Situated in Singapore’s Primary 4 Social Studies curriculum, the ‘Coolie House Design@Chinatown’ project is one of Nan Chiau Primary School’s ‘FutureSchool’ projects. The project takes on a context-specific situation, role-playing game that places students in the Singapore of the 1930s, an era of the influx of Chinese immigrants.
Since the design of the project is collaborative, it has allowed students to both deepen and widen their ideas and concepts towards creating meaningful and useful knowledge. In the model lesson, presenters would share on how they have adopted the knowledge building approach to build students’ epistemic repertoire. When students are consistently challenged by knowledge building work that foregrounds the importance of human creativity, collaboration, and design, and the teachers ably facilitate students’ use of appropriate epistemic resources, it is possible for students to develop some form of coherent epistemological beliefs (Elby & Hammer, 2010). The presenters would also share the effective strategies they have used for facilitating student discourse and advancing their knowledge in a knowledge-building classroom through the ‘Coolie House Design@Chinatown’ project. They would also introduce a collaborative online platform, ‘Idea Garden’, and how it has facilitated students’ learning in a knowledge building environment.
