¹Education Studies
Lesley University
Cambridge, Massachusetts
²College of Transdisciplinary Sciences
Kanazawa University
Kanazawa-shi, Ishikawa Prefecture
Japan
Title
Designing Across Cultures: A COIL-Based Case Study Integrating Design Thinking and STEAM Education
Synopsis
This qualitative case study examines a multi-year Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) project connecting U.S. pre-service teachers studying STEAM education with Japanese university students studying design thinking. Grounded in Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences theory and Duckworth’s Critical Exploration framework, the project explored how cross-cultural, cross-disciplinary collaboration supports creativity, inclusive design, and learner-driven inquiry. A central innovation was the development of COMIESTA, an avatar-mediated, comic-based asynchronous communication platform designed to reduce linguistic barriers and foster multimodal dialogue. Data sources included student reflections, COMIESTA transcripts, instructional materials, and faculty analytic memos collected across multiple academic cycles. Findings suggest that COIL can function as a longitudinal learning ecosystem in which ideas accumulate across cohorts and that playground design provides an effective shared problem space for examining inclusion, accessibility, and cultural perspectives on public space. The study contributes insights into the integration of design thinking and STEAM across cultures, the use of comic-based platforms to support low-anxiety international collaboration, and the evolution of faculty learning within action research partnerships. Findings further suggest that COMIESTA may evolve from a discussion platform into a student-driven knowledge-building environment that supports multimodal communication, cohort-to-cohort dialogue, and future inquiry.