Co-creating knowledge - developing an on the spot epistemic practice in teaching

Educational systems around the world strive to customize methods and practices to fit both rapidly changing societal requirements and cultural changes. Educations are expected to deliver a highly skilled workforce and the term ’employability’ is among the parametres that are used in the quality assessment of the work done at universities and other higher education institutions. And so the aim of education becomes an ever changing fixpoint. Preparing students for becoming 21th century knowledge workers, then, entails preparing them for an unknown future. Critical reflection, independent thinking, creativity and a strong sense of navigating in the unforeseen are among the skills needed of the individual student. And – you could state – their teachers as well. The paper introduces an ’on the spot’ epistemic practice that combines basic principles of qualitative research with the practice of teaching and learning. Focus is on learning processes as they take place in the shared space between students and teachers. In some ways the methods suggested in the paper suspends the classical concepts of teaching and replaces them with a structured generative dialogue within which knowledge exchange and knowledge production takes place.