I have been reflecting on the discussion around the suggestion that the
object of xmca is 'community-building' and tentatively ofer a perspective
from our work in schools that may - or may not - be seen as relevant. But
first, my understanding of what it takes to have a community.
There are several ways of understanding the term 'community'. One version
would be a religious community, which members join by choice; here the
community exists in order for its members to engage in practices according
to shared values. A second version would be the sort of community of
practice envisaged by Engestrom in the health centre context or by Lave
and Wenger in the case of midwives or tailors, where the activity in which
the members variously engage is what coordinates them in a community.
Third, there is the community constituted by people who happen to live and
work in the same place, as in a village community which is relatively
isolated and not made up of commuters to or from elsewhere. Jay Lemke
recently wrote about becoming a village, using the village as a metaphor
for individual identity formation, but the village community is itself
constantly developing/becoming as members join through birth or
immigration and others leave.
Although the village is different from the first two types of community in
the sense that membership is not (usually) a matter of choice but of
birth, in all three examples what makes the community is not the effort to
create it; rather, the community is a by-product or outcome of the
work-related and other action-related relationships into which its members
enter in the practices in which they engage together.
Classes of students are not communities in any of the ways sketched above.
Their members are not there by choice, nor do they enter a pre-existing
community, as in the village. The question facing a teacher, therefore,
is how to create a community - if this is what s/he believes would be
beneficial for all concerned. One strategy that is often used is that of
mutual self-interest: if the classroom is to be a congenial place to be,
members will do well to agree to abide by rules and conventions of
appropriate behavior. A second strategy is to emphasize the common goal
of learning and to encourage various types of collaboration, as in a
“community of learners”. In our collaborative action research group,
however, we have taken a somewhat different approach, which we recognize,
post-hoc, to most closely resemble the Engestrom model. As teachers, we
have focused on the ‘object’ of our activity, seeing this not as learning,
but as making and improving artifacts of various kinds. Sometimes these
artifacts are material objects - models such as elastic-powered vehicles
that embody functions that need to be understood in order for them to be
constructed so that they ‘work’. In other cases they are solutions to
problems arising in the life of the classroom, for example, procedures for
conducting discussions that are not teacher dominated or planning a
display/demonstration of work on some topic for an audience of parents or
other students. Sometimes the artifact is more theoretical, for example
an explanation of historical events or of phenomena considered
scientifically. In all these cases, the emphasis is on improving the
object being worked upon in what we think of as a collaborative attempt at
knowledge building in action. It is this shared goal that encourages an
inquiring stance and the respectful consideration of alternative points of
view and that leads to dialogue, both spoken and written, in which both
individual and collective understanding is enhanced. And, in our view, it
is these ways of working that most effectively create and sustain the
‘community’, particularly in the culturally and socially diverse
classrooms that are the norm in Toronto, as in many large cities.
This is, of course, a somewhat idealized account. Not all activities are
so clearly focused on an ‘improvable object’; there are occasions when
direct instruction in constituent tasks is considered necessary and others
in which skills of various kinds are practiced. There are also times
when ‘things fall apart’ - though these often become the ‘improvable
object’ for discussion in class meetings. Currently, we are exploring
ways of including the students as co-researchers, hoping in this way to
help them to develop and use a ‘meta’ stance to the practices in which we
engage and to enable us all to understand what facilitates a class
functioning as a ‘community of inquiry’. In the process, we hope to
discover how important a role the ‘improvable object’ and the knowledge
building involved in working on it plays in the creation and sustaining of
the community.
Perhaps there are ways in which these attempts throw light on
participation in the ‘xmca community’?
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Tue Mar 07 2000 - 17:54:11 PST