Temasek Secondary School: Designer Mindsets for Community Innovation
“How might we bring about authentic learning for secondary school students, where they have opportunities to connect to the community through solving real-world problems?”
Client/ Partner:
Temasek Secondary School & DesignSingapore Council
Domain:
Social Impact
Community Innovation
Health
Service:
Learning Design
Bold-designed methodology and real world assets
The Challenge/Opportunity:
The principal and teachers of Temasek Secondary School were looking to design authentic learning experiences that would make learning relevant and applicable in a real-world context. In particular, they believed that learning should go beyond the conceptual and abstract, to be grounded in real-world problems in an actual community setting, allowing students to exercise their creative capacity in tangible ways.
What we did:
Bold At Work designed for a cohort of 40 Secondary 2 students, a design learning process that leveraged our 5Ps as assets:
Process
Place
Problem
Practitioners
Platforms
Process: https://www.canva.com/design/DAFuUpmX010/Q5rEzJtP5davZLIXwulaKQ/edit
Located in a void deck in the neighbourhood of Yuhua, Bold At Work brought together both our local connections (Place) and our expertise and knowledge in relation to the Movements For Health (Problem), a national project connecting ground up movements to make systems-level changes for health to create a sensing journey. The sensing journey was designed using the local knowledge of Yuhua, as well as our understanding of the health challenges that we face as a community and nation.
Going on the sensing journey while taking on the archetypes of the local family members navigating health issues in their community setting, we created an opportunity for students to i) gain new insights through the perspectives of the archetypes and ii) question their own thinking and assumptions through encounters with the artefacts at the various sites such as the polyclinic and senior activity centre. Click here to learn more about the experience and new questions the students raised as part of the sensing journey.
Further on, through our network of social and health innovators, Bold At Work also brought linkages to Practitioners who provided grounded perspectives to the students and deepened their understanding of the needs in the health and community setting.
The process culminated in the students developing 7 prototypes that they showcased at a Platform called Parking Day 2023. This enabled them to distil their thinking into a tangible interactive piece that they brought to community members to gauge their actual reactions and feedback.
The results:
We believe that the design thinking process, grounded in the real-world context, enables students to find meaning in learning, deepen their understanding of issues and gain confidence in their capacity to create.
We saw this realised through the evolution in the students’ thinking, as their questions deepened beyond the surface level of understanding, to embrace the complexity of another’s perspectives and needs. Creative confidence as they pushed themselves beyond the safety of a classroom learning environment, to interact with members of the community.
Other than the direct work with the students, Bold At Work also journeyed alongside 10 teachers, to equip them with the tools and processes to facilitate the design thinking process for other student cohorts. It is our hope that this partnership will pave the way for more of such learning collaborations, with educators being equipped to bring their students through the design thinking process, and practitioners like Bold At Work coming in with the real-world elements of 4P to ground the learning.
About Learning by Design, DesignSingapore Council:
The Learning by Design initiative brings together educators and design partners to develop our next generation to become creative problem-solvers who are resilient in the face of change and future challenges. Through this, they hope that Design Thinking can become a way of thinking and doing.
Bold At Work is proud to be one of the appointed learning partners on DesignSingapore Council’s industry panel, working with educators and schools to bring authentic learning experiences to our young.