ACADEMIC STRATEGIES

Community Learning

COMMUNITY LEARNING

The term community here refers to the social context of students and their environs. A community is a group of people with a common purpose, shared values, and agreement on goals. It has powerful qualities that shape learning. A community has the power to motivate its members to exceptional performance. Community can set standards of expectation for the individual and provide the climate in which great things happen. These qualities characterize conditions that matter for student success in college. Higher education is replete with descriptions of communities—research communities, learning communities, communities of practice. A real community, however, exists only when its members interact in a meaningful way that deepens their understanding of each other and leads to learning. Many equate learning with the acquisition of facts and skills by students; in a community, the learners—including faculty—are enriched by collective meaning-making, mentorship, encouragement, and an understanding of the perspectives and unique qualities of an increasingly diverse membership.

Society should care about learning in community for two primary reasons. First, learning is a social process that works best in a community setting, thus yielding the best use of societal resources. Despite multiple theories about how people learn, they agree on one point: the critical role of interaction. In particular, social cognitive learning theory argues for a rich environment in which students and faculty share meaningful experiences that go beyond the one-way information flow characteristic of typical lectures in traditional classrooms.  Second, learning in community will have an important role in preparing students for their work-life to come. College graduates must succeed in professional environments that require interactions with other people. Some companies today call for graduates with different perspectives to collaborate across traditional disciplinary and business lines.  Indeed, because of the volume and volatility of information today, as well as the proliferation of information-sharing mechanisms, knowledge may be seen as vested in a distributed network across communities of practice, not in individuals.  In other words, community-centered education will help prepare graduates to live and work in a world that requires greater collaboration. (www.educause.edu)