ABSTRACT
In a world of increasingly complex technological entanglements and deep environmental concerns education is challenged as how best to prepare pupils for their lives as global citizens. As an invaluable school subject design and technology is ever adapting within both a crowded curriculum and a world facing immense change. Given such contexts, how can we best support our pupils, the subject and society at large?
This chapter describes the importance and value of critiquing as a key trait of a rich design and technology education. It is one thing to design and create products, processes and systems but there is an ever-present need to question (in multiple ways) our ways of working with, and our ways of existing with, technologies. Critiquing facilitates such questioning in multiple ways – prior to, during, and after designing and creating in the classroom (at all steps of a project’s execution); within one’s mind, with peers and with those beyond school (through reflection and discussion); and as a skill worth developing and as a disposition worth nurturing.
The chapter includes: a range of perspectives to help embed critiquing in one’s practice; models of design and technology curriculum that articulate critiquing; explorations of the relationship and differences between designing and critiquing; aspects of the pedagogy of critiquing; prompts for developing pupil discussion and dialogue around designerly acts and technological creations; and, some sample critiquing games.
