In this chapter we explore the teaching of ancient history in an Australian junior secondary school classroom, focusing particularly on how the knowledge of government in city-states in Ancient Greek are developed. We show that an important part of knowledge building in ancient history involves ‘factoring out’ the meanings which are condensed in technical terms – characterised informally as ‘flexi-tech’ because of the weakly classified nature of the terms. Throughout two history lessons, the teacher guides the students to think ‘critically’ about how types of government are categorised. We show that while Spartan government is referred to in different pedagogic materials as a monarchy, an oligarchy, or a military state, as the lessons unfold the teacher repositions Spartan government as a complex structure – comprising elements of different kinds, including specific elements of democracy. Our analysis focuses on how this repositioning is achieved and what kind of ‘critical thinking’ is involved.

In this chapter, we explore how Mandarin Chinese is used to describe and taxonomise phenomena in history discourse. While Systemic Functional Linguistics has had a long tradition of studying history discourse, particularly in English and Spanish, the focus has been on historical events and their impact. We show in our study that building knowledge of history also involves reporting what things were like in the past. We analyse a pedagogic text describing the development of handicrafts during the period of the Western Han dynasty (206 BC – AD 24), a particularly prosperous period in Chinese history. We approach the identification of language resources from a ‘tri-stratal’ and ‘top-down’ perspective, taking into account threefold aspects of meaning-making, including the static knowledge structure in the subject area, the language resources organised in the unfolding of the discourse, and the grammatical resources organised in the clause. We reveal that each meaning-making level has its unique characteristics in construing description and taxonomisation.

The development of cognitive skills depends on designing curricula based on theories of learning. A knowledge-building perspective utilizes technology to enable students, teachers, and administrators to become active participants in knowledge creation. One of the most important objectives in building knowledge is to establish connections among key concepts, key representations, and real-world contexts. Building knowledge should be a productive struggle so it is helpful to create learning environments that appeal to students’ interests. The ICAP learning theory predicts that learning should increase as students progress from passive to active to constructive to interactive engagement. There is evidence to support problem-based learning in which the curriculum focuses on solving problems in class. Self-regulated learning is promoted by teaching students to formulate goals for self-monitoring and to evaluate their performance. Although teachers should be aware of students’ strengths and limitations, their ultimate goal should be to empower their students to make their own decisions for regulating learning

Undergraduate research programs in Australia’s 43 universities emerged in the mid-2000s. The last decade saw undergraduate research (UR) evolve to become a major force in Australian higher education thanks to a range of national and regional projects and initiatives, which aim to integrate undergraduate researchers at all levels and in various functions of the university. The achievements of Australian undergraduate students and the benefits of inquiry-based learning are now well documented and widely reported beyond Australia. The pinnacle of this development is the establishment of the Australasian Council of Undergraduate Research, whose mission is to promote and advance the spread of UR in Australasia. This chapter presents the multiple facets and milestones of this journey.

This chapter describes a pedagogy whereby students learn how to engage in collaborative creative processes similar to professional knowledge workers. The five themes of knowledge building are (1) Community knowledge: students work together to advance the knowledge of the entire community; (2) Idea improvement: all ideas can be continually revised in an ongoing creative process; (3) Dialogue: community knowledge building involves public discourse along the lines of professional discourse in a scientific community; (4) Constructive use of authoritative information: students always need to work with authoritative information, even while they are creating new knowledge. New knowledge creation must be coherent with what is already known; (5) Epistemic artifacts: knowledge building is more effective if learners create externally sharable things. The chapter describes the authors’ influential Knowledge Forum application, one of the first networked collaborative idea-generation tools.