Humanistic knowledge-building communities

The goal of humanistic education is to help people become more open to experience, creative and self-directed. The humanistic movement, with its person-centred approach, emerged in full force during the American Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. One of the major developments that came out of person-centred pedagogy is the encounter group. Knowledge-building communities aim to advance the collective knowledge of a community through dialogue. Knowledge-building communities in classrooms were developed to simulate the types of activities and practices that real knowledge workers carry out. The belief underlying Humanistic Knowledge-Building Communities is that personal growth and shared development of ideas can co-exist and that they work together in exciting new ways. Person-centredness adds a new perspective to building knowledge in the classroom or online. In the words of Carl Rogers: “The most socially useful learning in the modern world is the learning of the process of learning, a continuing openness to experience and incorporation into oneself of the process of change”.