What is a learning community, really?
What has to shift for a group of learners to become a learning community? What is different about a school for which this shift takes first priority?
Let’s step back a little bit to think about what each of these words means. As many educators and theorists have proposed, a useful way to think of learning is as the construction of knowledge. With what we already know in hand, we then build new structures that represent and contain new knowledge. When we learn in community, we do this work together.
Like “communication,” the word community is rooted in the idea of sharing; in community, individuals are not independent, but interdependent. So the new structures of meaning that arise in a learning community come from the contributions of each person within the community, and the interpolation of each person’s ideas with those of the ideas of others. Learning is both an individual and social process, and the ultimate goal is enhancing both an individual’s learning and that of the group. To enact this, we prioritize discourse because that’s how we make this collaborative thinking visible. And we prioritize social norms that support learning in community.
Sometimes, at Long-View, it feels like prioritizing community is just part of the water – one of our core assumptions, after all, is that “Learning is more powerful when it occurs as a community endeavor.” At other times, we notice that we need to call more attention to the practices that make learning in community possible. While we usually think more of practices connected to discourse and thinking in this context, in a recent instance, we realized a need to focus more on how we care for physical spaces – because they so directly impact the way we function as a learning community.
Noticing that a decline in our habits of re-setting learning spaces at the end of blocks had dovetailed with an uptick in trash left around the areas where we eat lunch at the local park, teachers discussed approaches to the problem in one of our many informal meetings after school. Some were tempted to “bring down the hammer,” as one teacher laughingly suggested. But we quickly realized that we needed to bring the problem back to our learning community, so that we could create solutions together.
Campfire, where we meet in mixed groups each morning, provided a venue. As we do each day, we greeted every person by name, and then opened the conversations. We projected a choice photograph recently snapped at the park and posed a few questions. By the end of the process, it was pretty easy to see the consensus around several key ideas. But what was really remarkable about the principles that emerged was how applicable they were to the work of making not only physical, but intellectual and social space for the work of learning in community. Here are a few key examples – written in the context of caring for physical spaces, but relevant far beyond:
In a learning community, we:
Support and challenge each other to learn.
Care about each other.
Make the daily work of learning a social construct, so as to support higher levels of learning and opportunities to grow in regards to collaboration, communication, critical thinking, and creativity.
Shared spaces are also cared for, so we leave rooms cleaner than we found them.
Do it for the community.
Clean up after self.
Make the time.
We lead by example.
We are in charge of ourselves.
We hold each other accountable.
Feedback is given (clearly and kindly; say what you need) and received.
In the process of re-committing to caring for shared spaces, we needed to ask, “How do we want to be together?” We found answers by valuing the contributions of each person, prioritizing conversation, giving and taking feedback, and always keeping in mind our accountability to each other: the core practices of learning in community.