Pedagogy for knowledge recognition and acquisition: knowing and being at the close of the mechanical age

Abstract

It is the outstanding intellectual challenge of our age to find ways of providing citizens with access to and competent acquisition of the new applications and systems of knowledge. The purpose of this article is twofold. First, it is to justify at the conceptual level that we are facing an unprecedented shift in the way knowledge is generated and acquired, and to draw attention to the specificity of the emerging curricula pathways along which learners and their mentors may respond to this challenge. For this it draws upon the work of Walter Benjamin. Second, the aim is to outline and open for discussion a ‘bottom-up’ approach to learning and curriculum in higher education that would be complementary to the traditional methods of delivery, and to draw guidelines for bridging the gap between the conceptual ideas and the pragmatic, pedagogical steps needed to implement this approach.

Keywords:

• archaeological pedagogy
• context-driven inquiry
• knowledge maps
• knowledge systems
• new technologies

Notes

1. Contributed in part at the Annual Conference of the Society for Research into Higher Education (SRHE), paper 104, Brighton, December 2007.

2. The methodology was subsequently broken down into eight steps for clarity in working with younger learners (see Deakin Crick 2009).