Review Article Stefanie Panke* Design Thinking in Education: Perspectives, Opportunities and Challenges

particularly as it related to the multidisciplinary teams and 
the diversity of thinking that advanced the work as well as 

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Stefanie Panke
the identification and participation of multiple stakeholders 
within the process”. 
Humanities: Molinari and Gasparini (2019) led a 
two-day workshop that centered around how to enhance 
student participation in university governance with 
students from philology programs. They started with 
participants writing one love letter and one break-up letter 
to their university. The goal of the love and break-up letters 
activity was to support divergent thinking and trigger 
empathy. The authors observed enhanced self-confidence 
and decisional skills among the participants.
Public Administration: Peters and Maatman (2017) 
discussed how a combination of foundational materials, 
an ill-defined problem and design thinking maximizes the 
students’ freedom to independently define the problem, 
identify the requisite information for analysis, and 
develop solutions.
Writing Studies: Purdy (2014) compared the design 
thinking and the writing process and argued that it offers 
a model for situating writing in the academy: “With design 
thinking, processes of composing are generative, not just 
because these activities matter in determining what products 
are created, but because they shape the future and motivate 
the ways in which we (learn to) represent and communicate” 
(Purdy, 2014, p. 626). Leverenz (2014) discussed how 
design thinking might help students see academic 
writing, as a creative act of making, “in which writers make 
not only texts, but themselves and their worlds” (Leverenz, 
2014, p. 3). According to the author, writing assignments 
that foster design thinking should represent real design 
problems and allow for many possible responses that are 
not easy or obvious. While teachers typically have the 
impulse to take the wickedness out of assignments and 
make their expectations as explicit as possible in order to 
avoid confusing or frustrating students, wicked problems 
trigger creativity: “As a result, we come to own the problem 
– as our vision – rather than merely fulfilling someone else’s 
idea of what should be done” (Leverenz, 2014, p. 7). For 
further examples, Pope-Ruark, Moses, and Tham (2019) 
created an annotated bibliography that explores the role 
of design thinking in writing studies and technical and 
professional communication.