“Teaching is both an art and a science” (Harrison & Coll, 2008 p.1). Good teaching excites students and cultivates their curiosity to learn more than they are asked. But what if students’ blank faces tell you that the teaching did not land, what can you do? Using an analogy or metaphor to explain the principle helps students visualize and comprehend the knowledge of difficult, abstract concepts by making it familiar. The National Academy of Engineers issued a report in 2008 emphasizing the need for design engineers to develop 21st century skills, such as ingenuity and creativity, and to create innovative products and markets. However, designers have a hard time ignoring evident constraints on their concepts during their design process. This is especially difficult for novice designers when attempting to use analogical reasoning (Osborn, 1963; Hey et al. 2008). Hey et al. explains how the multitude of design considerations is even more difficult for novice as compared to expert designers who are more able to focus on the important features of a problem. Kolodner (1997) iterates how novice designers have difficulty sifting through the mass of information they encounter. They need help with the transfer of knowledge that analogical reasoning requires. When students can clearly extract and articulate what they have learned, this helps them to internalize this. Biomimicry education teaches the clear extraction and articulation while learning to decipher and transfer function analogies from biology to design. This transfer can also improve reasoning when solving problems (Wu and Weng, 2013), reacting to the challenge in a more ‘out-of-the-box’ manner (Yang et al. 2015). However, not being able to fully understand this “conceptual leap between biology and design” in an accurate manner, is sited as a key obstacle of this field (Rowland, 2017; Rovalo and McCardle 2019, p. 1). Therefore, didactics on how to teach this analogical leap to overcome the hurdles is essential. There is insufficient research on the effectivity of biomimicry education in design to help establish ‘best practices’. This thesis offers advice to fill this pedagogical gap to find out how to overcome the obstacle of analogical reasoning for novice designers, while practicing biomimicry. The contribution to science is a not earlier tested methodology that leads to a clearer understanding of the translation of biological strategies and mechanisms found in scientific research. This translation from biology to design in visual and textual manner, is called the Abstracted Design Principle (ADP) and is introduced and explained in detail in chapters 4, 5 and 6 of this thesis. Together with the proposed instructions, we sketch the net-gain of positive mind-set for novice designers on their path to design for a sustainable future.
DOCUMENT
Preliminary empirical research conducted by the leading author has shown that design students using biological analogies, or models across different contexts, often misinterpreted these, intentionally or unintentionally, during design. By copying shape or form without integrating the main function of the mimicked biological model, students failed to consider the process or system directing that function when attempting to solve the design need. This article considers the first step in the development of an applicable educational model using distant analogies from nature, by means of biomimicry thinking methodology. The analysis examines results from a base-line exercise taken by students in the Minor Design with Nature during the Spring semester of Industrial Design Engineering at The Hague University of Applied Sciences in 2019, verifying that students without biomimicry training use this hollow approach automatically. This research confirms the gap between where students are at the beginning of the semester and where they need to be as expert sustainable designers when they graduate. These findings provide a starting point for future interventions in biomimicry workshops to improve systematic design thinking through structural and scientifically based iterations of analogical reasoning. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10798-020-09574-1 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/helenkopnina/
MULTIFILE
When teaching grammar, one of the biggest challenges teachers face is how to make their students achieve conceptual understanding. Some scholars have argued that metaconcepts from theoretical linguistics should be used to pedagogically and conceptually enrich traditional L1 grammar teaching, generating more opportunities for conceptual understanding. However, no empirical evidence exists to support this theoretical position. The current study is the first to explore the role of linguistic metaconcepts in the grammatical reasoning of university students of Dutch Language and Literature. Its goal was to gain a better understanding of the characteristics of students’ grammatical conceptual knowledge and reasoning and to investigate whether students’ reasoning benefits from an intervention that related linguistic metaconcepts to concepts from traditional grammar. Results indicate, among other things, that using explicit linguistic metaconcepts and explicit concepts from traditional grammar is a powerful contributor to the quality of students’ grammatical reasoning. Moreover, the intervention significantly improved students’ use of linguistic metaconcepts.
DOCUMENT
Biomimicry education is grounded in a set of natural design principles common to every known lifeform on Earth. These Life’s Principles (LPs) (cc Biomimicry 3.8), provide guidelines for emulating sustainable strategies that are field-tested over nearly four billion years of evolution. This study evaluates an exercise for teaching LPs to interdisciplinary students at three universities, Arizona State University (ASU) in Phoenix, Arizona (USA), College of Charleston (CofC) in Charleston, South Carolina (USA) and The Hague University of Applied Sciences (THUAS) in The Hague (The Netherlands) during the spring 2021 semester. Students researched examples of both biological organisms and human designs exhibiting the LPs. We gauged the effectiveness of the exercise through a common rubric and a survey to discover ways to improve instruction and student understanding. Increased student success was found to be directly linked to introducing the LPs with illustrative examples, assigning an active search for examples as part of the exercise, and utilizing direct assessment feedback loops. Requiring students to highlight the specific terms of the LP sub-principles in each example is a suggested improvement to the instructions and rubric. An iterative, face-to-face, discussion-based teaching and learning approach helps overcome minor misunderstandings. Reiterating the LPs throughout the semester with opportunities for application will highlight the potential for incorporating LPs into students’ future sustainable design process. Stevens LL, Fehler M, Bidwell D, Singhal A, Baumeister D. Building from the Bottom Up: A Closer Look into the Teaching and Learning of Life’s Principles in Biomimicry Design Thinking Courses. Biomimetics. 2022; 7(1):25. https://doi.org/10.3390/biomimetics7010025
DOCUMENT
Voorbeelden en onderwijs lijken onlosmakelijk met elkaar verbonden. Het gebruik van voorbeelden is vaak zo vanzelfsprekend, dat zelfs in didactische opleidingen niet altijd aandacht wordt besteed aan de voorwaarden voor een optimal gebruik ervan. Voorbeelden blijken echter niet automatisch tot meer kennis en beter begrip te leiden. Leren van en door voorbeelden vereist bewuste aandacht en doet een beroep op analoog redeneren. Er is veel onderzoek gedaan naar de centrale rol van analoog redeneren in leren. De hieruit voortgekomen kennis en inzichten lijken echter nog niet algemeen bekend bij docenten noch breed geïmplementeerd in het onderwijs, zo komt ook naar voren uit een verkennend onderzoek aan De Haagse Hogeschool. Dit artikel vormt een eerste aanzet om kennis en inzichten in analoog redeneren en in het effectief gebruik van voorbeelden bredere bekendheid te geven. De aanbevelingen in het artikel zijn bedoeld om docenten te inspireren en uit te dagen. Abstract. The use of examples for teaching purposes would seem an obvious choice for teachers. This might be the reason why even courses intended to instruct teachers in their future profession sometimes skip over ways to make effective use of examples. However, research has shown that the use of examples does not automatically enhance a learner’s knowledge and understanding. Learning from examples requires conscious effort and attention and calls for analogical reasoning. Although the key role played by analogical reasoning in learning has been widely investigated, an exploratory study conducted among lecturers at The Hague University of Applied Sciences showed that not that many of them were familiar with the findings of these studies nor were these findings featured in their teaching. This article is an attempt to promote the acquisition of scientific knowledge and insights into analogical reasoning and the effective use of examples. The recommendations provided here are meant to inspire and challenge teachers.
DOCUMENT
The study of moral reasoning in relation to sustainable development is an emerging field within environmental education (EE) and education for sustainable development (ESD). The vignette method was used to evaluate the perception of the relationship between environmental and social issues in the Dutch upper elementary school children. This case study is placed within two broad areas of tension, namely between the need to address urgent environmental problems and to promote pluralistic democratic learning; and between the value of environment as an economic asset and deep ecology perspective. Results of this study indicate that the children are able to critically think about the moral dilemmas inherent in sustainable development and distinguish between different values in relation to environment. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.stueduc.2013.12.004 https://www.linkedin.com/in/helenkopnina/
MULTIFILE
Metaphor is one of the important discursive themes in organizational literature (Grant et al.,2001). Metaphors play an important role in the discourse within organizations as well as in theorizing about organizations. This empirical paper focuses on the latter by analysing the role of metaphor in the development of theoretical concepts – in particular the concept of social capital – through the means of quantitative content analysis. Some authors argue that metaphors should be avoided in organizational theory (Bourgeois and Pinder, 1983; Tinker, 1986). Others see metaphors as valuable creative tools for developing new theories and insights (Weick, 1989). Morgan (1997) has shown that many theories about organizations can be ‘reordered’ (Keenoy et al., 2003) into a particular metaphorical view of organizations, showing the metaphorical bases of organizational theorizing. Lakoff and Johnson (1980, 1999) go even further, presenting compelling evidence from cognitive science indicating that metaphors are inescapable because they are the basis for our abstract reasoning. There is a debate about the way metaphor works (Black, 1993; Cornelissen, 2005; Heracleous, 2003; Keenoy et al., 2003; Lakoff and Johnson, 1999; Marshak, 2003; Oswick et al. 2002, 2003; Tsoukas, 1991;) especially about whether metaphor is simply a matter of comparison highlighting the analogies in the source and target domain, or whether a metaphor does more then that. In the paper we take the latter position and adopt Lakoff and Johnson’s (1999) model of cross-domain mapping. This model states that not only similarities and features are transferred from the source to the target domain but that the target domain often gets its structure from the source domain. The metaphorical mapping from the source to the target domain can be rich and complex because metaphors have many ‘entailments’. Entailments are the connotations of the metaphor that transport meaning from the source to the target domain. Furthermore, the application of conceptual metaphor often happens out-of-awareness (Lakoff and Johnson, 1999; Marshak, 2003). It is part of the unconscious mental operations concerned with conceptual systems, meaning, inference, and language. We can recognize the unconscious use of metaphor in organizational theorizing by looking at the literal meaning of organizational concepts and statements (Andriessen, 2006).
DOCUMENT
The methodology of biomimicry design thinking is based on and builds upon the overarching patterns that all life abides by. “Cultivating cooperative relationships” within an ecosystem is one such pattern we as humans can learn from to nurture our own mutualistic and symbiotic relationships. While form and process translations from biology to design have proven accessible by students learning biomimicry, the realm of translating biological functions in a systematic approach has proven to be more difficult. This study examines how higher education students can approach the gap that many companies in transition are struggling with today; that of thinking within the closed loops of their own ecosystem, to do good without damaging the system itself. Design students should be able to assess and advise on product design choices within such systems after graduation. We know when tackling a design challenge, teams have difficulties sifting through the mass of information they encounter, and many obstacles are encountered by students and their professional clients when trying to implement systems thinking into their design process. While biomimicry offers guidelines and methodology, there is insufficient research on complex, systems-level problem solving that systems thinking biomimicry requires. This study looks at factors found in course exercises, through student surveys and interviews that helped (novice) professionals initiate systems thinking methods as part of their strategy. The steps found in this research show characteristics from student responses and matching educational steps which enabled them to develop their own approach to challenges in a systems thinking manner. Experiences from the 2022 cohort of the semester “Design with Nature” within the Industrial Design Engineering program at The Hague University of Applied Sciences in the Netherlands have shown that the mixing and matching of connected biological design strategies to understand integrating functions and relationships within a human system is a promising first step. Stevens LL, Whitehead C, Singhal A. Cultivating Cooperative Relationships: Identifying Learning Gaps When Teaching Students Systems Thinking Biomimicry. Biomimetics. 2022; 7(4):184. https://doi.org/10.3390/biomimetics7040184
DOCUMENT
Metaphors are common phenomena intellectual capital and knowledge management theories and practice. An important question to ask is: what are the ‗best‘ metaphors we can use in our theorizing on intellectual capital and knowledge management? This paper addresses the question of the aptness of knowledge related metaphors. It concludes that the aptness of metaphorical expressions depends on three factors: the richness of the semantic field of the source domain, the validity of the mapping, and the ideological implications of the mapping. This conclusion results in a research agenda on the aptness of metaphor in knowledge management and intellectual capital theory and practice.
DOCUMENT
Er is behoefte aan mensen die bijdragen leveren aan de ontwikkeling van technische producten en processen. Onderwijs heeft de opdracht de technische geletterdheid van leerlingen te ontwikkelen en te zorgen dat ze zich prettig voelen bij het hanteren van techniek. Deze studie focust op de bijdrage die Mindtools hieraan leveren. Mindtools zijn op ICT gebaseerde leermiddelen die samenwerkend constructivistisch leren en hoger-orde (kritisch en creatief) denken stimuleren. Het begrip Direct Manipulation Environments (DME's), een subklasse van Mindtools, kenmerkt concrete leermiddelen zoals de microwerelden "Lego Mindstorms" en "Techno Logica". Deze microwerelden functioneren op basis van een materieel technisch model dat direct via een computer¬programma bestuurd wordt en taken kan uitvoeren (robots). De leertaak voor de leerling kan zich bewegen op het continuüm van het zelf programmeren van een kant-en-klaar materieel model dat bepaalde taken moet uitvoeren tot en met het zelf bedenken, bouwen en programmeren van een dergelijk model dat een of meer taken kan uitvoeren. Op grond van eerder literatuuronderzoek en een casestudie veronderstellen we dat het educatief toepassen van DME's bijdraagt aan de ontwikkeling van de technische geletterdheid van leerlingen. Hoewel definiëring van technische geletterdheid meer aandacht vraagt, zijn de volgende drie dimensies voor onze analyses bruikbaar gebleken: inhoud (zoals feiten, concepten, voorschriften), praktijk (het handelen, het materiële, doen en realiseren) en de cognitieve dimensie (denkvaardigheden en denkhoudingen). Het is aannemelijk dat door het toepassen van DME's domeinspecifieke concepten en kennis ontwikkeld wordt. Het denken van leerlingen is gekoppeld aan contexten en taken en moet niet geïsoleerd worden bestudeerd. We concentreren ons in deze studie vooral op onderzoek naar de dimensie van de denkvaardigheden en denkhoudingen (het denken van leerlingenduo's bij het oplossen van een probleemtaak) door het analyseren van de verbale interactie op kenmerken van kritisch - en creatief denken. Er is gebruik gemaakt van een Techno Logica leeromgeving bestaande uit een computer met software, een interface, bestuurbare materialen zoals lampjes en motors, en een zelfinstructie handleiding. Twee in complexiteit toenemende probleemtaken, ieder gebaseerd op een kant-en-klaar materieel model (Verkeerslicht en Reuzenrad), zijn gebruikt om de leerlingen besturingen te laten ontwerpen en testen. Dit proces werd op video opgenomen. We veronderstellen dat Techno Logica een bruikbare Mindtool is wanneer werken ermee bijdraagt aan technologische geletterdheid, in de zin dat er sprake is van probleemoplossen en hoger orde denken. Om dit te operationaliseren ontwierpen we een gestructureerd observatie-instrument op basis van het IOWA Integrated Thinking Model en de theorie over denkhoudingen (Costa, 2000). Hiermee werd het voorkomen en de diversiteit van denkvaardigheden en denkhoudingen in de verbale acties en interactie gescoord. Op basis van onze waarnemingen concluderen we dat veel interactie en handelen eerder geduid kan worden als uitingen van denken dan trial and error. Er zijn indicaties dat de leeromgeving en probleemtaken leiden tot ontwikkeling van expertise waardoor een nieuwe (moeilijkere) probleemtaak efficiënter en effectiever opgelost wordt. We vragen we aandacht voor de rol van de docent. We ervaren immers dat nieuwe leermiddelen niet gemakkelijk geadopteerd worden door leerkrachten.
DOCUMENT
