Design Based Learning for Innovation: A Revolution within Higher Education?

• In Event: Alternative Pedagogies at the Crux of Interdisciplinarity: Promises and Pitfalls of “Innovating” Education - I

Abstract

«Innovation» has become a common and positive objective for -and within- Higher education in the last decades. One knows the M.I.T «media lab» and it’s tail of «fab labs» or Stanford design school and it’s network, but the phenomenon is broader, and there is no more University that does‘nt try to develop such innovative, collaborative, interdisciplinary programs, rooted on « project pedagogy», linked with enterprises and society, everywhere using digital collaborative tools and design based methods.
Those programs, discourses and policies support the increasingly stronger overlapping (and more and more entanglement) between Knowledge production and transfers, within economy or society: at international or national levels, but also strongly at local or «territorial» levels.

Historical origins and pillars of this « innovation and creative turn» within Higher Education are diverse, merging engineering traditions; applied art activities and cultures; architecture; management, behavioural or social sciences; and nowadays progressively -but with difficulty-, pedagogy and sciences of education.

Anchored on STS current researches in the STS Laboratory of the CNAM-Paris and on-going publications ( edition of an eponym special issue of European Journal of education) , the paper will describe, in a comparative view, the scope of this phenomenon.
It will interrogate some of the complex links, between Public policies, research and education practices or institutions, and business development.
It will enhance the question of inter/trans-disciplinarity and the different innovative pedagogical approaches, currently enlighted in the research literature and within creative /innovation pedagogy or curricula.

Author

• Jean-Claude Ruano-Borbalan, CNAM (National Art & Craft Conservatory) Paris