and sustainability of these tools can be formulated, and if and to what extent these research artefacts are appropriated into everyday practice once a research project has ended, which has been identified as a problem (Cerratto-Pargman & Milrad, 2016; Ramberg, 2013) Another concern is to which degree design solutions for teaching scale beyond the context of the immediate design project and those participating in it (Halverson & Halverson, 2011). An additional question that can be raised is how teachers can come to good use of these technologies when many of them are struggling with basic issues of the technical infrastructure (Jahnke, Svendsen, Johansen & Zander, 2014)
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