Hi all,
I've attached a link to a video of Carol, a teacher at the school we do research at, talking about her JK kids studying kites. The video itself is part of an article about 'brain research', which is NOT KB, but the video itself gives a brief glimpse into her approach.
In terms of the learning/using information distinction, Marlene and Carl often talk about ideas as real things - essentially as knowledge objects that need to be examined, built upon, improved, evaluated, (often times) rejected, tested, pooled together, etc. That is, they can be actively worked on by the group, and this effort is the driving force of the community. So, one of the major concepts behind Knowledge Forum is having a space to 'play' with ideas, to use them productively to explore a given problem of understanding. As I've often heard...ideas are a dime a dozen, selecting promising ones and pursuing these is the hard part!
As in the case with Carol's kindergarten students, their ideas also coincided with making actual objects, so that they got to test them and refine them, to utilize their ideas in a practice that was directly geared to improve them. As opposed to a unit that would culminate in the building of a kite, they designed and tested multiple rounds of kites and finally came to a group understanding of how to build the best kind of kite they could - the one that could fly the farthest. I think what's so important to highlight here is the necessary component of having failure BE OKAY ... it's OKAY if the first kite you made got nowhere, that's in fact a way to move forward. What in my design could be improved? What do I have to learn more about in order to make a better kite?
Teachers in this school make it an imperative that kids understand that a person's ideas are to be respected and that if you disagree with an idea or think it is wrong, it is the IDEA and not the person who is lacking something. I've personally seen kids as young as grade one respond perfectly well to this philosophy, and by the second grade are having conversations where "I disagree with X's idea" or "I want to build on Y's idea" is common vocabulary.
I think I've veered off the path here a bit, but I see part of the learning/using info distinction as being bound up with the overall trajectory of a given class -- in a KB class, 'learning' information is continually going on, but it is 'acquired' in the process of building knowledge about certain phenomenon or problem, which requires the active use and testing of ideas emerging out of what one is learning. This itself requires an atmosphere where going off track (at times), taking risks, and making mistakes is part and parcel of the overall effort to gain deep competencies in and "knowledge of" a particular area.
Martin's blog posts keep popping up in my head here, which compels me to state also that, of course, the KB approach is not necessarily suited to every educational context. I think, with most of S&B's articles, they are geared to highlighting the contrast between traditional approache to K-12 education in particular and KB (though of course the theory and the pedagogy is not constrained by subject or by grade). But I think this is important to keep in mind.
