Bounded Communities - Jared Frisby

Why it's important:

The typical teacher-to-student method of interaction doesn't really allow a sense of community to develop during a course, and bounded learning communities bring benefits such as:

• A social context for the material
• Students feel more connected within a community
• They can serve as a bridge between school and work environments

More authentic learning environments are created when communities are encouraged and supported.

Successful learning communities can accommodate surprising levels of diversity in safe and supportive environments that invite risk-taking, learner control, and agency.

Strategies and techniques:

Consider the developmental arc, from initial acquaintance and trust-building, through project work and skill development, and concluding with wind-down and dissolution of the community

Participants must 1) be engaged in a compelling purpose or project that draws them together, 2) have common access to a shared repertoire of resources and tools, and 3) maintain relationships through mutual engagement in trust-building activities.

Substantial supports for course-based communities can and should be designed ahead of time by the instructor, anticipating the learning and collaborative needs of students. There are seven features that seem to facilitate its creation:

• Shared goals
• Safe and supporting conditions
• Community identity
• Collaboration
• Respectful inclusion
• Progressive discourse toward knowledge building
• Mutual appropriation

Teachers must provide the infrastructure for interaction and work, model effective collaboration and knowledge construction, apply instructional strategies, supervise student activities, monitor and assess learning, troubleshoot and resolve problems, and establish trusting relationships with students.

Establishing a trusting relationship with the teacher is an important precondition for successful learning communities.

Teachers should model community participation skills and values.

The job aid for analyzing culture (page 12) has a number of tips to add culture to bounded learning communities, including identifying leaders, developing rituals, and noting people and language that are distinctive and valued.

There are a number of strategies presented to approach the seven features of learning communities:

• Shared goals - Build the course around projects and challenges that are authentic and meaningful to learners
• Safe and supporting conditions - Allow private discussion, train students and then transfer leadership to them, establish contingency plans to deal with technical issues, monitor community discussions to support as needed
• Community identity - Have learners create profiles, generate email reminders or updates, continually add fresh content
• Collaboration - Provide tools for communication and self-presenation, provide for different roles within teams and the community, develop a reward system that targets collaborative work
• Respectful inclusion - Have learners share stories on a particular theme, have learners collaborate on projects that require multiple perspectives, train teams to negotiate differences and assure full participation
• Progressive discourse toward knowledge building - Have different learners summarize the previous week's discourse and bring forward key points, involve learners in a progressive writing or product building project, invite experts to the community to share ideas and facilitate discussion
• Mutual approbation - Provide opportunities for each learn to be a mentor and a mentee, have learners share or rotate leadership roles within groups

Courses are not and should not be fully self-contained, closed systems. Rather, boundaries should be porous and sufficiently defined to establish a clear sense of community within, but flexible enough to accommodate outside resources, including people, information, and field interactions.

Technical skill acquisition is doubtless of value, but even more valuable is the ability to use a skill to solve an authentic problem.

My thoughts:

We have attempted to use bounded communities at work with mixed success. I think that the author's suggestions and warnings are very fitting. In cases where bounded learning communities worked well, the teachers and facilitators seemed to have used a plan similar to the one outlined in this article. In cases where these communities failed to reach their potential, many of these guidelines were not included. I think there are appropriate times to use blended learning communities and that they can greatly add to a learning experience. I also feel that there are times when blended learning communities aren't as useful.