Design Literacy in Chilean Curricula

Abstract

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.