Commentary: learning for knowledge work practices in the wild

ABSTRACT

Could knowledge work practices become pervasive in formal education? Could knowledge creation pedagogies help us close the gap between graduates’ knowledge work competencies and fast changing needs of the knowledge society? In this commentary, I first revisit the most notable contributions of this special issue. Then, I turn to some overarching challenges and discuss three thorny questions: 1) What is distinct to learning through knowledge creation? 2) How could we evaluate success of knowledge creation pedagogies? and 3) Are knowledge work competencies transferrable? I offer some suggestions for future lines of inquiry in response to each. I conclude this commentary by asking one provocative question: How could we help students develop competencies to work across different knowledge practices and prepare them for tackling the most complex and ‘wild’ challenges in today and tomorrow’s world? I suggest that we need a sharper focus on epistemic qualities of practice, and to be more precise about what students need to learn about knowledge and knowing.

KEYWORDS:

• Knowledge practices
• knowledge creation
• domain-general skills
• transfer
• interdisciplinary knowledge work

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Natasha Arthars for the editorial assistance and very helpful feedback on the first draft of this commentary.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. For example, the word ‘knowledge’ appears only 3 times in the World Economic Forum’s ‘The future of jobs report’ (2018). This can be contrasted with the word ‘skill’ that appears 614 times.

2. Anna Sfard (1998) similarly argued that it would be impossible to free the participation metaphor from the acquisitionist language and vice versa.

3. The terms ‘object’ and ‘artefact’ are not always used as synonyms in the knowledge creation literature (e.g. see Bereiter 2002; Markauskaite and Goodyear 2017a, 2017b). But as the authors of this special issue use them as synonyms, I do not make a distinction either.