Cycle Two: Challenges and opportunities in building classroom communities

Welcome to Cycle 2!

Classroom community. It’s a word often on our lips, but what does it really mean? What makes a community a community? And is this possible in a classroom setting?

In the first place, I think we, as teachers, need to look inwardly and ask ourselves what we really imagine when we say the word, “community.” Too often, I find myself as a teacher thinking about community instrumentally--as a way to forward the teacher’s agenda; really, as a codeword for classroom management.

Some of our readings this week should help us be aware of the danger of organizing communities around what we perceive to be as the most convenient manner for us, the teacher, to teach. Tracking--as a form of classroom organization that posits it is easier to teach students who are all at the same level--is a practice that can have unintended consequences that are difficult to undo.

There is an organic coming-together in every community, one that cannot be forced. Tracking, when it assigns fixed levels of ability to students, and bases curriculum decisions on such assignations, becomes a tool too crude for the job. It seeks to eliminate the problem of human diversity by positing a single trait by which people can be grouped--intelligence. Yet the problem remains: for intelligence is fluid and contextual. Someone good at reading needs help in art; someone good at mechanics struggles in the study of civics; someone with a lot of interpersonal skills has a hard time reading expository text silently. Tracking, at its worst, simply ignores everything that a person is good at, and instead reduces the world to math and reading scores.

If learning communities are to flower, students certainly need to be able to come together based on their interests, their hopes, and yes, their abilities. They should be able to come together with their friends and their neighbors. As teachers, we should hope to provide differentiated opportunities in our classroom. This means that we seek to provide learning experiences, for as many of our students as possible, where that golden sweet spot arises--where the child’s interests, abilities, prior knowledge merge with the resources available in both the classroom context and the formal curricular materials. This rarely happens in a one-size-fits-all approach.

A final way to think about community--one that goes beyond community as management tool, and community as learning tool--is as an affective bond that creates a feeling of inclusion. In such a community, students and teachers come to care about each other, and in that caring, they begin to see their own well being tied up in the well being of others. In my mind, this is the most expansive and lovely way for us to think about community. It integrates the notions of community as management tool, and community as learning tool, but into a higher and greater good. It makes of community an end in itself, and the most educative force that our classrooms might invoke.

Such a community, ideally, moves beyond the formation of groups around similarities--whether those be of race, social class, gender, ability, or any of the many other ways we as humans deny love and respect to each other. In such a community, true hospitality begins to emerge, as we open ourselves up to living with and learning from those who have been strangers to us.

As Jim Garrison writes about Tony, a student who had come to be marginalized by a classroom reality focused only on his inabilities, rather than his strengths:

We do know this much, though: There is only one Tony, he has unique potential, and only moral perception recognizes the unique, irreplaceable, and one-time-only characteristics of persons and contexts. In the end, only moral perception can see beyond the actual into Tony’s best possibilities. It is a prophetic art.

As teachers, we must seek a form of prophecy, one based on the conviction that each child is absolutely unique and irreplaceable--the view that each child has something to give to the world that no other person is capable of giving, and that it is our job, along with the community we create within our classrooms--to teach the Tonys of the world to find within them what their true vocation is.