Design as rhetoric: A New South Wales technology education curriculum perspective

The imperatives in education of preparation for work and the ability to be active (productive) participants in the evolving technological society drive much of the current agenda in technology education. This agenda increasingly privileges technical ways of knowing in design over more aesthetic, creative and hermeneutical ways of knowing or arts oriented ways of knowing in design. Increasingly the aesthetic dimensions of design education are present in curriculum as broad overarching rhetoric with the reality a more specific technical curriculum driven by a conservatism that serves technical interests of control, for industry, training and economic imperatives. This paper will attempt to deconstruct some of the history and curriculum forces that have shaped and are shaping design in technology education. It will examine those aspects of design thinking which gave rise to its central pedagogical positioning in design & technology and general curricula and have since isolated designing in many curriculum from their aesthetic hermeneutic and cultural beginnings. Design is now being realigned and re-designed within current technology literacy statements and technology curricula. This association brings together the engineer and the designer, science, mathematics and technology education and is poised to loose much of what originally defined its unique aesthetic knowing and design literacy.