The development of students’ identities as knowledge builders
Yotam Hod is working on the SIKB project which aims to prepare school students to successfully take part in the new knowledge society. Funded by the Horizon 2020 framework programme, Yotam shares some insights from his research.
Yotam Hod, In his own words
My name is Yotam Hod. I’m an assistant professor at the University of Haifa, Israel. My research – in the field of learning sciences – is primarily concerned with examining human learning in classroom environments that are designed as learning communities. Classroom learning communities are a model for teaching and learning that position students as active, collaborative learners who learn through their direct experience as inquirers.
The technology is usually in their hands, instead of the teacher. This conception is a sharp departure from the structure of traditional classrooms, which need to transform given new societal demands as well as opportunities that have come about in the age of technology.
Research in this area is vital to advance teachers, develop educational technologies and new learning spaces, and of course guide policy and wide-scale change. My research deals with these aspects of the future of education through the prism of learning communities.
THE SIKB PROJECT
The SIKB project aims to examine how grade 5 students studying science within knowledge building communities (a specific type of technology-enhanced learning community) develop their identities as they participate in the learning process.
Acquiring knowledge has and should be a goal of education. But we are doing much more than this in classrooms. We are developing students’ lifelong scientific practices, or the way they interact with knowledge, scrutinise it, build on it, collaborate with others etc.
When students participate in a classroom learning community, they must bring in their own personal experiences and interests to advance their knowledge. Some students are very successful at doing this, while others have a hard time either getting started or persevering through the challenges that they face. How they approach knowledge building is thus a matter of one’s practices and identity. The more we know about it the better we can support students to develop and become more successful knowledge builders.
WE ARE ALL ‘KNOWLEDGE BUILDERS’
A knowledge builder is a person who engages in an endeavour aimed to advance theories or ideas about a particular topic. In their everyday life, people are knowledge builders in different contexts. A mother and father negotiating how to raise their children, a parent joining a Facebook group to discuss how to cook healthy food, and a brother and sister putting together a Lego structure while consulting a manual. These are all acts of knowledge building.
It is important to recognise the public nature of this process as people advance the state of knowledge – in either very small and subtle ways such as in these examples, in classrooms like those that I research where this is designed to happen, or in professional scientific communities that aim to make big discoveries.
SPECIFICITIES OF STUDENTS’ IDENTITIES
We are all knowledge builders in that we all face and react to knowledge in all aspects of our lives, and do so in routinised ways. Just as no two fingerprints are the same, no two people build knowledge the same way. So it is a very individualised and personal story. Still, we can see patterns in the way people build knowledge, and can identify more successful practices.
For example, becoming aware of other people’s knowledge is vital for the next step of building on and advancing an idea. Therefore students need to be good, active listeners. Other examples include sharing knowledge instead of keeping it private, seeking out help in the face of challenges or setbacks, and clarifying then following one’s own interests.
These types of practices (that form people’s knowledge building identities) are often hard to change in people, as they sit deeply within people’s belief systems, understandings, feelings, and attitudes.
EXPECTED RESULTS OF THE PROJECT
Learning is too often viewed from a classroom-centric perspective – students are measured based on external standards and this basically ignores their interests and how they use what they learn as part of their everyday lives.
The expected results of this study will provide us new ways to examine learning by taking the perspective of students as lifelong, lifewide, and lifedeep knowledge builders. Having this perspective should help to re-frame how classrooms can be organised so that what students learn is better connected and relevant to their lives.
YOTAM HOD
