Abstract
For us, “polytechnic” means something like a trade school rather than a general university; for the USSR and for China, it meant almost the opposite: learning to operate many different complex machines rather than learning tool-specific trades or farming. “Design and Technologies” has likewise begun to move from an emphasis on sewing and cooking for girls and wood and metalworking for boys to abstract and general notions of food and fibre production, computer-assisted design (CAD) and science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM). In this paper, we lay out a methodology for studying this transition in a database of interviews with teachers who have just taken a graduate certificate course in how to teach it. We hypothesize that this transition can be summed up in seven “key” keywords, each of which distinguishes an interview from all of the others. Taken together, these keywords are not the last word on the last iteration of the course. But they might be the first words for the next one.
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