Co-designing for Learning Across Disciplines: Bringing Students' Perspectives into Design Principles via Relational Design

The inclusion of students' voices and perspectives into the design of new educational programs is gaining visibility in universities. However, students' perspectives are usually absent from the creation of principled design knowledge in the form of design principles and patterns that are used to guide educational design. This chapter presents a relational approach for student involvement in co-creating design principles for new courses. We draw on our experiences in co-creating design principles to guide the design of an innovation-oriented interdisciplinary course. Students from a Leaning Sciences program led the design and facilitation of design thinking workshops involving other students and university staff. Observational data and artefacts from the workshop were used to co-create design principles to guide the subsequent course design. The design principles largely echoed existing theory-driven design principles for interdisciplinary learning; however, they exhibited distinct features. The design principles also pointed to the need to design for flexibility to enable both student and teacher engagement in ongoing course adaptation and redesign. The relational design approach provides a model for course design, drawing on students' perspectives and involving them in the design process, offering novel insights into design for interdisciplinary learning and challenging normative approaches to a priori course design.