4 minute read
Learning communities: unlearning to teach, serenely
By Michaël Séguin // assistant professor at Saint Paul University in Ottawa
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Michaël Séguin is an assistant professor at the Providence School of Transformative Leadership and Spirituality at Saint Paul University in Ottawa. In his text, he shares a first in vivo experience of a learning community in the context of his teaching.
When I started my 2021 position at Saint Paul University, my department chair assigned me two course loads: one on leadership theories and the other on transformative leadership and learning communities. While it was clear to me what the first course was about (having studied sociology and management), the second was a mystery... Learning communities, but what a boring subject! And how do you teach "that", the leadership of learning communities, to twenty or so adults at the master's and doctoral levels?
So, I started to do my homework to understand the concept of the learning community and the trendier concept of the learning organization might refer to. My first surprise was to find that these concepts, popularized in the 1990s, invite a reversal of pedagogical perspective1: students (or employees) are no longer simply the recipients of knowledge developed by others, but the active producers of it. This reversal becomes possible precisely by creating learning communities, i.e., "groups of people engaged in intellectual interaction, for the purpose of learning2".
FOUR INGREDIENTS ARE NEEDED FOR A PEDAGOGICAL REVERSAL
As simple as this definition may seem at first, some people may even think that this is what is already being done in any classroom; it requires a combination of four ingredients to create the pedagogical reversal mentioned earlier3. First of all, it is necessary to consider learning as a collaborative process, a co-construction, made possible because each member of the group contributes to the knowledge or reinterprets what is proposed based on his or her experience. For such co-construction to be possible, the group must also agree on a common goal that its members agree on what they wish to learn together (whether the goal is instrumental; to develop as individuals or transformative, to change the world around them). For this learning to be meaningful, it must be particularly practical, in that the topics and issues addressed must be related to real problems that affect the daily lives of the group members and that challenge them on a personal level. Finally, their motivation will be greater if people are part of an authentic community, that is, a group of which they feel part of, where they can have an influence, where their concerns are taken seriously and where the presence of others creates emotional support. "Only then can a learning community be described as promoting "active learning over passive learning, cooperation over competition, and community over isolation"4 .
TRANSFORMATIVE LEARNINGS
With such a theoretical framework, it became impossible for me to give a lecture course. I had to find ways to reverse the top-down dynamic of knowledge transmission. During the first five weeks of the course, I recorded video capsules of about an hour that allowed us to review the concepts presented in the readings (learning communities, learning organizations, transformative learning, systems thinking and complex leadership). Our class time was no longer about transmitting the material, but about sharing it, critiquing the theories, articulating them and applying them to our lives. To accomplish this, students were given long periods of time in small groups (often 25 to 35 minutes) before moving to plenary sharing. These long periods of sharing were themselves aimed at transformative learning rather than informational learning5 .
1 On the idea of a learning community, one can consult Karen Littleton, Dorothy Miell & Dorothy Faulkner (dir.), Learning to Collaborate, Collaborating to Learn, New York, Nova Science Publishers, 2004. On the idea of a learning organization, one can consult Peter M. Senge, The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization, New York, Currency Doubleday, 2006. 2 K. Patricia Cross: "groups of people engaged in intellectual interaction for the purpose of learning", in "Why Learning Communities? Why Now?", About Campus, vol. 3, no 3, 1998, p. 4. 3 I am inspired here by the work of K. Patricia Cross, Idem, pp. 4-11; Roth Wolff-Michael et Yew-Jin Lee, "Contradictions in Theorising and Implementing Communities in Education", Educational Research Review, vol. 1, no 1, 2006, pp. 27–40; David W. McMillan et David M. Chavis, "Sense of Community: A Definition and Theory "Journal of Community Psychology, vol. 14, no 1, 1986, pp. 6-23. 4 Cross, Ibid, 1998: p. 5. "Only then can a learning community be described as promoting active learning over passive learning, cooperation over competition, and community over isolation". 5 Robert Kegan, “What ‘form’ Transforms? A Constructive-Developmental Approach to Transformative Learning.” In Contemporary Theories of Learning, under the direction of Knud Illeris, London, Routledge, 2018, pp. 29-45.
