Curriculum Programme

D&T issues

PATT 14 Conference deals with interesting issues
Author: David Barlex

www.iteawww.org

The 66th annual ITEA conference in New Mexico included the PATT 14 conference with the theme Pupil’s decision-making in technology research, curriculum development and assessment.

Marc deVries presided over the PATT conference with his usual flair and insight enabling participants from all over the world (US, Canada, Australia, Great Britain, Japan, Finland)

One of the most interesting speakers at PATT 14 was Stephen Petrina from the University of British Columbia. Stephen is a great theorist and has lots to say that is relevant to practice in the classroom. He talked about a lifelong view of technology education – at school, at work and in the third age. This is a new vision of ‘tech ed’ and one we should all take seriously. He has almost finished writing up his ideas in a new book on this view of technology education. You can read the draft chapters at this address.

David Barlex and Marion Rutland gave a presentation about their work, funded by the TTA, which explores ways to engage secondary design & technology PGCE Students with teaching designing. David and Marion are pleased with the preliminary results which indicate that the interventions carried out so far have resulted in a significantly increased awareness on the part of the students concerning the pedagogy required to teach designing with the students reflecting critically and constructively on the schemes of work in their teaching placement schools. You can download a preview of their paper from the lefthand column.

Given that our national curriculum in design & technology expects pupils to be ‘autonomous, creative problem solvers both as individuals and in teams’ the proceedings of this conference will be of interest to all those concerned with the state of design & technology in our schools. The proceedings will be published shortly on the ITEA website given above.

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