ABSTRACT
Knowledge creation and the educational market place On the first Saturday of every month, down by the wharves of Sydney Harbour, there is a Growers’ Market. Fresh produce, cheeses, olives, oils, fine fruit and vegetables, organic meats, flowers, tiny cakes and tarts are all set out for those who eschew the banality of the supermarket shelves to sample and buy. People meet, dogs investigate, coffee is drunk in Sydney’s balmy weather. Regulars not only buy, they discuss, argue and debate. Points of view are exchanged as much as goods and services; some conversations commence where they left off the month before. This is the market place, the Agora, that Nowotny, Scott and Gibbons (2003) so powerfully evoke as a metaphor for knowledge formation in contrast to the disciplined sites of production so characterised by university faculties and government sponsored research centres. The Agora, that ancient market place was such a place, where it was not only goods that were traded but was also a site where political, commercial, administrative and social activity occurred. Ideas were as central and vital to the Agora as the commodities that were there to be bought and sold. Education, and its emblematic heart, the school, is similarly a site where ideas are developed and traded and where professional knowledge is developed.
