Dear Diane and everybody--
I just came from my class where my students asked me what is "community" in
the context of our class discussion of "a community of learners." My
operational definition was that in a classroom, community occurs when kids
are genuinely interested in listening to each other. Then the discussion was
led to what makes kids listen to each other and how to facilitate it by
designing learning activities and guidance in certain ways.
At some point, I decided to introduce a "dark side" of the community by
asking them if having a community is always good. My students could not
think of examples when community is a bad thing. I asked the students what
if I pick up a shy student in the class and invite the other students to
make jokes on him/her. My students agree that it may create a community but
a bizarre one. Then I told them about Tim Lensmire's book "When children
write" where the teacher (Tim himself) successfully created a community of
writers and the kids used their writing to make fun on unpopular kids in the
classroom. That led my students to the issues of control, safety, and
inclusion.
We came to roughly 4 archetypes of communities in our discussion:
Family
Village (or neighborhood, "it takes a village to raise a child")
Classroom (e.g., a community of learners)
Professional community (something like a community of practice)
(there are, of course, more archetypes of a community, e.g., community as
"motherland" or community as "us vs. them")
Community as "family" puts its emphasis on caring. Community as "village"
puts its emphasis on solidarity (see Jim Gee on solidarity). Community as
"classroom" puts its emphasis on collective inquiry. Community as "practice"
puts its emphasis on productive specialized interdependent relations.
Traditional schooling puts often students in position of indifference or
competition with each other. Emerging communal properties of the classroom
(e.g., friendships, cliques, alliances) are often indifferent to the
instruction and unguided.
That was what we discussed. Just sharing....
Re-reading Diane's critique of community, I see that she talks about
"oppositional community" that builds its solidarity in opposition to
something that they do not like (e.g., homeless people) but I guess that
this is not by any means only possible critique of the notion of community.
In the last century (I mean still the 19th century), progressive people were
very vocal in critisizing (traditional) communities for their backwardness
(e.g., see Marx's famous phrase about "idiocy of village life"), for
following traditions and being too conservative and rigid, for being too
situated and local, for suppressing dissent and dissidents, for resistance
to innovations, for prejudices, for superstitions, for disrespecting
individual rights, for irrationality, for corruption, for nepotism, for lack
of productivity, for particularity, for uniqueness, for patriarchy, for
rigid hierarchy, for lack of democracy.
To address the vices of traditional community, new ways of forming relations
were/are called forward based on modernity, rationality, individualism,
totalitarism, democracy, propaganda, mass media, information, education,
literacy, basic skills, progress, industry, mental hospitals, structuralism,
learning disability, diagnostics, exams, accountability, universalism,
liberalism, conservatism, balance, decontextualization, alienation,
standardization, positivism, scientism, technocratism, computerization,
Internetization, intellectualism, gigantism, globalism, monopoly,
competition, marketism, consumerism, massism (this is my term for treating
people as "mass" or headcounts). Now being fed up with the treatment, we
seem to be again at a fork of what is next to try.
Dialogism? Negotiation? Diversity? Queerness? Feminism? Carnival? Critical
thinking? Multiculturalism? Postmodernism? Ecology? Self-organization?
Emerging processes? Social construction? Contextualism? Situated learning?
Networking? Afterschool programs? Informal learning? ZPD? (if I wrote this
message in 60s I'd add many other option like psychedelic drugs, kibbutz,
small communes but I guess they have been mainly rejected by now).
What do you think?
Eugene
PS After re-reading my message, I came to a conclusion that its genre is
between a flow of, tired after teaching, consciousness and millennium
prophecy :-)
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Diane Hodges [mailto:dhodges@ceo.cudenver.edu]
> Sent: Monday, March 06, 2000 8:42 AM
> To: ematusov@UDel.Edu
> Cc: xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
> Subject: Re: RE: more myopia
>
>
> ematusov@udel.edu writes:
> >Hi Diane--
> >
> >Can you elaborate on the following please,
> >
> >> In the Butler/Scott edited "Feminists theorize the political" - one of
> >the
> >> authors there (afraid the name has escaped me lobes) wrote that the
> >model
> >> of community
> >> belongs to a patriarchal ideal, a way of keeping control by creating
> >> myths of utopias where none can exist so long as a community is based
> >> on some sort of faux shared practice/identity.
> >
> >Why? Can you give an example, please? How was "shared" understood?
>
>
> hi eugene - in larger urban areas, a lot of white middle class folks are
> creating their own "communities" within the larger neighbourhoods as a way
> to protect
> particular values: this pretty much comes down to eliminating the sight of
> the homeless folks, busing homeless youth miles out of the area being
> protected as the "community"
> and ensuring that hetero-values dominate in social activity for kids, and
> so on;
> it is a form of policing, protecting their community, it is much like the
> "gated community" practice that is burdgeoning in north american cities;
>
> the agenda of these communities is to protect the dominant groups
> (whites/middle class/hets) from those who threaten the dominant values
> (which is where i felt obliged to laugh to at the idea of a majority
> protecting the intereests of any minority) -
>
> what is "shared" in these contexts, and in the article by Murdoch and the
> book by Frazer and Lacy, is an ideology about values:
> communities of practice seem to me to function along the same lines,
> that certain ideologies must be accepted in order for the community to
> maintain its
> status/history of a community - it is the dominance of "traditions" that
> are
> designed to preserve practice, and so resist/prevent change to practice.
>
> >
> >It sounds very interesting! Did the author provide an alternative notion
> >of
> >community?
> >
> i wish i had the book, i could refer to Murdoch's text more closely, but i
> think her interest was more in explicating how community functions best as
> an ideal
> and how it fails in the everyday - i think at the heart of these critiques
> is the ideal of homogeneity - and how this is is provoked through concepts
> or "shared practice/activity" -
>
> something that concerns me is the question of belonging, that a community
> is a site where people seek to belong; however if the underlying success
> of any community's function is through normativity and homogeneity, then
> belonging
> becomes a work of conforming, not joining, and the sharing-in-practice
> becomes
>
> a work of contorting, not engaging.
>
> i am not sure an alternative addresses the overarching acceptance of the
> ideal of community, so much as there is aneed to consider more closely
> what is being applauded in the ideal.
>
> thanks eugene, and nate, for your nudges.
> diane
> >
> >
>
>
>
> **********************************************************************
> :point where everything listens.
> and i slow down, learning how to
> enter - implicate and unspoken (still) heart-of-the-world.
>
> (Daphne Marlatt, "Coming to you")
> ***********************************************************************
>
> diane celia hodges
>
> university of british columbia, centre for the study of curriculum and
> instruction
> ==================== ==================== =======================
> university of colorado, denver, school of education
>
> Diane_Hodges@ceo.cudenver.edu
>
>
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