Of two contrasting philosophies that underpin openness in education and what that entails

From the conclusion: The ultimate question is a normative one: Which way do we want that openness in education to go? That question concerns educational resources, open educational practices and what other forms the educational system may spawn. For ultimately, we as stakeholders, in the learning of our children and grandchildren, in the professional development and Bildung of ourselves, should get the educational systems that we want, including appropriate forms of openness therein. Every individual then should decide for herself or himself to what extent this requires education as a public good and to what extent education as a private good, that is, as a commodity subject to market forces. It should not come as a surprise that we side with the humanitarian elaboration of openness. Indeed, we feel that governments as guardians of the public space should actively get involved in promoting this kind of openness, indeed, much as Delors in 1996 advocated for education as a whole.

Students’ Use of Knowledge Resources in Environmental Interaction on an Outdoor Learning Trail

This study examined how students leveraged different types of knowledge resources on an outdoor learning trail. We positioned the learning trail as an integral part of the curriculum with a pre- and post-trail phase to scaffold and to support students’ meaning-making process. The study was conducted with two classes of secondary two students. We coded two groups’ discourse to examine the use of knowledge resource types in the meaning-making process in an outdoor learning setting: contextual resource, new conceptual resource, prior knowledge resource, as well as the relationship among these knowledge resource types. Next, we also examined environmental interaction and integration in the students’ use of these knowledge resource types. Analysis showed that contextual resources are chiefly instrumental in fostering students’ capacity to harness new conceptual resource and to activate prior knowledge resource in interacting with and integrating the outdoor learning environment in the meaning-making process.