English Teaching: Practice and Critique
Replacing traditional lectures, tutorials and exams with a Knowledge Building Community (KBC): A constructivist, problem-based approach to pre-service primary teacher education
Volume 2 Number 3 December 2003
Brian Cambourne (University of Wollongong, Australia)
Julie Kiggins (University of Wollongong, Australia)
Brian Ferry (University of Wollongong)
This paper reports on a journey that begun in 1997
when a small group in the Faculty of Education at the University of
Wollongong agreed to trial an alternative model of teacher education
known as the Knowledge Building Community (KBC) Project. This
alternative model of teacher education was based upon three learning
principles, community learning, school-based learning and problem-based
learning. Since the first students began in 1999 the original model has
undergone several revisions and is now best described as a
�negotiated-evaluation-of-a-non-negotiable-curriculum-based-on-a-constructivist-model-of-learning-and-knowledge-building�.
The aim of the KBC Program has been to deal with the perennial problem
of contextualising students' professional learning, by linking abstract
theory as closely as possible to the contexts and settings to which it
applies, that is, the primary school classroom.