Community as Curriculum
= The community is not the path to understanding or accessing the curriculum; rather, the community is the curriculum (David Cormier)
Source
- Book: Education in the Creative Economy: Knowledge and Learning in the Age of Innovation. Edited by Daniel Araya & Michael A. Peters. Peter Lang, 2010
Chapter 23: Community as Curriculum, by David Cormier
Another earlier version from the Journal of Online Education is here at http://davecormier.com/edblog/2008/06/03/rhizomatic-education-community-as-curriculum/
Excerpts
Introduction
"Most of us have, in spite of ourselves adjusted—at least incrementally—to this transmission-focused military model of education. There is a sense in many educators’ minds that learners need to explore their way through their learning, and have the experience of learning, of searching out ideas and discovering them for themselves. This process, though, is usually bounded by the learning objectives laid out at the beginning of the course of study by the designer/instructor. There is still, implicit in most widely held conceptions of learning that the instructor, designer, or at least the institution knows what a learner should get out of a given course.
The problem, then, only comes into play when we are not sure what “people should be learning.” What is the curriculum for innovation? How do we impart creativity? Where do students turn to be guaranteed that they are learning what is new and current? These are the questions that face us on a more or less regular basis now. As knowledge becomes a moving target and the canon starts becoming less reliable, we need a new—or in fact an old—model of education drawn out on a new canvas: community.
The answer is to stop trying so hard, to stop looking for a systemic solution, and to return to a human-based knowledge plan. We need to return to community as a valid repository for knowledge, and away from a packaged view of knowledge and expertise. Knowledge can be fluid; it can be in transition, and we can still use it. We need to tap into the strength provided by communities and see the various forms of community literacy as the skills we need to acquire in order to be effective members of those communities.
Community as curriculum is not meant as a simple alternative to the package version of learning. It is, rather, meant to point to the learning that takes place on top of that model and to point to the strategies for continuing learning throughout a career. There is a base amount of knowledge that is required to be able to enter a community, and there are methods for acquiring the specific kinds of literacy needed to learn within a specific community. A learner acquires basic forms of literacy and associates with different peer groups. Networks begin to form and, occasionally, communities develop. Knowledge is created and sometimes discarded as the community interacts. Knowledge does not develop and spread from and through concentric circles. There are no “plastics” to be learned and no canon to consult to ensure that a new skill has been acquired. Knowledge is a rhizome, a snapshot of interconnected ties in constant flux that is evaluated by its success in context. We need a move toward a more practical, sustainable learning model that is less based on market-driven accreditation and more on the inevitable give and take that happens among people who engage in similar activities and share similar forms of literacy and worldviews.
The rhizomatic view of learning reflects an organic, practical approach to thinking about learning and knowledge. It has a distinct connection to the traditional academic knowledge model, with its interlinking references and people. Each piece of information and knowledge is interlinked and supported by at least one other element, with no one place where knowledge about a matter begins or ends. The rhizomatic model, in contrast to the academic one, keeps the knowledge in the people and in the community rather than distilling it into a paper based product – be it the final publication of a journal, book or other ‘changeless medium.. The problem with the paper publishing cycle is the time it takes to proceed through the entire cycle, and the constraints on time and space that go along with the medium place severe restrictions on the flexibility and applicability of the academic tradition. It is not to say that it is not valuable, just that it does not always—and cannot always, today—respond in ways that meet the needs of learners in a world where what is known in many fields changes from month to month.
If we are working in a field where what is new or current is continually in flux, then we need to have a way of keeping our knowledge up to date. With the huge increase of academic publications, the simple process of choosing has become more difficult, and the sifting through what is out there a significant task for any professional. Our ideas of learning and knowledge need to become more flexible to allow for this mutability. “The term [rhizomatic learning] encapsulates a sort of fluid, transitory concept; the dense, multi-dimensional development and integration of several different sets of tools and approaches, appearing in diverse forms under separate settings, using all the multidimensional networking information technology tools, the social web, etc.” (Szucs, 2009, p. 4). rhizomatic learning distributes the channels of knowing outside traditional hierarchical models and into the social realm, allowing for help in sifting through the flow of information and knowledge. These “social learning practices are allowing for a more discursive rhizomatic approach to knowledge discovery” (Cormier, 2008, p. 3). rhizomatic knowers use a variety of approaches and tools to blend together bits of information and knowledge in order to form what they need. They especially need a learning community to help them test ideas, filter information and knowledge, and seek advice." (http://davecormier.com/edblog/2010/01/27/community-as-curriculum-vol-2-the-guild-distribute-continuum/)
For a longer excerpt, which includes a distinction of two different types of community, see here at http://davecormier.com/edblog/2010/01/27/community-as-curriculum-vol-2-the-guild-distribute-continuum/
The Two Types of Community
David Cormier:
The two types of learning communities presented here reflect two differing directions for learning. They should not be seen as mutually exclusive but rather as different in control. The first, the guild model of community, offers more control and better options for accreditation and verifiability and is also the easier one of the two options. If a guild style community can be established, then it gives a single locus of learning. The other, the distributed model of community, i.e., multiple membership roles in multiple communities, offers far greater flexibility , though less control. It would be difficult for an employer to track learning in this kind of environment, or for learners to take guidance on what they should learn. A combination of these two is certainly possible, or the path might lead from one end to the other.
Community as Guild
"Creating communities for learning is the first path that many people take begin to believe that the Benjamin Braddock model is failing them. They are looking for a connection between the organized world of learning and the new connected world of the Web. Indeed, there is a sense that a classroom can be this way. The community versions of these kinds of classrooms emerge around a particular topic or perspective and grow and adapt along non-institutional lines. We also see the same in different social communities that occur around different topics and fields online.
They do offer a number of very significant advantages—perhaps the most important being quality control. A look at traditional guild models and how they deal with issues of quality control offers an interesting perspective to the current open classrooms and social networks.
It is clear from the records left by guilds that they [guild] were vitally interested in matters of “quality control” and quality assurance. The exclusive right of the guilds to sell certain goods in certain markets, coupled with quality standards written into the guild regulations, assured buyers that all goods under the guild’s jurisdiction would be of a certain quality. The guild “imprimatur,” in other words, took the place of the reputation of individual craftsman as a quality assurance device. (Merges, 2004, p. 7)
The members of the guild, be they a representative organization or a classroom, are constrained by a charter, social contract, or syllabus that defines the things that are done and known inside that community. It both allows for observers of a community member to know what that member is likely to know and allows new members a better sense of how they can get involved. There are observable dos and don’ts that a person can follow in order to be more successful. People need to know who they are in their community. They need to know how to succeed. They need to understand the roles that are available and what it means to participate. Guilds can work, particularly when they are open and people think of them as part of the whole knowledge building structure.
“ The community is not the path to understanding or accessing the curriculum; rather, the community is the curriculum” (Cormier, 2008)
The ED366H Educational Technology and the Adult Learner classroom, a course I taught at the University of Prince Edward Island in the summer of 2008 was an attempt at putting the guild model community learning into practice. The goal was to create a sense of reliance and a sense of responsibility in each student toward the learning of their fellow students. The goal was not, however, to create some kind of community that would last past the time allowed for the course but rather to instill some of the literacies and demonstrate some of the advantages of community learning in the hope of fostering the desire to join or support community learning in their respective teaching environments.
The course is a accredited by the university and designed to span 35 hours in a two-week period. The constraints of such a shallow time span had a considerable impact on the decision not to create a standing community. The course began with a day-byday syllabus that suggested broad topics of research for week one and broad topics for student lead demonstrations for week two. It took a people centred and, as far as possible within the required structure, a technologically neutral approach to introducing the idea of technology to the classroom.
One of the interesting features of teaching this kind, of course, is that any specific information, terminology, technology, or even approach is likely to be partially or totally outdated by the time the opportunity for the learner to actually use it in the classroom has happened. The focus of the syllabus was entirely on the students learning to rely on each other to find paths through the tasks that were set out. Competency for the course was simple, the students needed to teach something to the rest of the class in the second week that they had never heard of in the first. During this process, they were required to create a textbook, together, of the things that they learned and reflect on the process throughout.
The difficulty with the course scenario, however, is that the forced community tends to fall apart after the course. Many more formal attempts have been made to create this kind of community, but they face significant challenges. A case study made of the Education Network of Ontario illustrates many of the pitfalls of trying to sustain long-term interest and participation in an online community of practice. It was a 12-year project that began in the days of dial-up and, due to the inevitable challenges implicit in sustaining a long-term community, eventually ended in 2005.
Despite the obvious benefits of online networks, the complexities of forming and supporting online communities will need to be addressed if they are to be sustained. Designers will have to balance the needs of the community and the needs of individual members. The success of future online communities will be heavily dependent on: the level of information overload, the tone of the environment (including all of the community building practices needed for a healthy community), and outreach and marketing. (Riverin &Stacey, 2008, p. 55)
The guild style community, however, need not be an end in and of itself. It can be seen as a gateway to a more distributed, more flexible view of learning communities. It can be a safe place from which to set on our own or simply a trusted node in a widening network of trust from which communities tend to form. What the leaders of these guild style communities need to teach people, then, has little to do with content and more to do with actually using communities to learn. The community is, in effect, the whole of the curriculum. Its members need to experience what it can be like to learn in a community mediated environment and take that away with them so that they can continue to be contributing members to their knowledge rhizomes." (http://davecormier.com/edblog/2010/01/27/community-as-curriculum-vol-2-the-guild-distribute-continuum/)
Distributed Community
"Seeing communities more broadly and taking multiple community and network membership online/offline might be a sustainable community learning model. In a sense, this is what academia has been, as opposed to a simple guild model. The guilds learned and worked mostly with people from their villages or the rare traveler; academics had the written word on books, and they traded with them. They developed methods by which, at a distance, the community could judge the applicability of a given bit of knowledge to the overall field. The methods of quality control by peer review and citation are the distributed community in paper form; adding the Internet, matters start to move faster at a fantastic rate.
The learner and the knowledge producer now can tap into a broad base of professionals in any field at the click of a button. There are professionals sharing their work at the time that it is happening, presentations being streamed online and data coming out from research long before papers are published. With connections through social networks it is possible to query the writers of professional works in order to get clarity, suggestions or confirmation about certain ideas or theories.
We are also able to find other people who have the same degree of interest in a given subject as we ourselves possess. This concept makes Chris Anderson’s idea of the long tail so attractive. If we connect the whole world through social networks, then the people with very specific, very passionate interests will be able to collaborate. In Braddock’s world they would have accomplished their goals—had they been able to find each other, but now even simple searches will reveal people with whom specialists can form strong connections.
The multiple memberships that make up online community participation can be overwhelming. Online participation can, from a technical perspective, include micro-blogging, bookmarking, blogging, Web cast memberships, and a host of other technical formats that require some degree of competency to participate. The key, however, is the varying layers of connection that they allow with the people who are actually present. Simply “using” the technology offers no particular benefit. Being able to participate in live knowledge building on a daily basis with a group of peers, on the other hand, is a privilege of the so-called digital age.
Having members of a community involved daily in activities of the digital age l means teaching them to network first, to assess ways in which their networking can grow into relationships of trust that allow them to rely on people to care about their learning and about their success and where they learn how to judge people’s opinion. They will, in a sense, have to become sensitive to the ways in which knowledge can be acquired, created and validated along the rhizomatic view." (http://davecormier.com/edblog/2010/01/27/community-as-curriculum-vol-2-the-guild-distribute-continuum/)