Learning requires a community

ommunity and Education have gone hand in hand since the beginning of time. The community has always been engaged in the education of its members. Mom and dad teach their offspring, relatives get involved and eventually so does the immediate community. Schools have been asked to maintain society's health, to erase its woes, to heal, to cure. Education has always held a sacred place in American society. The federal government does not prescribe educational curriculum to any school. Educational matters are local and although we hear a great deal of noise on national tests and national curriculum, we always fall back on the original notion of the Founding Fathers by not making education a federal responsibility. Education is a local matter. Governors set the educational policy in each state. That policy filters down and is refined and redefined within the broader scope at each municipality. In the end, in each school, a teacher is determining the pedagogy that will be practiced in that classroom. Now to help the isolated teacher, we need to reinvest in the idea of community involvement in the education of our citizens.

The African concept: "That it takes a village to raise the child," and even First Lady Hillary R. Clinton's It Takes a Village: And Other Lessons Children Teach Us promotes community education. To best practice this theory, we can use the Internet and tap the virtual community. How can we best continue this admirable notion in the digital age?

Schools should be the hub of the community. Schools are for kids and not for adults. A problem with the industrial model of education over the years is that schools are more teacher centered than they ought to be. As we swing to a more constructivist model of education, we find the classroom more student centered. Students are herded, told to sit still, be quiet, listen, and learn. Education is delivered in a one way practice. It is not reflective of the society into which these students will be thrust. It is not AUTHENTIC. Instead of one way delivery of information from the teacher, a text, a film; we are now able to use the new technology to tap into this new age of interactivity in education. The learners interact with each other and with the community. No longer do we need to be sages on the stage but we may become or morph into guides by the side.

	The virual community may be the silent majority.

Students are creating their own communities in the classroom. From there they can reach out into the virtual community which includes family, friends, and netizens. The safety of the PERSONAL connections teaches them how to deal with outside contact. Our village is taking on global proportions and the sooner we engage our students in this brave new world the sooner they will respond and the better off we all will be. Fostering community building locally and then globally is accomplished with ease on the Internet. Just as mentors assist us in the real world, telementors help us in the virtual world. The purpose of this interchange on so many levels provides the student with access to the DIVERSE community in this brave new age of interactivity.

A purpose of developing the classroom community is to demonstrate and practice peer review, collaboration, and social skills necessary to engage in and adapt to the virtual world and to promote SCHOLARSHIP. The classroom is where the students can practice those life skills under the tutelage of a guide, have access to more guides via the Internet, and begin to realize the dreams of themselves and their community.

In Lori's class...the first few weeks of any semester have always been crucial for me in terms of creating a sense of community in my classroom. I want the kids in my class to feel safe sharing their ideas with one another, to minimize the risk of embarrasment. I want them to feel a sense of importance in the work that we are DOING together; I don't want them to think of my class as just another waste of forty minutes. I want them to see our class as a place where we work hard, and rally together to help one another. This goal has never been more realized than in my first semester in a wired classroom.

Formerly, in the initial days of the term, I'd set up activites that would require the kids to get to know each other and to work together. We played theater games, we conducted interviews of one another, and we shared collages made up of images that illustrated our interests. We tried to learn something about our histories and our goals as readers and writers. Though more of an attempt at creating community than many of my kids had seen, it still felt contrived, as some of the activities had little purpose outside of getting to know one another, little connection to the work we would be doing later on in the term.

Avishkar, using his expertise to assist classmates.

The use of computers has eliminated the need for artificial ways of creating community as the need to collaborate becomes a more organic outgrowth of our work together. I am no longer the only expert in my classroom; my kids need each other. I have seen more collaboration than I have ever seen before. As in most classes, mine are made up of kids with a vast range of abilities from DIVERSE cultures. The kids with stronger backgrounds in technology quickly finish their work and immediately begin helping others. "Mrs. Mayo," is constantly being called across the classroom. "In a minute," I call out, only to find that, by the time I get there, another student has helped solve the problem.

What Randy Bomer writes about creating community, has been an important concept in my classroom. Heretofore it meant frequent publishing of class magazines, poetry readings with invited guests, and writing celebrations. With our newly acquired Internet access, we have acquired an even larger sense of others-- in fact, the whole wide world is now outside our door!

In one week, I was able show off my kids' work at two district wide staff development workshops and my school's faculty meeting. A day after the faculty meeting, Chicora came running into class and began working feverishly on her homepage. In front of her, she actually had notes that she'd written earlier in the day about James McBride's The Color of Water. Feeling my eyes on her, she looked up at me. "Mr. Serating looked at my homepage last night and asked why I hadn't written anything about the book yet," she said, "I need to do this now in case he checks tonight." The fact that somebody else might look at her work affected her more than the possibility that I, the teacher responsible for giving her a grade in the class, might look at her work.

Ted uses the POWER of the Internet in his Cyber English class to access information for his scholars, to publish their work on the Internet, and to use the Interent to cultivate that collaborative and engaging force only the Internet provides all learners.

	Students aren't isolated in the virtual community.

The Virtual Community is here. Our lives have been altered, therefore it is incumbant upon the schools and its teachers to utilize the Internet in delivering curriculum to the scholars. We believe community involvement can be best achieved via the net. Once the students' work has been made public, parents, employers, college admissions, teachers, netizens will have access and can provide valuable feedback to the student. The community can be as local as the classroom as Lori describes it above or as vast as the world.

What is important is that the real world now has access to the students via the Internet. The community has an opportunity to help shape the future. Within the first month of the term, Avishkar Jaikaran, a student in Lori's class was contacted by the Director of Online Recruiting at AOL, who saw his resume online and wrote to say that she has a position for him. The cyber room provides community access for the good of the community.

Starting to get outsiders to visit the cyber room as telementors may be hard at first, but once word gets out, the flow becomes more regular. Tapping local businesses, retirement villages, alumni lists, and the like will provide local sources for possible telementors. Posting requests on lists is also a good way to find telementors. And keeping a mailing list of those who do get involved provides the teacher with a cohort of telementors to whom s/he can write monthly updates and to maintain important links of communication. We know community involvement is healthy, it is a matter of making that theory practice.