Co-development patterns of knowledge, experience, and self in humanistic knowledge building communities

This study attends the learning sciences to the work of Carl Rogers and his person-centered therapy and education. Building on claims that knowledge building communities are idea-centered, as well as recent research in this area that has looked at learning holistically, we examine the notion of a ‘humanistic knowledge building community’ as an integration of idea-centered classroom knowledge building communities with Rogerian person-centeredness. We investigated an innovative course for graduate students in an educational technologies program that both inspired and informed this conceptualization. Our grounded theoretical approach combined with a microanalysis of one student revealed five patterns that knowledge, experience, and self can co-develop in a humanistic knowledge building community.