Teaching for citizenship in knowledge intensive societies
Keynote 13 June 2018
Roger Säljö, University of Gothenburg
The roles and role-expectations of teachers and students have a long history. Teachers taught a stable body of knowledge and skills, and students learned, largely by copying what teachers knew. Learning mainly has been a matter of reproducing what is already given. During the past 150 years or so, we have experienced dramatic social transformations: industrialism and even post-industrialism, democratization and new forms of citizenship, advances in communication technologies and media from the wireless and television to information technologies and the Internet, an unprecedented expansion in knowledge, and, during the past few decades, increasing globalization. Changes of these kinds have profound consequences for the nature of knowledge and skills, and they challenge established ways of teaching and learning. Instructional practices in more participatory forms of knowledge societies will be based on knowing as a matter of design and co-construction of knowledge rather than as mere reproduction.