Attendees at the recent KBDS2021 in June 2021

Knowledge Building in the New Normal

Knowledge Building Design Studios (KBDS) 2021 is the 3rd edition of a series of Design Studios, organised by the KB team in Singapore. After successfully conducting studios in 2019 and 2020, KBDS2021 was the first of two studios that are planned for the year 2021. On the 3rd and 4th of June 2021, the design studio was held virtually with a continuation of an ongoing theme of ‘Saving Planet, Saving Lives’. This serves as an extension of content and context from previous years, where students can come together and join a community of experts, researchers, teachers and other students, to discuss topics that interests them, to create new ideas, and to continuously knowledge build together as a community.

Experts and researchers from around the world, together with teachers and student participants from schools all over Singapore, were invited to join the Knowledge Forum, which serves as an online discourse platform for all participants to knowledge build. This Design Studio presents an opportunity for knowledge builders to collectively work together on this online platform, by sharing ideas related to the theme and symmetrically advance community knowledge, through the showcase of idea improvement and collaboration. Similar to the virtual studio organised in the previous year, participants actively contributed to discussions using the Zoom platform as an alternative to face-to-face discussions for deepening their discussions. Over the two-day Design Studio, students between the ages of 10 to 15 years old in Singapore met up with experts from London and the United States, researchers from Toronto, and teachers from Singapore schools.

First Day

Students working together on a note posted on the Knowledge Forum

Students were welcomed to the community and briefly introduced to the theme of ‘Saving Planet, Saving Lives’. Following this, a short video, from David Attenborough’s ‘Plea for the Planet’, was shown to students to trigger their thoughts, ideas, and their roles in saving the planet. The community then came together to discuss parts of the video that appealed to them and describe ideas that they want to better understand.

Talk by Dr Erik Jahner on emotions, empathy, and memory

Dr Erik Jahner, from the University of California Riverside, then shared with students how emotions affect and impact learning. Through this sharing, students were able to develop a better understanding of how emotions, such as empathy, can influence their learning and memory. Students became more encouraged in accepting a diversity of ideas from other peers and studio participants, as part of a collective effort to deepen their understanding.

Within smaller break-out groups, students freely discussed ideas that they had regarding saving Earth. Students were able to embrace this opportunity to constructively use authoritative sources and improve each other’s ideas by voicing out questions that they can further explore. Unlike previous Design Studios where a fixed set of challenges were presented by the experts to the community for discussions, students in this Design Studio were allowed to exercise epistemic agency and generate big ideas that they wish to investigate and propose these idea or solutions to the whole community. The big ideas that emerged from discussions include suggestions about reducing plastic wastage, tackling problems about fast fashion, and solutions to reduce waste and to use electricity more efficiently.

To further inspire students to think about their big ideas, Hoe Yeen Nie, a journalist and ChannelNewsAsia (CNA) producer-director of the documentary ‘Climate Change: A Wicked Problem’, was introduced to the community as a main speaker of the Design Studio. Yeen Nie shared her insights and experiences of documenting plastic wastes in Singapore and how everyone can play a part in reducing their plastic consumption. Students were curious in wanting to know more about the situations in various aspects of combating wastage in Singapore, something which students may not be readily exposed to, as they keenly sought information from Yeen Nie about ideas and problems that they want to further investigate about. Students then broke up into smaller groups, where they continued and focused their discussions based on the sharing, to develop a team statement relevant to their selected topics of interests and to continue improving on their ideas.

Students are encouraged to think deep and produce a team statement by the end of the Design Studio

Second Day

Text analytics used on various topics in the Knowledge Forum

Students were given some time to consolidate their findings before developing their team statement. However, to broaden students’ thinking and trigger recall from the previous day’s discussions, researchers Leanne Ma, Monica Resendes, and Ahmad Khlanri, from the University of Toronto were invited to share with students text analytics that they had conducted based on the students’ existing Knowledge Forum posts. These analytical insights provided students with the opportunity to view and compare emerging ideas across other groups. Students were able to identify gaps in their current knowledge and decide whether certain words could encourage further research to determine their understanding of topics. As a result, students became responsible for their own learning and were able to set more objectives to aid their group in achieving their team goals.

Students then continued to work on developing their team statements, where they exchanged diverse ideas based on their own understanding of the problem and generated plausible solutions. During this period, teachers and experts dropped by different breakout rooms to listen to and contribute ideas towards the ongoing discussions. By the end of the Design Studio, the students managed to design, create, and develop memorable artifacts that include posters that encourage people to reduce their plastic consumption, placards and brochures that raise awareness of the pollution and accompanying solutions. One group even created pamphlets that encourage the gamification of the act of reducing single-use plastics, so that users can have fun while practicing the act of reducing plastic waste. The full list of artefacts can be found in this link.

Towards the end of the Design Studio, students reflected on the knowledge building activities and created rise-above notes to illustrate what they envisioned of the future on the topic of ‘Saving Planet, Saving Lives’ as individuals and as a community. Given the short duration of a two-day Design Studio, students performed admirably and demonstrated high levels of epistemic agency in identifying problems, working with diverse ideas, and rising to the occasion in presenting their team statement to the wider community of experts, teachers, and fellow peers. If you are interested to join such a knowledge building experience, be sure to look out for the notice of the next Design Studio!