Developing Thinking Skills in a 4th Grade Design Studio in Trinidad and Tobago

Introduction

“Why do we send our children to school?” asked Deanna Kuhn in Education for Thinking (Kuhn, 2005 p. 3). She responded to her own question by saying that schools are expected to prepare children for life and “to produce students who will become confident, eager and self-motivated learners” (Kuhn, 2005 p. 3). Most of us hope that school will lay a solid foundation for children later on in life. This foundation comes from the ways in which we learn to think at school. Many course outlines at elementary, secondary and tertiary level include the development of critical thinking skills as one of the key objectives. This suggests that building thinking skills, and in particular critical thinking skills, is valued as a significant aim of modern education. What about in an under-resourced context or in a rural school? Is critical thinking different in these situations?

The aim of this chapter is to examine and demonstrate how a design-based curriculum can be used to foster thinking skills and to provide useful recommendations for other educators. This is done by clearly outlining the modes of thinking that students used at each stage of a three-week design class, drawing from examples from the curriculum, the participants at work, and references to relevant literature. The context of this study was a primary school in a rural village in Trinidad and Tobago. The general academic performance at the school was significantly lower than at schools from more urban areas. Children were recruited from students of the incoming fourth grade class at the school. The anticipated age of the participants was 9 – 10 years old. This age-group was selected for the study since most upper elementary children master language and are proficient communicators, which would facilitate the feedback process (Finnan, 2009). The actual age range of the children was wider than anticipated, and ranged from 8 – 13. This was because one of the girls had skipped a grade, another had been held back, and a third child, the oldest, was recruited from the neighborhood and not the school. Two boys and one girl did not complete the camp.

Education is preparation for life, work and citizenship (Strauss, 2015). Perhaps educators need to understand how education can be made relevant to life, especially a future life that has not been envisioned as yet. One way of developing education that is relevant to an unimagined future is to focus on thinking skills rather than content. Skills such as inquiry, analysis, inference and argument can be built through regular exposure to problem solving challenges. These challenges require a context, however, to give students a focus that ensures better problem solving, and keeps students more engaged in the process, which will also ensure better learning. A design thinking approach was considered as an engaging and appropriate educational approach to build thinking skills among children in Trinidad and Tobago, given the public interest in and exposure to design through festivals like Carnival and Divali, and the possibility of problem solving around familiar problems within the community.

Escobar (2018) highlighted differences in the focus of design research from the Global North and Global South, where research issues in the Global North focus on social innovation, transition, and ontology among other areas; where research issues from the Global South seem to focus on issues related to decoloniality, design methods from the South, alternative design practices and autonomous design that is co-developed by people who are not designers. In this light, this chapter is situated in research issues of the Global South, as it focuses on alternatives uses for design methods that relate to the development of people.

The research question that drove the study was: “how can a design-based curriculum be used to foster critical thinking in a rural school in Trinidad and Tobago?” To answer the research question a three-week design camp took place at the selected school. Qualitative data was collected from the children through weekly focus group discussions, their reflections in their journals and observation of the children at work. The paper gives details on the content of the assignments, as well as how several thinking types, including critical thinking, were manifested in the behaviors and responses of the children throughout the camp. The chapter ends with recommendations for other educators who might want to use a design-based approach to build thinking skills among children.