Design Thinking in Education

Report of a proposal to the teaching of mother language

Abstract

This text aims at presenting a report of a proposal to the teaching of mother language that reflects on the possibilities of working with a creative methodology called Design Thinking (DT). What motivates this proposal is the necessity of a teaching methodology that considers a reflection on its operation in several instances of society. As a theoretical background, we consider the conception of language as a social construct, and, to support it, we use the assumptions of Tfouni (2020), Kleiman (2007), Antunes (2003) e Rodrigues (2011) about the teaching of mother language. In order to structure the proposal, as mentioned above, we conducted a literature review about the use of Design Thinking in education. Based on that, we connected its possibilities to create spaces to enhance the repertoire of reading and writing inside the mother language classroom. The proposal was implemented during the Portuguese lessons to eighth-graders in which an advertising genre was being worked on, which is presented, in this paper as a report. After reflecting on the application of the proposal, we conclude that the use of Design Thinking in the mother language class can contribute to the development of students' creativity and criticality not only in their textual production processes, so that they experience authorship in their texts, but also in relation to the plurality of meanings in reading practices and in literacy events beyond the school.