The personal response to designing and making: investigating PGCE students' feelings as they move through a designing and making assignment

The purpose of the study reported in this paper was to investigate the way in which feelings of trainee teachers on a one year post graduate certificate of education (PGCE) initial teacher education (ITE) design and technology (D&T) course changed as they moved through a designing and making assignment. This paper is in four parts. The introduction presents a brief overview of the literature reporting pupils’ emotional response to the secondary school curriculum in science and attitudes toward technology. Second, it describes a pilot study in which a cohort of secondary design and technology PGCE trainee teachers were required to record their feelings in response to a designing and making assignment. Third, the paper presents a preliminary analysis of the data, commenting in some depth on the response of four purposefully sampled trainees. Finally, it considers the possibility of this approach being used with pupils in schools.