Teo, Chew Lee

To better prepare learners for the "knowledge society," educators in Singapore have embarked on a journey in experimenting with knowledge creation pedagogy in classrooms. The Knowledge Creation and Innovative Design Centre was set up to further coordinate this effort. In this article, the authors give an account of the historical development of effort in sustaining and scaling knowledge building pedagogy in the past decade, and present two recent research efforts of this Centre.

Knowledge building requires collaborative bootstrapping, with participants at all levels of the education system part of a collective effort to go beyond information exchange to innovation-producing networks that demonstrate that education can operate as a knowledge creating enterprise. Organizational theories and research are increasingly focused on multilevel perspectives for creating actionable knowledge; the challenge is to take advantage of emergence to self-organize around solutions and new means. By “innovation networks” we mean networks that go beyond sharing and discussion to the actual creation of new knowledge and innovations. Self-organization and emergence surround us, all the time and at multiple levels, whether we are aware or not. However, self-organization around idea improvement is rare and requires engaging innovative capacity at all levels, a research-intensive enterprise surrounding innovations, and an open source engineering team committed to enabling new forms of interaction, media, and analytic tools. “Multi-level” envisions inclusion of students, teachers, administrators, researchers, engineers, and policy makers in a collaborative enterprise. This session takes the form of a design think tank to advance conceptual frameworks and means for new and more powerful environments to support a multi-level knowledge building innovation network.

This study is situated in the field of knowledge building and teacher professional learning community (PLC). It describes a case study of eight elementary school teachers working on lesson design using knowledge building pedagogy to enhance student learning. The research question is: “How is knowledge building accomplished among teachers within a PLC?” The main method employed is the analysis of teacher’s discourse in the PLC. Results indicate that although not cognisant of it, these teachers functioned as a reciprocal layer of knowledge builders over their students’ work. Critically, teachers’ knowledge building was enabled by working with authentic classroom problems, embracing idea diversity and demonstrating epistemic agency in their knowledge advancement. Future work can focus on building teacher’s awareness of this layer of knowledge building and scripting creation of knowledge artefacts among teachers to mediate and record their collaborative inquiry.

The paper presents a study on a partnership between schools, a community welfare organization, Science Centre and the National Institute of Education to design, study and implement new approaches of learning for lower track students. Singapore as an inclusive society has sought to address the diverse educational needs of children in the country. This partnership seeks to ignite students’ interest in learning Science and address the affective needs in learning, which includes developing students’ confidence, competence and social skills. Leveraging on the diverse expertise and experiences, the partners designed tinkering activities to anchor students’ learning experiences in exploring, testing and constructing Science ideas. The activities are designed and enacted with linkages to the existing Science curriculum. However, setting a partnership with stakeholders from different backgrounds and domains is challenging. We will describe the journey of setting up the partnership, developing shared goals, building capacity and knowledge, and designing for learning. Also, we will share students’ learning and affective outcomes because of the partnership and participation in the designed tinkering activities. Our goal is to highlight how meaningful partnerships can be formed to better understand and meet lower track students learning and affective needs through collective social responsibility according to the familiar proverb “It takes a village to raise a child”.

Singapore and Ontario, Canada, have been rated as among the top education systems in the world in terms of both student achievement and progressive management. This symposium brings together leaders and researchers working in these systems to discuss efforts to go beyond present achievements and to address new imperatives to educate for innovation. Both systems are experimenting with Knowledge Building as an approach to meet this need. How they propose to do this while also upholding other educational goals forms one facet of the symposium. The other facet concerns how this work fits into the larger picture of education for innovation as seen from the points of view of research in the learning sciences and OECD’s studies of innovation in education.