Creating a community of learners in Design and Technology education: triumphs, disasters and lessons learned!

This paper is an evaluation of an attempt to create a community of learners in an Initial Teacher Education course. Students who participated were in their third year of a four year Bachelor of Technology Education degree at a Scottish university. As part of the Educational Studies component of the course, students were required to work collaboratively to produce a unit of work based on the Scottish Higher Grade arrangement documents in one of three areas of Technology Education (Product Design, Technological Studies and Graphic Communication). The end of year assessment, however, was to be based not on the actual unit of work produced but on student reflection on the process of collaborative learning and their ability to establish links between practice and theory in the field.