Learning Community Design 2.0: The library as a communal center of learning

My friend and urban planner, Jen Hurley (Twitter: @JenHurPlanner), forwarded me this piece (April 1, 2011), by Rick Cole, on libraries as learning communities. In response to the declining importance of book lending, Cole points to an Australian library design that dramatically recasts the place of libraries in the community.

Citing Ross Duncan, the manager for Learning Communities for Sunshine Coast Council, a large Australian metropolitan region, Cole explains the new vision for libraries in the Sunshine Coast:

Duncan’s philosophy is to infuse the 10 branches of the Sunshine Coast library system with a focus on “changing the world.” He’s shaped what is essentially an informal family university offering more than 4,500 activities, workshops and events that foster a “learning community.”

Duncan’s vision is of a dynamic learning space that allows individuals of every age to learn, study, interact, and take action together. The model is especially compelling because it seems so much more functional and flexible than the traditional schooling design for learning with its set classes and limited outcome goals. Duncan’s library design is powerfully open-ended–allowing transformative learning to incubate in a variety of safe spaces:

Another take on bundling: The diverse provider model

On the subject of unbundling (I discussed a section of November’s Phi Delta Kappan that focussed on the subject in a post of mine last week)…

The less ideological articles in this section drew the attention of my persistent school design lens. One comes from Mehta and Spillane who offer an interesting analysis that the core debate between the ideal of system coherence and the alternate vision of unbundled services. In explicating the arguments the authors write:

Perhaps ‘system-wide coherence’ is an illusion. Similarly, while unbundling could increase inequality across providers, existing policies designed to achieve greater standardization have made little progress in reducing inequalities” (p. 50).

Unbundling and neighborhood schooling: A policy debate over imagined differences

The November 2010 Phi Delta Kappan featured a set of articles and an editorial on educational unbundling, “…a process in which innovators deconstruct established structures and routines and reassemble them in newer, smarter ways” (Hess and Meeks, 2010). The collection includes some pretty disparate essays and there are some interesting elements (too many to write about in only one post).

The conflict over “unbundling” mirrors the contrasting views of community I have discussed previously: 1) A non-spatial, interactive understanding of community based on John Dewey’s work (here); 2) An understanding of community rooted in place and space that is based on sociology and critical race theory (here). Unfortunately, in the unbundling debate outlined below, neither of these positions are critically examined.

Henig and Hess, in their article on the declining significance of space and place, imagine the possibilities of a schooling system not restricted by geography. Phi Delta Kappan editor-in-chief Joan Richardson, in contrast, laments an era of neighborhood schools she believes used to exist and is now disappearing in an era of unbundling and school choice.

Measuring social capital: Accountability worth thinking about

In 2000, Harvard’s Saguaro Seminar, featuring famous social scientist and social capital researcher Robert Putnam, produced a set of measurement tools for social capital.  The bottom line for schools: Knowing many people and having positive relationships is good for individuals and it is good for communities.

Defining Community (Part 2) – Space and place and their role in the 21st century community

In Friday’s post on John Dewey and the definition of community, I suggested that in many ways, physical geography and place have little to do with what defines a community. Today, however, I’m turning to another highly cited author, Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (2000), to consider the role physical world does play in the meaning of and formation of community.

Putnam’s (2000) research in Bowling Alone, (a large scale analysis of national survey data) explains that there was a large generational shift during the second half of the twentieth century. He writes, “Compared with Gen X’ers, men and women born before 1946 are nearly twice as likely to feel a sense of belonging to their neighborhood, to their church, to their local community, and to the various groups and organizations to which they belong” (pp. 274-275).

Younger generations still care most about close family and friends–their most intimate social networks–but not as much about the traditional community markers of neighborhood and membership in civic organizations.

How individuals understand and make meaning of their communities however, may not be the only relevant issue. Spatial segregation by class, color, and ethnic background are facts of the American landscape (Putnam, 2000; Squires, 1994; Massey and Denton; 1993). As a result, while individuals continue to identify less with their physical communities, the physical boundaries of their communities continue to impact their lives and their development of effective social networks.

Defining Community (Part 1) – The Common and Communicative: The neoclassical thinking of John Dewey

The word “community” is a great example of a term that everyone uses, but no one has a clear sense of what an actual definition might be. As we become an increasingly communicative and interactive society, there is a general sense that the nature of communities may be changing, but whether this is true and what it means if it is true remains unclear.

Since the REAL School design is a “community school model,” defining community is an essential task for us. We believe that communities of space matter and so do other kinds of communities. Community can be defined by geography, but also by common interest, by shared values, and by historical accident.

John Dewey, the pragmatist philosopher and father of progressive education, offers a foundational definition that points us towards the heart of the matter–communication leads to commonalities which allow people to form communities.

School Design Process in Action: The video and text of my presentation @PennGSE

As mentioned, last week I spoke to a group of graduate students and colleagues about the REAL School design process. Here is the video of the presentation and my slides.

These are my slides: REAL School Penn Presentation – 11-19-10 – Web Draft

And here’s the video of the talk: http://www.veotag.com/player/?pid=bb082988-40e3-4052-84f2-e6c4911fb697

And a picture (thanks Mary!):