Design principles for language sensitive technology lessons in teacher education
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Design principles for language sensitive technology lessons in teacher education Gerald van Dijk1 · Maaike Hajer1 · Wilmad Kuiper2 · Harrie Eijkelhof2 Accepted: 21 August 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract Using language adequately within technology tasks is part of technological literacy. However, this can be challenging for students, and a teacher may need to help students to master aspects of domain specific language that matter for the task at hand. In this study, a curricular design was developed through a series of trials, with the aim to arrive at general principles for a pedagogy that helps students to write about an engineering (electronics) design. The curricular design was theoretically anchored in ‘genre pedagogy’. The interventions were carried out by one experienced teacher in one course, during three consecutive cycles of trialling and improving the curricular design. The resulting design principles for teaching to write about (engineering) design are concerned with: a relevant, complete and feasible focus on language; scaffolding the writing process; procedures for teacher support. For each of these, specifications are described. Keywords Technology education · Design · Language · Pedagogy · Writing · Genre
Introduction Technological literacy requires mastery of the language of technology (Kimbell and Stables 2008). For other domains, such as science and mathematics, it has long been established that many students experience grave difficulties in mastering the language that is an inherent part of the content (Wellington and Osborne 2001). There are no reasons why this would be very different for engineering and technology education (ETE), but this is not well researched (Van Dijk and Hajer 2017). This study departed from the assumption that ‘genre pedagogy’ would provide an entrance to the solution of this problem, as it did for other subject domains (e.g. Smit et al. 2016). Genre, in short, can be described as regularities in oral or written texts or graphic representations. Genres are goal oriented and they serve communicative and thus social purposes (Rose and Martin 2012). Furthermore, in the case of texts, the author usually develops the text through stages, often with subheadings, that are recognizable for users of * Gerald van Dijk [email protected] 1
University of Applied Sciences Utrecht, Utrecht, The Netherlands
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Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands
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the genre. Genre pedagogy is an approach whereby subject teachers make the characteristics of the genre to be produced by their students explicit, by means of modelling the genre and gradually increasing students’ independence. Functionality of language use in specific contexts and situations is foregrounded. How this approach could fit within a ‘pedagogy of designing’ needed to be explored.
Theoretical framework For five decades, approaches to give students language support in subject areas have been researched (Shanahan and Shanahan 2008; Schleppegrell 2004). G
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