Activity 4-Knowledge Building

As one writer has put it "we learn... through making connections between stuff we already knew and the stuff we didn’t. This meant we actively constructed the knowledge as we needed it. "  This is pretty much the premise on which knowledge building stands.

Our students enter the classroom having being exposed to many strands of thought and information.  To some degree there is the isolated case of cases of small hunches (as indicated in the online video on WHERE GOOD IDEAS COME FROM by Steven Johnson) This unit has challenged me as a teacher to launch the proverbial net into the great minds of my students and provide avenues for them to make sense of their ideas; merge their ideas with other ideas from their peers and explore possibilities in expanding these ideas to even create new versions of thought.  My mind takes me to  Mark Zuckerberg who, with his college roommates, founded facebook. Note that they were college students.  I would want to believe that their learning environment was that of knowledge building; and hence, they had the scope to explore those 'hunches' and finally reach a "Eureka" moment.

In my context where linear learning is the norm, it will be difficult at first to incorporate this new trend into my present context.  One implication of creating a knowledge building environment would require  a  reconstruction of the teacher training programme so the phasing in of this trend can begin to filter through the school system.  The monitoring and evaluation of teachers  will also need to be refocused so that teachers can be assessed on the incorporation of 21st Century learning which will nurture a knowledge building environment.