Communities of Learners

Communities of learners is a theoretical perspective deriving from notions of learning as a process of transformation of participation in which responsibility and autonomy are both desired (Newman, Griffin, & Cole, 1989). Learning is not seen as a passive process (i.e., as the transmission of knowledge from experts or the acquisition of knowledge by novices), but rather as a participation in shared sociocultural endeavors (Rogoff, 1994).

Working together as a community, learners are active in a social process, engaging in a variety of interactions and intercommunications (Dewey, 1938; Blumenfeld, Marx, Soloway, & Krajcik, 1996). Communities of learners work cooperatively and collaboratively to structure their shared endeavors or develop acknowledge base of resources that are accessed, negotiated, revised and applied (Slotta, 2013). Some learning community approaches adopt a knowledge building pedagogy, where learners create new cognitive artifacts as a result of common goals, group discussion, and synthesis of ideas (Scardamalia & Bereiter, 2006; 2007). Others emphasize a more structured interaction with carefully designed sequences of collaborative, cooperative and collective inquiry activities (Bielaczyc & Collins, 2005).

It is challenging to design collective inquiry activities where a community of learners engage in carefully designed inquiry projects that ensure the process toward learning goals. One pedagogical model, called Knowledge Community and Inquiry (Slotta & Peters, 2008), offers four principles to guide the design of a collective inquiry sequence or script of inquiry activities. First, learners work collectively as a knowledge community, creating a knowledge base that is indexed to a specific content domain. Second, the knowledge base is accessible for communities of learners as a resource as well as for editing and improvement by all members. Third, collaborative inquiry activities are designed to address the targeted domain learning goals, using the knowledge base as a primary resource and producing assessable outcomes. Finally, teacher’s role, and how the role necessitates new pedagogical approaches and responsibilities, must be clearly specified within the inquiry script.

A community of learners’ model entails a particular philosophy of how learning occurs that involves a coherent and integrated set of assumptions guiding practice. In a community of learners, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, and different members have different roles (Rogoff, 1994). Each learner can have multiple opportunities or pathways to get involved with the knowledge and connect with different individuals. Because of its relevance to 21st-century learning, the notion of communities of learners and collective inquiry is gathering an increased level of interest (Slotta, Quintana & Moher, 2018).