I have figured out what my old job and my new job have in common: expanding our understanding of where learning happens, breaking open the classroom. Technology allows us to do this even when we may look like we are still sitting in a traditional classroom. Community-based learning gets us moving our real live bodies out into the world.
Will Richardson had an interesting article in Edutopia and the subtitle is “How to Teach When Learning is Everywhere.”
One of the challenges of community-based learning is that the instructor is not in control of all of the learning. In a way,the students’ experiences become another text for the class, and it is a text that the teacher can not possibly have read before the beginning of the semester. Just like the way technology can encourage teachers to be guides for students when the “expert in everything” role is closed to them, CBL has the same effect. And yet, technology helps to minimize the problems of dispersed learning, allowing us to maximize the reflection and community building. A few examples:
1. One of the hardest things about group work for students is scheduling time in their busy schedules to meet. A simple free tool like Doodle can make a huge difference in saving them from wasting time to schedule time. Giving them access to wikis and group blogs can also help them work collaboratively, and can give the instructor the opportunity to see when groups are having problems and intervene when necessary.
2. I suggest that all my faculty who have students in the community at service sites require students to post to a blog within 24 hours of their work each week. That way the students are forced to reflect while the experience is still fresh, and they never have to lose time handing in their journal to be graded–they get constant real-time feedback from professor and peers. When everyone in a class community is reading about each others’ experiences, it is much more likely that the experience will be a part of the face to face time as well. One of the keys to successful CBL is weaving the experiences into the very fabric of the class.
3. Another challenge of having students work in the community is that sometimes they aren’t doing a kind of service that will meet the academic needs of the class. If students are writing about their experiences, the faculty (or, in my case, members of the CBL support team) can intervene with site supervisors to make sure that both the needs of the site AND the needs of the class members are being well served.
3. Students can produce work for classes that can be useful when they can use technology tools. A good example is a project we have in mind for next semester. A professor wants students to create something audio visual that creates a kind of snapshot of a neighborhood they are studying. I have suggested she might have them use something like the movie created using Google Maps Street View that you can see here or here. When a project uses interesting technology tools, it can multiply the learning. But when they use interesting tools to create something real people will use to do good things, the learning becomes even more profound and their motivation goes through the roof. Whatever this class decides to create, we will be using it to support our Build It Initiativeand our new website (coming soon).
Raising the roof and blowing out the walls of the classroom appeals to me. Does it appeal to you?
