Transforming the teaching and learning culture in higher education from a DIY perspective

Abstract

This article focuses in part of the results of the implementation of the European project DIYLab in five bachelor’s degrees at the University of Barcelona (Primary Education, Early Childhood Education, Social Education, Education and Fine Art). The project was carried out in six elementary and secondary schools and two Universities of Spain, Finland and the Czech Republic. The main focus was to incorporate learning modalities related to the Do it Yourself (DIY) culture, fostering creativity, collaboration, self-regulation, authorship and a critical use of digital technology. Following a methodology based on the principles of participatory action-research (PAR), we first organized discussion groups with teachers, students and, in the case of elementary and secondary schools, families. Then, we defined the implementation, based on the characteristics of each institution and the formative actions organized with the teachers. During the teacher’s professional development, the participants proposed that students create audio-visual productions collaboratively about their learning and the processes that propitiated it. Simultaneously, we created the open digital platform DIYLabHub with the aim of sharing the productions created by students. During the implementation at the University of Barcelona, 471 students collaboratively created and shared 76 audio-visual objects in the Hub and the researchers carried out observations, recordings, field notes and discussion groups. In this article, we present the results of the analysis and the conclusions of how teaching and learning practices were transformed, how teachers’ and students’ attitudes and roles were reconfigured, and the possibilities of sustainability of the DIY culture in Higher Education.