Abstract
A case study of design thinking in education considers how two educational organizations - a university graduate program and a public zoo - develop and enact design thinking processes in relation to one another. It also examines how this inter-organizational design thinking project contributes to a "center without walls,"or collaboratory (Wulf, 1993), pursuing an aspirational vision: to support interest-driven learning while also connecting youth to a wider landscape of formal and informal learning opportunities among educational organizations in a major US metropolitan area. As an initial step in pursuit of this vision, the work of the collaboratory concentrated on one of the zoo's community-focused education programs called Overnight Adventure. Over seventeen weeks, the project involved the collaborative efforts of two faculty and twelve students from a college of education, and three full-time staff and nineteen part-time instructors from a zoo education program across ten inter-organizational events and observations of five Overnight Adventures. To characterizer inter-organizational design, the case employs contiguity-based connecting strategies to analyze design thinking across four timescales. Findings describe the structures and processes of inter-organizational design thinking and the role of cultivating relational agency.
Original language | English (US) |
---|---|
Pages (from-to) | 1-23 |
Number of pages | 23 |
Journal | Open Education Studies |
Volume | 1 |
Issue number | 1 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Jan 1 2019 |
Keywords
- collaboratory
- design thinking
- infrastructuring
- learning sciences
- relational agency
- zoo
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Education
- Social Sciences (miscellaneous)
- Developmental and Educational Psychology