Refining a Teaching Pattern: Reflection Around Artefacts

Reflection is a critical component in creative design, but may be difficult for novices to employ or explicitly express. Pedagogy to promote such expression may be enhanced by requiring undergraduate students to explain how they conceptualised, fabricated, revised and consulted though a semi-formal performance to peers. By incorporating spoken as well as deictic gestural expression into their performance, students are readily able to reveal their thinking. This study reports on a longitudinal teaching experiment designed to establish and better understand pedagogy concerned with inducing student reflection around self-made artefacts. A comparison of a single pedagogical pattern over time indicates that a durable and successful teaching methodology was captured and refined. An analysis of in-performance spoken and gestural expression revealed a high density of complex high-level reflection by students. This study has implications for pedagogical design of undergraduate programs requiring reflection and the evaluation of student reflection based on performance.