Designing for Designerly Ways of Knowing: Creating Learning Design Futures in Higher Education

Abstract

The need to design learning exists in different professional roles and design practices vary among higher education faculty members, learning designers, and instructional designers. Designerly knowing is a unifying theme that underpins the education of designers of learning. However, teaching designerly knowing to the designers of learning is not straightforward as it not only involves challenging their existing design routines and teaching conceptions, but also the formation of their design identities. Through a personal narrative, this chapter examines the notion of designerly knowing from the author’s experiences as practitioner of instructional design, an instructional design student, and a teacher of designers of learning. It discusses examples of how higher education design educators can foster designerly knowing through the use of alternative design contexts, experiential learning of theory, technology-enhanced learning, and capstone experiences. It also suggests how higher education institutions can support faculty members to embody designerly knowing within their teaching practices.