Jerome Zgraggen
Situated in Swiss-German school and teacher education, this brief presents Inquiry Learning and Designing (ILD) as a pedagogical instrument currently being explored in educational settings concerned with open-ended, complex, and materially situated problems. Systems thinking provides an epistemic orientation towards relations, dependencies, feedback, and consequences. Designing adds a projective and intervention-oriented dimension by exploring how situated arrangements might be configured otherwise. Designing is understood as a cultural technique through which people participate in culture while continuously producing and transforming it. It is socially and materially situated and involves reflexive engagement with possible configurations under conditions in which problems, purposes, and criteria remain partly open. ILD combines Reitinger’s criteria of inquiry learning with Kretz’s dimensions of designing—examining, theorising, and changing—and provides orientation through guiding questions, fields of activity, a discursive core, and attention to irritation and provisionality. In relation to Ryan’s systemic design framework, ILD is presented as a pedagogical articulation of systemic designing and as an orientation for open-ended inquiry and designing in education. It can extend existing project-based and interdisciplinary learning by making designing processes visible and discussable, thereby making designing itself available for reflection and practice as a cultural technique. Systems thinking thus becomes pedagogically consequential when perceiving interrelations is connected to exploring how these interrelations might be configured otherwise.
Keywords: designing, systems thinking, design pedagogy, inquiry learning, pedagogical instrument