The Chilean school curriculum shares with the design literacy approach the goal of forming responsible citizens committed to caring for the environment. Given that design is included as obligatory ...content of the visual arts and technology subjects in the first 10 years of compulsory education, we wonder if the learning objectives of visual arts and technology support the development of design literacy abilities, as outlined by Lutnæs and Cross. To address this question, we coded 119 learning objectives in alignment with Lutnæs’s and Cross’s design literacy abilities. Then, we generated heatmaps to undertake a visual analysis of the alignment between the learning objectives and design literacy categories. As a result, we found a strong convergence between the Cross and Lutnæs categories and technology learning objectives, especially in lower secondary level education. In the visual arts, design was focused on aesthetics, and connections with design literacy narratives were scarce. We propose that adopting the analytical instrument (coding table) as a standardised tool will encourage comparable studies of how well design literacy is incorporated into other national curricula.
The Covid-19 pandemic is having an undeniable impact on all the statements of society. Regarding teaching and learning activities, most educational institutions suspended in-person instruction and ...moved to remote learning during the lockdown of March and April 2020. Although nowadays many countries have progressively re-opened their educational systems, blended learning is a common practice aimed to reduce the spread of the Covid-19 disease. This disruption has supposed an unprecedented acceleration to the digitalization of teaching and learning. Teaching professionals have been forced to develop their digital competence in a short amount of time, getting mastery in the management of information, the creation of audiovisual contents, and the use of technology to keep their students connected. This Special Issue presents contributions regarding the adoption of distance learning strategies, experiences, or lessons learned in this domain.
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the entire process of teaching and learning moved online. This forced teachers and pupils to heavily rely on information and communications technology (ICT) and make ...adjustments to the new mode of teaching and learning in educational institutions. We conducted a qualitative case study by interviewing 24 teachers from Slovene primary schools focusing on the implementation of cross-curricular connections in music and visual arts content with the support of ICT during the period of emergency remote teaching. We found that when planning and implementing the cross-curricular learning process, teachers insufficiently took advantage of possibilities offered by modern ICT. The manner of implementing cross-curricular connections showed uncertainties in terms of understanding their specifics, resulting in the inefficient transfer of concepts taught, the results of which were seen in pupils’ work. This might additionally show the negative influence of parental supervision on the creative thinking and expression of pupils. The present study emphasizes the lack of ICT competences on the part of all participants in the educational process. Our findings show the need to educate teachers by eliminating the uncertainties related to the implementation of distant cross-curricular connections while meaningfully applying ICT adapted to pupils’ competences.
