Fostering growth orientations in students’ identities as knowledge builders

Fast-moving changes to society as part of the digital age are posing new educational challenges that require students to be flexible, adaptive, and growth-oriented. Humanistic knowledge building communities (HKBCs) are a growth promoting pedagogy, suitable to address these challenges. Yet, the way that students’ identities as knowledge builders are transformed remains undertheorized. In this study, we rise above existing frameworks of fixedness versus fluidity to elucidate how students develop growth orientations. Using a grounded approach, we examined a graduate course, coding 322 relevant utterances that were expressed by the course participants over the semester. This resulted in a five dimensional framework of fixedness versus growth that was used to describe the personal transformation of students within the HKBC. The changes that students made over time were shown to occur at statistically significant levels. This study suggests that learning communities should focus on the complementary nature of collective idea-advancement and personal growth promotion if they are to address the challenges of preparing students for life in a rapidly changing world.