This qualitative study explores how knowledge and concepts of knowledge are experienced in an undergraduate teacher education course that employs a community of enquiry pedagogy. As designer and facilitator of the course I engaged students in enquiries and enquiry-based activities to learn about art. Using an action-research approach I made changes to the course design in response to how it played out. The art of the Constitutional Court of South Africa was the focus of our study and students developed structured and logical ‘frameworks’ for analysing artworks as well as playing with laterally extending concepts such as art, justice, equality and humanity. The findings suggest that the dialogical and embodied practice of a community of enquiry pedagogy strongly influenced my students’ and my own awareness of knowledge as a creative and experiential opening up and as a companion to the equally valuable experience of not knowing. Teaching within this epistemological framework demands democratic and reflexive pedagogies such as the community of enquiry.

Knowledge sharing across domains is key to bringing down the cost of production and the time to market of products. This thesis is directed to improve the knowledge sharing capability of the present systems that use information and communication technologies. Systems for different domains have structures that are made up of concepts and relations with different semantic interpretations. Therefore, knowledge sharing across such domains becomes an issue. Knowledge sharing across multiple domains can be facilitated through a system that can provide a shared understanding across multiple domains. This requires a rigorous common semantic base underlying the domains across which to share knowledge.