Using Design Thinking to Integrate Academic Literacies into Subject Teaching in Higher Education
Using Design Thinking to Integrate Academic Literacies into Subject Teaching in Higher Education

Summary/Abstract: Design Thinking is a design approach created to assist in resolving complex problems. This paper argues that there is a problem with the traditional, lecture-led approach to Higher Education. This approach has led to a teaching imbalance between the delivery of subject content and the skills necessary to write a good academic essay or report. Courses can be content heavy, to the point where it might be argued that many students feel overloaded with information, but the development of academic writing competencies is often a very minimal part of the core curriculum on any individual module or indeed degree programme as a whole. This problem is then exacerbated, within the current UK HE system, by an erroneous cognitive separation of writing from thinking and learning. This paper reflects on an initiative that attempts to resolve this problem by taking a design thinking approach to module redesign in two modules on an undergraduate business programme at a post-1992 institution. The paper concludes that, despite being used in many different industries and for product development in many cases, that a design thinking approach is highly suitable for use in designing education programmes. Indeed the user-centric focus of the design thinking concept, makes it a very useful design framework for those seeking to design with a student centred approach in mind.

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