Things that matter: Student engagement and technologies in knowledge-producing schools

Abstract

Student engagement has long been recognized as a key contributor to short and long term educational success. This chapter explores an approach to improving the engagement of diverse and at risk learners developed within a framework known as the knowledge-producing schools initiative. Conceptualizing students as active, not passive, and as the producers not the consumers of valued, valid, community based knowledge, the knowledge-producing schools framework provides a mechanism for understanding technologies as one part of a much broader educational agenda concerned with fundamentally reconceptualising the processes and purposes of education.