Holistic Learning Communities

In Millennial Momentum: How a New Generation is Remaking America, Morley Winograd and Michael D. Hais include two chapters on education, “Building Better Learning Communities” and “Taking Higher Education Higher.” The first addresses elementary and secondary schools. The second looks at college and beyond. Progressive activists could well incorporate some of their ideas into holistic, life-long community centers that would foster personal development, mutual support, life-long learning, and informed political action.

In 1789, Thomas Jefferson wrote, “Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government.” This necessity is no less pressing today, as the millennial generation is demonstrating increased civic engagement.

Winograd and Hais rely on the “unified theory of learning” that emerged in a 1997 “year-long conversation on how to create ‘a society where all individuals fully participate in the development of their own and their community’s learning potential’” at the Institute for a New California. With an “emphasis on learning, rather than education,” the foundation formed a framework on four principles derived from studies at the Institute for Research on Learning:

• Learning takes place all the time.
• Learning is a process of friction between what we already know and believe and new experiences, people, or settings.
• Demands for learning never cease.
• The ability to know how to learn has become the most important type of learning.

“Real learning can take place,” they write, when we blend these four elements within a “social context of interactivity, exploration, and discovery.” All stakeholders, including students, parents, teachers, and those who provide funding need to be fully involved. Students can play the role of teacher in peer-to-peer interactions and parents can be involved in choosing school policies and administrators. 

The Institute’s unified theory affirmed, “The most productive learning systems are built and sustained when the goals of the four domains are aligned through a process of consensus-building.” With that consensus, schools can then integrate “the constituent parts of learning—subject matter expertise, pedagogy, and developmental aspects of the learner—into an effective learning environment,” with the student “an active agent in her or his learning.”

Applying these principles to colleges and universities would, according to Winograd and Hais, require “everyone involved in education to give up their institutional silos and work across boundaries to reform the entire system” into a “learner-centered” community. Especially with the use of modern technologies (including online education), with this approach,

Distinctions between learner and teacher will become blurred. Students will co-design and even co-instruct courses, since sharing the knowledge among peers provides the best context for learning. To prove mastery of a skill or topic, students will produce new simulations or author Web sites, and these work products will be assessed not only by faculty but also by their fellow students, to capture the value of the contribution to the larger team or learning community.

The authors of Higher Education in the Digital Age describe the radically different role of the faculty in such environments in this way: “Faculty members of the twenty-first-century university will find it necessary to set aside their roles as teachers and instead become designers of learning experiences, processes, and environments…. They may be asked to develop collective learning experiences in which students work together and learn together, with the faculty member becoming more of a consultant or a coach than a teacher.” 

Winograd and Hais propose that students retain a lifelong membership in the university from which they graduate, research results should be placed in the public domain rather than copyrighted, and universities should forsake their individualistic focus in favor of a collaborative model. 

Since “millennials’ digitally native brains will not sit still for hours at a time listening to traditional lectures,” the MIT physics department adopted an interactive, immersive approach in their freshman courses and saw a dramatic drop in failure rates. Learning rooted in trial-and-error “produce[s] the most innovative and valuable types of information,” as ecosystems reward what works and discard what doesn’t.

Particularly encouraging is the development of “serious games,” (sometimes using video games and/or computer-based, virtual reality), that expose students to “comprehensive, realistic experiences that produce a sense of being immersed in the action.” According to D. Thomas and J.S. Brown, these methods combine “knowing, or ‘learning about,’ with doing, or ‘learning to be.” As one group of researchers on gaming and learning stated, “Whereas schools largely sequester students from one another and from the outside world, games bring people together, competitively and cooperatively.” These games tend to help participants evolve their individual and collective identity as they “learn to become.”

These gaming technologies demonstrate the potential of growing dispersed learning communities that integrate “the roles of learners, providers, payers, and policy makers…[in] powerful alumni networks that span the globe and last a lifetime.” By affirming individual responsibility and collective action, these learning communities can “imbue their daily routines with civic purpose and meaning in order to attract the full energy and enthusiasm” of their members.

Progressive-minded political activists, it seems to me, could fruitfully develop learning communities based on these principles, both inside and outside existing institutions.