Senge, P., N. Cambron-McCabe, T. Lucas, B. Smith, J. Dutton and A. Kleiner (2000). "Fostering communities that learn," in Schools That Learn. New York: Currency,459-465

Tara Tetzlaff

Introduction

- article starts by asking what the role and responsibility of a school is to its students and their parents
- then asks the larger question people need communities to be
“Communities always exist, at least in part, because children need them as a place to learn to be adults.”

- there are many examples of school breaking the barrier between school and the rest of a child’s life because both the school community has an invested interest and priority in learn and recognizes that learning takes place beyond just the classroom

- in 1997 the Partnership for Children in Kansas made the “Is it good for our children?” campaign so that whenever a business, government, individual or other type of decision was going to be made the first consideration was “Is it good for our children?”
- “By asking ‘is it good for the children?’ people essentially ask, ‘will this add civility tolerance, and nurturance into the fabric of life here?’”
- give grants and tax waivers to plans that are “good for our children”

- Kentucky legislator established “family resource centers” as part of a “comprehensive school reform initiative”; brings the community into the schools

- Oregon program brings the schools into the communities by offering “service learning opportunities” where students use what they learn to serve others in the community

- article claims that learning in the classroom and learning in the community is “a vision that can never fully be realized”, but we can still work towards that goal

Community

- is not a group of people with a certain relationship but “a place, rooted in the biosphere, rife with activity, mutual respect, and the recognition that everyone in that place is responsible for and accountable to one another, because the lives of all are interdependent.”
- a community should always be a “caring container wrapped around the school and the development of children”

3 types of actives a community uses to develop its future:
1. identity: attitudes of community members of their boundaries and responsibilities to each other
- needs of schools transcend those boundaries
- ambiguity exists between where the school stops and the community begins
- teachers are excepted to commit themselves to the needs of the students and school, but the community needs to support teachers in that commitment (ex: except teachers to chaperon school dances, but don’t want to reimburse them for time and expense)
- “defining identity is a practice of building a shared vision for the community, with the school system as an active and valued player but hardly the only player.”

2. building (something- illegible in document)
- community members have many demands on their time making it difficult to build regular connections; however, these connection are important to “establishing a pattern of learning in a community”
- schools and other organizations need to see each other as important assets in developing community
- “making connections can amplify the disciplines of mental models and team learning and institutionalize those disciplines at a broad level.”

3. sustainability: involves awareness, “akin to the awareness in systems thinking,” of the long-term implications of our actions
- sustainable communities understand “that the evolution of each young child depends on the individual attention he or she receives”
- people therefore invest time with children to help them develop and model adult behavior

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Jeremy Szteiter
May 4, 2008

Main themes:
-the process of exploring the reach of the responsibility of schools may help us to understand community learning
-schools have the opportunity to serve students both by what happens inside the school and by how the schools connect students to other elements of the community that are outside of the school
-benefit to children might serve as a reference guide for making the right community decisions
-child learning and family learning are closely related, reflective of each other, and dependent upon each other
-a community might be thought of as a partnership involving individuals, schools, institutions, and government that supports the thriving of all
-the nature of the school has far-reaching influences on the community, including the geographical layout and space, the opportunities for making contact with others, and the attitudes and values of residents
-sustaining community is only possible when long-term effects of current decisions are weighed
New insights:
-"building community" is more than nurturing relationships that exist between community members, it also involves taking away the influences that isolate community members from each other and provide opportunities for familiarity
-teachers might need help and encouragement to appreciate their role and connectivity to the community
-develop relationships early, before they are "needed"
Remaining questions:
-why is there not more attention paid to the community resources that are present in a community's senior population?
-what opportunities are most effective at dismantling the isolating factors in an existing community?
Applications to own project:
-play is a common and universal language that might connect people that otherwise have nothing in common
-community centers as a place for dialogue, mutual understanding, and neutral territory for defining collaboration

Reactions to the notes of others posted here:
-reciprocal give and take are important to the success of the school-community relationship - connections between students and community through the efforts of the school lead to opportunities for students for their own benefit as well as the chance to offer their own abilities and efforts back to the community and the school
-"patterns of learning" seems important - how can we recognize patterns and distinguish ones that work well from ones that don't?

Andy Reyes
May 4, 2008
Thoughts on article:
-It is refreshing to hear MORE about children. They're quite easily left out in many "power lunch" planning, curriculum development, grant writing, business ventures, etc. Although a lot of "well-intentioned" visible projects include them, they are quite easily forgotten when the going gets tough. In light of the surge in violence in the Boston area lately, I can't help but wonder (worry) about the dangers that await children no different from the young boy found sitting on the steps.

Something that might be connected:

-Gary Clabaugh in Can Every Child Learn? (2002) in Educational Horizons critiques the slogan that "every child can learn." He clarifies issues related to contemporary rhetoric on the question he addresses. The slogan conceals the failure of many schools. He argues that the slogan is clearly false. He says:

Despite definitive research that points to nonschool factors as keys to school success, those embracing this motto (Every child can learn) implicitly dismiss the idea that "schooling failures" are really symptoms of social failures. They seem to believe that positive thinking can cancel out the educational consequences of the 20 percent poverty rate among U.S. children. They must believe that positive thinking can defeat our inner city infant mortality rate, which outstrips that of the Third World. They must imagine that positive thinking can help hundreds of thousands of U.S. youngsters who literally have no home where they can do homework.

According to Clabaugh, many children face a harsh reality today, especially those who live in households where there is abuse and drugs. He says:

...Yes, most (but not all) children can learn to stay away from Mom when she's high or to keep out of the way of Mom's boyfriend when he's looking for someone to abuse. Sure, most (but not all) children can learn to wait until Mom is just high enough to say "yes" before asking her for food money. But few children can learn to do algebra, appreciate Shakespeare, or balance chemical equations if they are abused, scared, sick, hungry, or bereft of love and security. Under those circumstances, one can't even learn to read. They're too busy trying to survive.

Application to my research/teaching context:

Gather more readings---for my students---around the subject of children, education, social problems, community, and "heroism," etc. I sometimes worry about the "naivete" that many of my students, in their quest for the "big dream," forget to shed. I can engage them in DIALOGUE about some of these relevant issues.

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John Quirk
I enjoyed this article about community for its definition of communities as being boundary-less, and for pointing out the importance of community to the general well-being of people. Understanding the role and defining the obligations of communities may be among the most difficult of social tasks in today's world. Various and varied interests and precious too little information (or manipulative information) makes it a challenge for people to adhere to the ideals of shared community life in a meaningful way, and I don't think enough of us really consider ourselves, in the truest senses, to be members of communities in all that it entails. I loved the story of the #1 Question Campaign for its clarity of values and the overt simplicity of it. What more sensible way to approach policy considerations than by asking, "Is this good for our children?" The simplicity of the question should not lead one to think that the answers would be simple. The premise, however, is spectacular and it represents a clear-thinking and purposeful community standard of high expectation for the motives and decisions of policy makers. Really interesting. One question I would ask: "Why would it be so difficult to get more typical communities to agree to such baseline questions as standards for decision-making?"
The idea of community as a place "rooted in a biosphere, rife with activity, mutual respect and a recognition that everyone in that place is accountable to one another because the lives of all are interdependent" is an interesting one, too, and it has me thinking about the communities in which I live (school, a micro-community, and my town, for examples). My school, by this definition, seems a pretty able community. My town, however, probably does not fit the definition, primarily because the lives of all are not truly interdependent in any demonstrable way. My question, then: "How does a town (a space on a map) make itself a community of learning (an environment of mutual support and respect), when there seems little intrinsic motivation for doing so?"

Virginia de la Garza
Senge defines a community by saying “a community of people is a place rooted in the biosphere, rife with activity, mutual respect, and the recognition that everyone in that place is responsible for and accountable to one another because the lives of all are interdependent.” He then writes about the importance of focusing on children in order to form communities. He mentions “Believing that “all communities can learn” is a starting point to developing a capability that may start with children and transform all of human society” I believe that in order to transform children and consequently all the society, parents should be aware of the important role they play in a child’s’ life. I believe that many parents now a day don’t have time for children. Sometimes both work or they are simply not there to monitor what’s going on. So children, who are social creatures, develop “away” from families and create their culture based on the commercialized environment which affect their emotional, social and physical development. This is definitely not a healthy for society. Parents should supervise what children watch, eat, think, do, and dream about, and help children develop the ability to filter out what they experience and understand how they can be easily manipulated by the “culture industries” which appear everywhere, such as in television, radio, music, internet, food, movies, books, etc. Those industries don’t question if what they are doing is good for children but parents and teachers should.