Story-Making in Designing and Learning: Ways to Establish Partnership between Children and Designers

This chapter examines ways of establishing an equal partnership between year 5 children and adult designers during a series of collaborative workshops titled 'The Future Design Board'.

The workshop’s aim was to explore the interface between adult designerly play and child play. The adult -child partnership attempted to immerse the adult designers in child play and at the same time offer children designerly structures to express their ideas.

Previous workshop stages have evidenced the challenges in establishing a partnership between children and designers . I had observed that the adult designers have been struggling to step out of the adult/teacher/ professional role and embrace their roles as learners learning from the children. Conversely, I had also observed that the children were struggling to varying degrees to step out of the learner role. This chapter discusses the methods and training that I developed ran with my participants with a view to facilitate an equal child- adult partnership.

The book was reprinted in 2020 by Brill
https://brill.com/view/title/54986
ISBN: 978-1-84888-127-3