What is a Learning Community?

A learning community is the site of an academic “home” in which students, faculty, and what are normally considered diverse disciplines cohabitate for brief of extended periods.  Learning communities by their very natures stress the interrelationships between ideas and fields of study in settings which promote collaboration and collegiality. The fundamental purposes of learning communities are, therefore, to increase coherence in and between subject matters, to reverse the intellectual fragmentation which many disciplines tend to promote, and to encourage interaction between faculty and students, among students themselves, and among faculty team members.

Learning communities are meant to revolutionize the way we think within our academic institutions, which have become during the course of the last century increasingly discipline centered.  However, there is not and should not be any single learning community model.  Rather, as Faith Gabelnick, et al state, “learning community” is a “generic term for a variety of curricular interventions.”[1]  These interventions, whatever their shape, transform the traditional curriculum so that “students and faculty members experience courses or disciplines as complementary and connected.”[2]  Perhaps the most important word in this explanation is “experience,” for in the learning community environment students share the process of discovering the nature and connectedness of ideas.

What are the Characteristics of a Learning Community?

• The same students enroll in the same classes together;
• The academic work of each course’s subject matter is enhanced by interdisciplinary study in which students and faculty build connections between subject matters, disciplines, and ideas;
• To facilitate interdisciplinary work, the community focuses on a central theme or question;
• Courses are team designed and/or team taught;
• Collaborative learning and experiential learning methods are keystones of the pedagogy.

What are the Advantages of a Learning Community?

• Study of connections between disciplines enhances critical thinking;
• Interaction between students, students and faculty, and faculty members is increased;
• The community serves social as well as academic needs;
• Interdisciplinary study improves the likelihood of exploring and understanding multiple perspectives;
• Faculty interact with peers from other disciplines and improve their own understanding of other fields of study;
• A variety of teaching styles and approaches is likely
• Students are more responsible for their own learning 
  

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[1] Faith Gabelnick, et al, “Learning Communities:  Creating Connections Among Students, Faculty, and Disciplines (San Francisco:  Jossey-Bass, Inc., 1990), p. 1.

[2] Ibid., p. 18.