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Teaching and Learning Outside of the Box

When we step into our roles as educators, too often we assume that our designs for learning must spell out a student's every move.

Whatever we do to control learning, less is probably better. Too often, learning in school becomes a separate-from-life activity that we direct, constrain, measure, and try to make as efficient as possible. In essence, we've put learning in a box.

Perhaps the most promising way out of that box is to create learning communities. Learning communities provide an informative lens through which we can see a new type of learning practice that is challenging for teachers and students.

Why is this practice so challenging? Because it identifies meaning making as a process students themselves must negotiate and control. It also locates the learning activities in settings more contextually rich than typical classrooms.

To give this new learning practice a chance, here are four things we should consider.

Rich Academic Tasks
By the time our students arrive in higher education classrooms, they have performed thousands of academic tasks, most of them characterized by low levels of cognitive complexity, designed and controlled by teachers, completed in pre-set time frames and evaluated according to pre-determined correct answers.

Under these conditions, a type of learning emerges that is not about community, and not much about the construction of meaning.

To support the kind of learning our college graduates need, we must create better tasks to organize their development around.

The learning task should pose an actual problem to be solved. If the stimulus we provide simply causes a quick memory response, then we probably do not have a task supporting a rich learning practice. Rather than the production of correct answers, a better goal might be to stimulate good investigative behavior.

For example, an important shift occurred for my psychology students when I gave them the opportunity to replicate for themselves experiments that previously I would have lectured about. With this richer task, they had to depend upon each other. The dialogue that developed gave me new insight into their thinking.

Another important element is the context for learning. We have a long history of sanitizing the work our students do. We routinely lift academic concepts from the cultural situations in which they naturally occur, focusing primarily on understanding that may be recorded correctly on tests.

Only recently have we begun to understand that context is more than a pedagogical nicety. When academic work is situated in an authentic way, students have a much richer opportunity to learn.

Why? Students get to see how real practitioners think, learn what tools are relevant and useful, and absorb the stories of actual practice. Consider, for example, students who are involved in a stream reclamation project or a neighborhood revitalization effort. They actually get to try on the practices around which their courses are organized.

Students learn from this collaboration and dialogue that there are many roles to be played in a complex work setting and that the knowledge required to accomplish the task is distributed among many players. In these settings, students learn that intelligence is more than what is stored in any single head. Knowledge-production is a community affair.

Responsibility for Self and Others
When diverse individuals in a classroom or work setting converge on a complex problem, they must negotiate ways to work together and take advantage of the skills and histories that each brings.

But such a gathering of individuals does not become a learning community simply because it is identified as a group and urged to work together.

The community forms as its members negotiate a situation that has not been preset for them. Maintaining the learning community may require a variety of contributions. Typical roles include peacekeeping, data collecting, record keeping, negotiating with others, and finding resources. During this process, individual identities may be shaped by the roles assumed and the reinforcement given.

The creation and maintenance of legitimate roles within the community and the support of those roles through dialogue and negotiation are foundations of group and individual responsibility.

Reflection
Within a learning community, a principal obligations of membership is to be self-conscious about the learning that is going on—for self and others. Such reflection may be simply a thoughtful, perhaps technical, consideration of two or more approaches or strategies.

Donald Schon's (1983) influential works dealing with how professional practitioners learn to do things illustrates that reflective activity is also imbedded within action. Reflection is done "on the fly" to better understand problematic situations that might arise.

We should not expect such reflection to occur automatically. Reflective action requires supportive dialogue, the gradual development of agency among learners, and the willingness to change our minds about the propositions that guide our action.

Unless communities of learners can pull this off, their practice is susceptible to all manner of outside influences that are all too willing to provide technical direction. Learning, as a result, is shoved back inside the box.

Knowing as doing
Finally, for learning communities to make complete sense, we need to understand the power of knowing as doing—the knowing of something within the context of participation, rather than as an end product of the action.

When we enter a community, our probability of success often increases because of the extended intelligence we now share within the group and the fact that our shared participation actually constitutes a way of exercising intelligence.

Fortunately, much knowing occurs even when learners are performing relatively minor tasks—if the task is legitimately connected to an important cultural activity.

Younger students can perform activities that do not require full expertise. But, in the process, they absorb the stories others tell, experience first-hand the intangibles of the practice, and generally ready themselves to assume progressively more central roles.

A Worthwhile Trade
Implementing and sustaining learning communities is not an easy thing to do. Doing so reflects a big change in our traditional way of doing things in the academy. However, all that we know and continue to find out about how people learn best indicates these communities are an effective structure to promote good learning.

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