Chile, October 2010, has encapsulated all human drama, a good news story that has enhanced our sense of humanity. Yet it doesn’t take long to come up with a list of hugely varied skills and attributes in scientific, mathematical, engineering and craft contexts that have made this story real.

Our own country is unsurpassed historically technological achievements and “Excellence” requires that we focus on the conditions that made this possible and how we can harness that to reinvigorate learning.

We now require a critical appraisal of the value of Technologies that reflects the sort of critiques we regularly see of literature and art. The recognition of the cultural values of technology, alongside an understanding of the history of our technology, ought to inhabit a central position in building young people’s learning about us as a nation. To illustrate briefly:

  1. In 1507 Fr John Damian had a laboratory at Stirling Castle working on the principles of flights, at the same time as Leonardo was working in Florence.
  2. Some two hundred years later Napier was at work developing logarithms
  3. Another hundred or so years later  we designed and built the Forth Bridge.
  4. 1979 The Ninian Platform- the largest moveable structure on earth – was built here.

In five hundred years a wonderful story of the small to the gigantic and, now, back to the small, with Scotland’s place in soft technologies developments continuing the story.

As Chair of the Technologies Excellence Group, I’ve been impressed by the energy the group has brought to making Technologies matter as much as possible. We started with a reminder of the core principles of Curriculum for Excellence, and agreed that these should have continual restatement.  Achieving a confident, successful, aspirational citizen requires a balance between academic and social skills, between scientific, mathematical and craft skills.

Understanding the value of interdisciplinary learning ought to be central to developing a holistic awareness of the inter-relationship between science, technology and mathematics; with numeracy, like, literacy as a base concept.  This interdependence merely reflects realities in industry, business, and higher education. Bio-engineering or bio-mathematics are established concepts. These linkages operate not only at an academic level but also at an artisan level – craft skills, such as in home economics founded on learning in numeracy, biology and health.

As an architects the idea of focusing on the Creativity and Innovation and its corollary – Design, as our goals, appeals. We can build learning outcomes and processes where the difficult and incomplete can co-exist with the structured – this is where imagination is everything.

Getting creativity right into the core of learning needs a few things to come together – Ruth Wishart, who chairs the expressive arts excellence group, suggested the need for a virtuous triangle- staff/practitioners/parents, which seemed to me to encapsulate all the main possibilities.

Our teachers have to be confident. Confident, well-trained teachers will lead to confident, well-trained students, who will in their turn, lead to a more technologically successful and responsible population, able to contribute to building their society and beyond.

Further the aspect which links parents, teachers, pupils and curriculum is assessment and a related value system.  If we are to give pupils space to fail – an essential part of creativity and innovation then some form of continuous assessment  – which gives support, demands accountability but without recourse to a blame culture – requires to be implemented in schools.

This in turn requires us all to in to invest or restore faith in our teachers to be central to that assessment process. Similar forms of assessment have been the basis of design courses at tertiary level for years.

My aspiration for the Technologies Excellence Group’s work over the coming weeks is that we should build the cases for balanced and practical skills development alluded to above and restate them in a convincing way that will be of value to staff, not only in the technologies, but right across learning.

Professor Gordon Murray
Head of School of Architecture University of Strathclyde