The Inseparability of Identity and Knowledge Construction in Humanistic Knowledge Building Communities

This research builds on the idea that learners’ identities and the knowledge they advance are inseparable. Our aim is to examine how fostering learners’ identities can shape the way they view knowledge, suggesting that instructional environments should attend to identity development as they should to epistemic goals. In this paper, we first explicate the theoretical grounds underlying the inseparability argument. Next, we describe the special design of a learning environment, called a humanistic knowledge building community, to explain how the interconnectedness of identities and knowledge can be supported to become an intentional facet of the knowledge building endeavor. Our findings and the resultant conceptualization extend broad views of learning that consider ways-of-knowing and being as intertwined, to show how the actual ideas that learners advance are also deeply entrenched with their ways-of-knowing and being. Such accounts have been described in learning sciences literature, but have not been empirically documented.