Knowledge Building

#EdBlogNZ Challenge WK 2

1. Write a blog post about an education question/ challenge/wondering that you have or are facing. You don’t need to have the answer/solution.

DG: 1 Coffee 1 Blogpost

I often think about two questions.

1. What might a knowledge creating culture look like and sound like in a classroom?
2. What might be a useful metaphor to describe Knowledge Building?

“Knowledge building may be defined as the production and continual improvement of ideas of value to a community, through means that increase the likelihood that what the community accomplishes will be greater than the sum of individual contributions and part of broader cultural efforts.”

MARLENE SCARDAMALIA  CARL BEREITER

Carl Bereiter and Marlene Scardamalia  discuss the conditions that are required to create knowledge. (Thanks  to my colleague Ally Bull for reminding me about these themes)

The themes are

• Knowledge advancement is a community rather than an individual achievement
• Knowledge advancement is about idea improvement rather than progress toward a true or warranted belief
• Knowledge of in contrast to knowledge about
• Discourse as collaborative problem solving rather than argumentation
• Constructive use of authoritative information
• Understanding as emergent

I wrote about Knowledge Building in a blog post in 2013. Since this blog post I have continued to think about Knowledge Building.

One response to exploring this question was the development of Maths Like a Pirate.

At present I am thinking Knowledge Building sits with a relationship to design thinking, complexity theory and strong collaboration. I am exploring how to work with these in my classroom teaching and school wide leadership.

“It’s in the spaces between the people, between people and ideas, and ideas and other ideas that creativity and new knowledge lie.” Jane Gilbert 2013

Possible Metaphors...

Fruit Salad: Where each separate ingredient comes together to make a flavour that it could not have been created on its own.

Music: Where two instruments come together to produce music they could not have done on their own.

The one problem with the two metaphors is they can be treated like jigsaw puzzles and can be untangled from their complicated states. I’m needing a metaphor where like an egg once a change has occurred, in this case boiling, it can no longer return to its  original state.

So I’m wondering about  Fire as a metaphor for Knowledge Building.

He manako te koura i kore ai.

He manako te whakahanga te matauranga i kore ai.

No use wishing for a crayfish.

No use wishing for knowledge building.