Knowledge producing schools
I am working on restoring stuff from the excellent collection of materials Trudy Graham had assembled. You can find some of the publications via Google scholar in the interim.
The notion arose for me when computers first began to find their way into schools. Vendors saw schools as an important link to build the home market (yes! that long ago). One of their "improve" sells was about improving access to information. Schools and students were positioned as consumers of ideas/information, knowledge.
I thought this was such a silly idea I began to wonder about inverting the idea, i.e. schools as producers of useful, serious knowledge. At the time I thought it might offer something of a solution for the middle years of schooling. At that time Deakin was primarily a provider of distabnce education courses. I was working with a student one evning over the phone and discussing this idea. She was a primary teacher. When I suggested the possible suitability of this approach for middle school she interjected loudly. "No! That's wrong! It would be perfect for primary schools. We collect huge amounts of data. We just don't do anything with it".
It took a move to central Queensland and a meeting with Trudy that the penny dropped. She was the principal of a primary school producing knowledge for the school, local community and beyond. There is a little more detail in the enactments chapter I wrote in 2011.
Trudy put together a terrific resource documenting the work and resources that was done under this umbrella term. She took the site down a while back, a rebranding move for her. My plan is to restore it on this site. Don't hold your breath.
In recent work Lester-Irabinna Rigney coined the same term to describe work he is doing in critical indigenous studies: Rigney, L.-I. (2020). Aboriginal child as knowledge producer. In B. Hokowhitu, A. Moreton-Robinson, L. T. Smith, C. Andersen, & S. Larkin (Eds.), Routledge handbook of critical indigenous studies (1st ed., pp. 578-590). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429440229
There are many instances of this kind of work going on in schools, like the Billy Madison Project in Iowa. Sometimes the work has democracy associated with it, i.e. kids have a genuine opportunity to set agendas and do work that matters to them, to the school or to the local community.