Critique in Design and Technology Education

“The authors present a wide range of perspectives around design and technology activity stretching and challenging in roughly equal measure; thus espousing the ideas of critical theory. … This is an essential read for the thinking design and technology teacher, teacher educator or researcher. Prepare to be challenged. Prepare to be bamboozled. Prepare to think. But read it nonetheless.” (Matt McLain, Design and Technology Education, Vol. 22 (3), December, 2017)

Professor P John Williams is the Director of the STEM Education Research Group in the School of Education at Curtin University, Australia, where he teaches and supervises research students in technology education. Apart from New Zealand, he has worked and studied in a number of African and Indian Ocean countries, as well as Australia and the United States. He directed the nationally funded Investigation into the Status of Technology Education in Australian Schools. His current research interests include mentoring beginning teachers, PCK and electronic assessment of performance.

Professor Kay Stables is Emeritus Professor of Design Education at Goldsmiths, University of London. A founder member of the Technology Education Research Unit (TERU), she has directed and contributed to projects in primary and secondary education in the UK and abroad. With Richard Kimbell, she authored the TERU retrospective, Research Design Learning (2007). More recently, together with Steve Keirl, she published Environment, Ethics and Cultures: Design and Technology Education’s contribution to sustainable global futures (2015), an edited collection of theoretical and practice based approaches. Her recent research has focused on design, creativity and sustainable development, digital tools in assessment (the e-scape project) and designer well-being, as well as creating dialogic frameworks to support the development of D&T capability, including in digital environments.