The Coalition of Knowledge Building Schools

This chapter reports upon the Coalition of Knowledge Building Schools (CKBS) established in Sydney, Australia, a decade ago. Working in conjunction with the Centre for Practitioner Research at the University of Sydney, members of the Coalition go about their work examining current practices and investigating new possibilities. Members share problems and prospects and have developed new methodologies for practitioner inquiry. The chapter will report upon the ways in which these transactions occur through the lens of several case studies as well as subsequent publications, and the contribution that these make to professional knowledge formation.

A particular emphasis in the chapter will be on the nature of knowledge formation in the current educational context which can be simultaneously seen as a place where schools market themselves, but where there is also a marketplace for ideas. It will explore the development of educational and educative knowledge that is crafted by those who well understand the purpose to which it is to be put as a form of Mode 3 Knowledge growing from the concept of Mode 2 Knowledge (Gibbons et al. 1994), as we discussed in Chapter 4. Such knowledge production is concerned with the identification and solution of practical problems in the lived professional lives of practitioners and organisations not encircled by the boundaries of a single discipline. The chapter will illustrate, through the case studies and subsequent publications, the ways in which these boundaries are becoming more interesting and problematic.