Abstract Book of the 9th International Academic Conference on Education
Year: 2025
[PDF]
Towards New Narratives of Africa and Europe: Using a Design Thinking Approach as a Framework for Collaborative Teacher Enquiry Within a Swiss and Cameroonian Context
Dr. Victoria Wasner
ABSTRACT:
What does teaching about Africa or Europe look like in each respective context? What kind of approach can facilitate such collaboration? The project African-European School Dialogue has brought together history, geography and language teachers within upper secondary school education from Cameroon and Switzerland to facilitate a reciprocal dialogue that responds to these questions. A key focus of the project has been the role of teachers as collaborative enquirers, who have had the agency to design, shape and be confronted with new content in an iterative process influenced by design thinking methods and a framework of practitioner enquiry. Within this approach, teachers have moved through different stages of trying to understand the problem, issue, context or challenge (Empathize), unpack and further interrogate it (Define), propose ideas of how to deal with it (Ideate), and create and test out their ideas (Prototype and Test). The project has revealed that using the variability that exists within a context enables a differentiated dialogue between Africa and Europe beyond stereotypes. A methodology of design thinking allows for this to happen when teachers are offered opportunities to exercise their own agency and interrogate their own perspectives and practices in a process of collaborative enquiry.
Keywords: dialogue, design thinking, practitioner enquiry, teacher agency, empathy