by NEX

Webinar Event: Creating Knowledge Building Communities

Join us in exploring how the knowledge building approach developed by Marlene Scardamalia and Carl Bereiter can support students to become creative and innovative within a community of learners. In this webinar we will share some of our findings and open things up for some of our own informal knowledge building.

Event description

In the 21st century we are facing numerous unprecedented social, political, economic, health and environmental challenges. To produce innovative and creative solutions to these so-called “wicked problems” we need to increase and democratise the knowledge creating capacity of our society (Rieckmann, 2012). In Education, there is an urgent need to design pedagogical practices, and create new learning opportunities to develop young people’s innovative capacity (Lai, 2014a). Instead of focusing on reproducing knowledge, students must be able to “actively interact with [knowledge]: to understand, critique, manipulate, create, and transform it” (Bolstad & Gilbert, 2008, p.39).

When?

Thursday 30 May 4-5.00 pm

Who?

Over the last year, four of us have been working with Professor Kwok Wing Lai (Otago University) to explore the research on knowledge building with a view to developing links between the research and developing teacher practice. The research team includes:

  • Professor Kwok Wing Lai, Otago University
  • Margaret Macpherson, Ashburton College,
  • Philippa Mallinson, Westland High School
  • Ken Pullar, NetNZ
  • Darren Sudlow, NetNZ

Join us in exploring how the knowledge building approach developed by Marlene Scardamalia and Carl Bereiter can support students to become creative and innovative within a community of learners. In this webinar we will share some of our findings and open things up for some informal knowledge building amongst attendees.

Please follow this link to register. You will receive the Zoom Video Conference link once you have.

What is Knowledge Building?

Knowledge Building promotes key principles which are designed to meet the growing need to re-imagine how schools meet the challenges described above. Scardamalia (2002) describes 12 key principles which together promote learning as a process based on curiosity, exploration and questioning, of improving ideas as a community of learners, and encouraging student ownership of the learning process and real world problem solving. It is a process that should be an integral part of the paradigm shift that needs to occur in education. It also places values such as “innovation, inquiry, and curiosity, by thinking critically, creatively, and reflectively” identified as integral to the New Zealand Curriculum, at its very centre.”