I’ve been (slowly) hacking away at a longer essay to summarize how I came to think about learning and communities. It’s challenging. Like herding concept cats.
When I write things like this, I start by trying to find key ideas or concepts that come to represent principles for me. (An example is Have direction, let the dialogue go where it wants to go, and engage everyone.) This longer essay is more challenging. I want it to represent a real fundamental set of principles, yet also to tell the story about how they came to be for me, and to pay respect to the folks whose work influences how I think.
In pausing to look at my work-in-progress I recognize that this work is more a narrative mind-map than a coherent theory-of-learning or set of learning design principles. The ideas I write about are more loosely coupled than tightly integrated. My initial test for including each: Do I find myself returning to them, to see things and make connections as I work in different contexts?
Here are the sections that I am hacking away at and a bit about each. It is really thinking-out-loud work at this point.
Communities of Practice. I start here, with Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger’s original work Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation (1991). It really is the taproot, framing social, informal learning as bound within a community focused on a domain of practice. The idea that communities of practice may exist in the wild (without intentional design) or as a result of intentional design gives rise to an expansive way of seeing learning and community in action. I spent much of my career as an educator exploring with students whether or not something we saw or experienced fits the definition of community-of-practice as outlined by Wenger. The goal was not to paint absolute lines but rather to recognize different elements that make a community a community that also learns. As a result, I see learning and community weaving together in many shapes and forms. It can be in a formal education or workplace setting. Or a group of activists working together at local, regional or global levels. It might be entirely online, in-person, or both. The weaving of learning and community may be short-lived before it dissolves into something else, or it may persist. The key: A need to learn and do binds a group together and generates movement greater than the sum of its individual parts.
Inquiry. This is inquiry in the John Dewey sense. Dewey’s work is foundational to a number of scholars working in disciplines that influenced my own thinking journey. Key among them were learning scholars D. Randy Garrison, Terry Anderson and Walter Archer and their community of inquiry (CoI) work, which emerged in an effort to create a pedagogy to leverage online technologies (text-based discussion) in more productive ways for learners in higher education. They frame formal higher education courses as consisting of a community of learners on an inquiry journey. The journey begins with a problem, moves through exploration of the problem and ideas to address it, to integration of ideas into a potential resolution that is tested against the problem and underlying assumptions. Within the course structure, inquiry works at both the macro and micro levels; it is linear (work through all the phases in order) and non-linear (back and forth between phases). Taken outside of the formal course context, inquiry is a powerful way to think about as the binding agent for learning in all forms of communities. Fitting neatly within this inquiry framework are two additional concepts I go back to again and again: reflection and co-creation.
Belonging. A key concept in community-based social learning is the idea that learning is more than learning what, it is also learning to be. This is clearest in the professions. Think about a medical professional – a doctor or nurse or medical technician. Each requires broad and deep technical knowledge. But each also requires members of the profession to understand and adapt language, norms, conventions and other behaviors that are recognized by members of the profession as being consistent with the profession. It’s identity: “I am a nurse.” The thing about identity and learning to be is that you first need to accept that you belong. And that you continue to belong as time moves on. I find learning-to-be/identity and belonging to be useful elements to pay attention to when assessing the health of a community on some learning journey. What exactly might we be learning-to-be? Coders? Writers? Community activists? Who is actually engaged (or not) in learning-to-be, and why?
Knowing and doing. Knowing and doing are inseparable. This is a concept as simple as it seems yet also more nuanced than it seems. We should not confuse explicit forms of knowledge – text, talk, visuals – with knowing. Knowing requires a knower who applies some knowledge in practice. It’s similar to the idea that the map (a representation) is not the terrain (what exists in the physical world). We intuitively get this when we declare someone has book smarts, or knows a lot but hasn’t done anything. But knowing and doing being inseparable also forces us to examine how knowledge/knowing exists in a specific moment of time, executed in practice. The terrain – and our knowing how to travel through it – is different when it’s raining, or when we are exhausted, or when we are with others who depend on us to get to a destination. All of this plays well with learning through community if, as inquiry requires us, we test our potential resolutions to a problem and check our assumptions by doing. And executing this inquiry work with a community of other folks forces us to consider a diversity of experiences and understanding when resolutions are tested and put into practice.
Rhyzomes. I encountered rhizomes as a metaphor in community and learning through the work of educator Dave Cormier. It was during the 2010’s when folks like Cormier were experimenting with open, online learning events that brought together hundreds of participants who engaged through Twitter, blogs, webcasts and chats. Cormier conceived of rhyzomatic learning as a concept to challenge the existing educational mindset that learning must be based on pre-defined inputs from experts. The experience of those open, online events brought the rhyzomatic concept to life. Participants connected organically with each other, and with ideas and content, using inquiry to explore a problem or question, taking knowledge and turning it into knowing. The experience was more alive than orchestrated. And folks approached their participation as members of a community, trying to understand and resolve whatever question or challenge triggered the learning event. That was the key insight from the experience: Folks will create a temporary community to learn if you understand the process as natural and organic. Let the rhyzomes do what they do.
Presence. This also comes from the community of inquiry framework. Garrison et al theorized that three types of presence were necessary for a formal educational class to succeed as a community of inquiry: Social presence, cognitive presence and teaching presence. The three work in harmony. The beauty of these presences is that you can literally see them in an online (text based) learning communities. Social presence encompasses the exchanges between participants that establish personal connections and relationships (i.e., using each other’s first names in text dialogue, sharing stories or experiences, etc.). Cognitive presence is some indicator that participants are thinking or working through a question (sense-making out loud). Teaching presence encompasses the moments when someone (not always an instructor) nudges the community along a path, or helps the community self-correct. I saw these presences in action repeatedly over time in formal education settings. The experience helps create a kind of spidey-sense for the state of learning more generally in all communities. And the health of the community as structure for learning.
Humans. When we see learning and community interwoven, we must also embrace the variety of humanity. A few ideas guide this for me. “Nothing about us, without us” is a phrase I first encountered in Sasha Costanza-Chock’s Design Justice book. It emerged from the disability rights movement, and in Costanza-Chock’s use, challenges the default of designing for and not with, the people who must use some designed solution. It challenges us to recognize that – as empathetic as we may believe we are – in truth, we always fall short of understanding the variations of humanity. Educators and learning designers Jesse Stommel and Sean Michael Morris were also early and significant influences in my thinking along these lines. Their work in critical digital pedagogy laid a foundation of concepts and practices that influenced how I taught and how to look at learners as people operating in society. Somewhere in all their writings is one line that I often paraphrase: Teach to the class you have, not the class you designed for. It’s a reminder – like Constanza-Chock – that when we design or facilitate, we all envision who the participants will be and how we might work with them. Then the actual humans show up and undoubtedly challenge many of our assumptions. Finally, I must also nod to the work of my former colleague Teresa Torres. A fundamental element of her work in designing solutions is story-based interviewing to look at specific, real moments-in-time to uncover what people actually do vs. what they might say they do. It’s a practice that continually yields the rich and meaningful ways in which we all operate in the world.
The photographs which accompany these posts are taken by me, and show different settings and views of Evanston (where I live). It is a visual reminder that this is the most important setting for belonging and contributing to community: our neighborhoods, our cities.
Jeff Merrell 
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