The role of metaphor in design education pedagogy

The classroom implementation of the Tasmanian Certificate of Education from 1990 has created a need for teachers to critically examine their respective pedagogies in the light of its syllabuses' aims, objectives, and assessment procedures. Syllabuses written for the Material, Design and Technology (MDT) curriculum area now prescribe a fuller expressions of the design education intention than that which was more liberally expressed in former School Certificate syllabuses for Manual Arts, The intention of design education is firmly stated in all MDT syllabuses, namely: Applied Design, Design in Graphics, Design in Metal, Design in Plastics and Design in Wood. Design education has been expressed in various forms in school subjects akin to MDT in the English-speaking world for 100 years and during that time a conflicting relationship between a tool skills orientation and a design based orientation of the subjects' pedagogies has emerged: each is regarded as being mutually exclusive. Much of the debate has focused on the pedagogical application of the design process; debate about whether tool skills acquisition can be addressed simultaneously with design processes through students' exploration and discovery of them, or whether tool skills development is a necessary pre-requisite for design activities which must be purposefully developed in an a priori fashion.