Learning Communities 21

LEARNING COMMUNITIES 21

Contradictions in “Learning Communities”

Wolff-Michael Roth, University of Victoria

ABSTRACT: The concepts of “communities of practice” and “communities of learning,” used largely by anthropologists of everyday life and work, have been adopted by many educators not only as theoretical tools but also as referents for designing new learning environments. Unfortunately, though, in the transfer from their lives as theoretical concepts to their new lives as normative referents for educators, some fundamental elements of the theoretical framework have gone lost. In addition, everyday life outside and inside schools embody some fundamental differences, even when the latter is organized according to the metaphor of learning community. In this plenary talk, I articulate contradictions both in the theoretical concept of “communities of practice” and “learning communities” (as these are used by educational scholars) as well as those in the phenomenon of lived classrooms organized as learning communities. I use data from extensive research projects to provide concrete examples along with my theoretical elaborations. In particular, I will articulate the characteristic features in some innovative schools, where the learning communities have greater structural similarity with communities of practice outside schools than with other school-based learning communities.

KEYWORDS: activity theory, dialectics, contradiction, intersubjectivity

During the twentieth century, many societies have become increasingly individualistic. Psychological self-help books are filled with advice how to realize one’s personal goals, needs, and fulfillment without ever acknowledging that our identities, who we are with respect to ourselves and to others, arises from a deep and fundamental relation between self and other. There is a decreasing appreciation of the connection between individual and collective that makes it possible that an individual can engage in, for example, the esoteric pursuit of studying Bose-Einstein condensation in dilute gases (Nobel Award 2001 in physics) without having to worry about the dinner being on the table although he or she is not hunting, gathering, or farming. Our physicists do not have to worry about where to live or where to engage in studying Bose-Einstein condensation because others, including architects, masons, and crane operators construct the office building and laboratory where they engage in their pursuit. Further, they do not have to worry about the work of maintaining the instrumentation, buildings, and offices—the craftspeople in the machine shop, cleaners, and secretaries. They do not have to worry about finding, hunting, or growing and raising their food for dinner, because others do it for them; because of a division of labor, we all participate in and reproduce society, and thereby increase our own control over our individual lives. But all these activities allow the physicists to find out (learn) and communicate to others evidence for and characteristics of this new state of matter. And yet, despite the complete dependence of these physicists on the society-based division of labor, they receive acknowledgment individually. Thus, the press release for the 2001 Nobel Prize in physics states, among others that

[t]he condensates [Wolfgang Ketterle] managed to produce contained more atoms and could therefore be used to investigate the phenomenon further. Using two separate [Bose-Einstein condensates] which were allowed to expand into one another, he obtained very clear interference patterns, i.e. the type of pattern that forms on the surface of water when two stones are thrown in at the same time. (http://www.nobel.se/physics/laureates/2001/ press.html)

Here the individual is being celebrated without any acknowledgment of the structural relations—community and material resources—that make learning about Bose-Einstein condensates possible in the first place.

Recent work on the nature of knowledge shows that the natural social structures for the ownership of knowledge are communities of practice (Wenger 1998). Although they are everywhere and have been around for a long time—in fact, ever since humans began to control their environment through agriculture and exchange goods and services (Roth 2003)—educators have only recently begun to think about how to design communities that support learning. Characteristically, these educational efforts do not lead to sustained communities of learning, in part because the unit under consideration is the individual classroom disconnected from the remainder of school and society, which itself is rather heterogeneous in almost any respect. These classrooms are assembled for administrative purposes, generally with a homogeneous age structure, and frequently more or less homogeneous class, gender, and culture structure. Further, assessments of what students know and have learned, at the classroom level as well as in national and international comparisons (e.g., TIMSS and PISA), always focus on the individual rather than on the collective. They focus on what individuals produce separated from all social and material (tools, computers) resources that normally are available to students in their classrooms, people in society, or the Nobel-winning physicists in my opening example. That is, there are some deep contradictions between communities of practice that have historically evolved and the design and study of communities as seats of knowing in educational contexts. In my view, these contradictions arise from a deep misunderstanding of the nature of communities and of the relation between individual and collective.

This paper is designed to articulate an understanding of communities of practice that affords collective and individual learning. To make my case, I advance in two parts. First, I provide a detailed ethnographic case study of one community, where many people enact environmental concerns, and where, school and village life came to interpenetrate one another—I mark some of the contrasts with normal, pervasive school experiences. Here we have an example of a community of learners, a learning community. Second, I draw on recent sociocultural-historical psychological and sociological theories to articulate the many forms of a dialectic relation between individual and collective, which is absent in much of educational research and practice. There is therefore a contradiction between the conceptual foundations of the notion of community of learners and how the notion comes to be used in (Western) educational practice.

A Community of Learners, A Learning Community

One of my projects is concerned with science and science learning in my community, primarily focusing on environmentalism both as everyday activity and as context for school science. My doctoral student Stuart Lee, a trained microbiologist, has become a practicing member of an environmentalist group that attempts to change policy and people’s practices pertaining to the environmental health of Hagan Creek within the community of Central Saanich, where I am also a resident (Roth and Lee 2002). As part of my contribution to the project, I taught science to several seventh-grade classes at Central Saanich Middle School, where students generated knowledge that they contributed to the community through their exhibits at an open-house event organized by the environmentalists (e.g., Roth 2002b). The environmentalist group, students, the members of the Water Advisory Task Force, environmental stewards, farmers, and other people in the community learn science as they take Hagan Creek and Hagan Creek watershed health as the object of their activities, which often concerns the sometimes-severe problems with quantity and quality of water that threatens Central Saanich.

Village Context

Central Saanich is located on a peninsula in British Columbia, and, in part, in the Hagan Creek watershed. This part of the country is a pristine rural area on the Northwest Coast of the American continent (Figure 1), which has been colonized during the mid-nineteen hundreds. In Central Saanich and the watershed as a whole, water has been a problem for many years. Despite being located on the Northwest Coast, Central Saanich has a relatively dry climate (about 850 millimeters of precipitation per year) with hot dry summers and moderately wet winters. Concomitant with the climate, recent developments have exacerbated the water problem. Farmers have straightened the local creeks (Figure 2) thereby decreasing the amount of water retained in the soil available for filtering into and supplying the aquifer. At the same time, the farmers draw on the creek and groundwater during the dry summer months, further increasing the pressure on the valuable resource. Other residents have individual wells that draw on the aquifers. Their water is biologically and chemically contaminated during the dry period of the year so that they drive five kilometers to the next gas stations to get useable water (Figure 3). Urbanization and the related increase in impervious surfaces (pavement), losses of forest cover throughout the watershed and along the stream banks, losses of wetlands and recharge areas (e.g., Figure 2), and the loss of natural stream conditions further worsen the water problem.

In addition to the decreasing amounts, the water has been affected by human activity in qualitative ways as well. Storm drains and ditches channel rainwater—along with the pollutants of suburbia, lawn chemicals and car leakage—into Hagan Creek and its tributaries and away from these newly developed areas. The community of Central Saanich introduced an industrial park to the watershed, which is carefully contained within a four-block boundary. The drains of its machine shops and biotechnology labs empty into a ditch (affectionately called “stinky ditch”), which in turn, empties into Hagan Creek. To increase its potential to carry away water in a rapid manner, the creek itself has been deepened and straightened, and much of the covering vegetation has been removed, thereby increasing erosion and pollution from the surrounding farmers’ fields. These physical changes have led to increased erosion and silt load in the wet winter months, and are responsible for low water levels and high water temperatures during the dry summer months when (legal and illegal) pumping for irrigation purposes taxes the creek.

Environmentalism as Salient Activity in the Community

An environmental group, the “Hagan Creek~Kennes Watershed Project,” arose from the concerns about water quality. The actions of the group include monitoring water quantity and quality or contributing the rewriting of community policies related to Hagan Creek, the watershed, and the quality and quantity of water. The group created and actively promotes a stewardship program, builds riffle structures in the stream to increase cutthroat trout habitat, builds fences designed to protect the riparian areas (Figure 4), and monitors the number of cutthroat trout in different parts of the creek. Other activities include replanting riparian areas for increased shading to result in a lowering of water temperature more suitable for fish. The environmentalists engaged in educational activities, which includes giving presentations throughout the community or assisting children in their Hagan Creek-related investigations. The members of the project often succeed in bringing diverse groups of people and organization together to bring about changes to the watershed in general and Hagan Creek in particular. Thus, in one instance, the organization achieved to bring together many people and agencies for a creek rejuvenation project:

Representatives from the Peninsula Agricultural Commission; the Hagan Creek~Kennes Watershed project; three local farmers; the Ministry of Agriculture Food and Fisheries; the Ministry of Sustainable Resource Management; the Land Reserve Commission’ the Island Farmer’s Alliance; the Department of Fisheries and Oceans; Agriculture Canada; and the District of Central Saanich banded together to support the Lower Hagan Creek Drainage and Fisheries Habitat Restoration project.

What they did is nothing short of astonishing. They restored approximately half a kilometre of creek in one week.

“It was fabulous to see so many people, so many agencies able to take on a project of this size, ad for all of them to agree. It shows that these kinds of solutions are viable—that we can do it,” said Misty McDuffy, project coordinator. (Lavin, 2002, p. B1)

In this description, we recognize different activity systems involving the water from Hagan Creek specifically and in the watershed more generally. Water is used for the activities of farming and raising cattle; the creek is used for disposing fluids, recreation (horseback riding, mountain-biking cycling, hiking); and it is the object of engaging in environmentalism or stewardship. These activities are associated with particular motives, emotions, and motivations; the knowledgeability of any individual or group becomes visible in and through their participation. Environmentalism in particular is characterized by a social motive; its adherents enact part of what they understand to be a collective responsibility toward sustainability of life in this part of the world, and in the world more generally. They are willing to expend individual efforts in the service of a common good. But in producing changes in the creek, community bylaws, or farming and recreational practices, they also produce their own knowledgeability, and with it, they produce and reproduce themselves as environmentalists.

Environmentalism in its engaged but non-aggressive forms appears to be an ideal context for learning by participating in something that is of value to the village at large; learning happens as individuals participate in it. In fact, learning is observable in the form of changing participation in the local community, which is not constant but changing. Participation is changing people, individually and collectively, and it is changing the world. Participation in environmentalism appears to me an ideal context for students to become engaged and responsible citizens in general, and for becoming knowledgeable in relevant academic disciplines. Introducing environmentalism in school science is easy, for every now and then, a newspaper article features the work of this group—such as the one from which the preceding quote was taken. It is with these newspaper articles that I have been beginning the science units at the local middle school, particularly an article that calls for the community to contribute to the currently available knowledge and direct actions to understand and change the health of the Hagan Creek watershed.

Students Produce Representations of Hagan Creek for the Community

Given the urgency and importance of the water problems in Central Saanich, it was easy to convince the principal and a few teachers at the middle school to participate in a study where students would learn science by investigating the Hagan Creek watershed. I offer interested teachers to coteach a unit with them, which means that we take collective responsibility for planning, enacting, and evaluating the curriculum.

Once introduced to the newspaper articles featuring the problems of the Hagan Creek watershed, and feeling addressed by the environmentalists’ invitation to the community, the children’s interests are sparked by their desire to help. This desire is further fueled when the leader of the environmentalists comes to class to talk in person about the salient issues. Students immediately volunteer to clean up the creek and to investigate its various facets. They design and conduct their own investigations at different parts of Hagan Creek, which they ultimately report, upon my suggestion, to the community during the annual open-house event organized by the environmentalists. The idea underlying these lessons is to put students in a situation where they become active citizens who contribute to community life.