Student-Generated Instructional Materials

Abstract

Student-Generated Instructional Materials, as the term implies, asks learners to provide objects that other students can use in their own learning. These objects (lessons, videos, questions, summaries) can become as important to the class as the teacher’s own work. Although well represented, this area has been largely overlooked, perhaps because it has lacked its own identifiable label and has been subsumed under the broad heading of student-generated materials. Yet Student-Generated Instructional Materials represents an exclusive area of student work, providing powerful evidence for how the responsibility for learning can be acquired by a community of learners. Examples reveal students building directly upon prior knowledge and developing independence, self-reliance, expertise, ownership, empowerment, inclusivity, and metacognition and transferring their understanding to new and potentially unfamiliar content. The popular contextualization of evidence-based practices as a prescribed “do this, don’t do that” list of actions raises deep concern, particularly in science education. Two dilemmas that warrant consideration are described.