The Community Classroom E-Book

Avery Nightingale

• Herausgeber: Creative Quill Press
• Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

In "The Community Classroom: Learning and Growing Together," Avery Nightingale explores a transformative approach to education that transcends traditional classroom boundaries. Rooted in the concept of a human-centric learning environment, this book delves into the experiences of sisal farmers and their children as they learn mathematics in a community-based setting. Nightingale emphasizes the value of social learning, where knowledge is shared and applied within the very environment where life unfolds. By bringing education to the farming grounds, this approach challenges the conventional reliance on technology and formal classrooms, offering a richer, more connected experience. "The Community Classroom" provides a compelling case for rethinking education in low-income rural areas, highlighting the potential for community-driven, inclusive learning to foster real change.

Leseprobe

The Community Classroom: Learning and Growing Together

Avery Nightingale

Published by RWG Publishing, 2024.

This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.

THE COMMUNITY CLASSROOM: LEARNING AND GROWING TOGETHER

First edition. August 28, 2024.

Copyright © 2024 Avery Nightingale.

Written by Avery Nightingale.

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Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Introduction

Benefits of Community Learning

Setting Up a Community Classroom

Facilitating Learning in a Community Classroom

Assessing Learning Outcomes

Overcoming Challenges in Community Learning

Expanding the Community Classroom

Empowering Learners in the Community Classroom

Introduction

In life, learning is witnessed through various informal settings. Researchers have come out to say that through these informal settings, learning can occur opportunistically while the people are in action. Being social creatures, our learning is always intertwined with what we love to do most, where we gain through association as we educate each other.

This colloquium session will therefore bring sisal farmers and the farmers' children together in one classroom to learn mathematics. The environment will be extended to a more social space on the farming grounds where they live through the community classroom. This will coincide with issues that researchers in developing societies have long been arguing for a human-centric system. The term human centrism is coined to challenge the pervasive influence of technology in many room-based systems in educational learning.

The University of Kwazulu-Natal can be counted as one of the institutions that has embraced a human-centric system by extending the learning of mathematics to a community. The community classroom concept is one of the less room-centric learning approaches that include connectedness to other people in terms of understanding and application of what is learned. The researchers' motivation is derived from the fact that these children are situated in a social setting where learning is supported by the presence of elders and peers. This demographic is perceived by the government and education stakeholders in general as agents of change in low-income rural setups. This research therefore unveils some of the views that can enrich thinking on what good education may look like, especially in the less resourced locations.

Benefits of Community Learning

Children who grow up in institutions do not develop a similar sense of continuity with the past. They live in a continuous present with no sense of drama or use for anything that happened before their individual births. And schools contribute actively to building a cyclopean present. When several generations share the same space and when several generations interact keenly with one another, the benefits are not confined to children alone. In many 'respect for the past' societies, old people used to play important roles in the kinds of wisdom that would outlast individual human lives. In less traditional times, people don't have time for stories, especially from those too old to be of much practical use any longer. Storytelling was not necessarily about folklore or heritage, but simply a means for each age group to celebrate its successes, mourn its failures and share its discoveries with others.

One of the most powerful aspects of learning in a community context is that a person can build on the outcomes and learnings of previous generations. Trudging up the hill towards the school, a girl stopped me - she wanted to know why the sparrows of the village never stopped to peck in my courtyard. This was not a part of her school syllabus. It was something that I had shared with a previous batch of children visiting my home as part of their study of nature. Although sparrows seem to be shunning all human habitations these days, they had been common birds around most houses a decade ago. I told the girl so. She went back to a world where sparrows could still be seen around people's homes and trees, plants and caterpillars were some of the other elements of that world. A world that was not too long gone. She would not take it for granted that things would always be the same for whatever life forms still shared space with humans.

Enhanced Knowledge Sharing

THE TOP-DOWN TRANSMISSION of information to teachers often makes students seem disempowered. However, in addition to learning directly from all peers and having at least a voice, the new Community Class system repositions the expertise from being entirely top-heavy. This makes it possible for all interests or chapters to have a speaker. With a number of group discussions and the forum on their own only, some active interest also often persisted in additional activities in the field. Although, in an active approach, pity arises the possibility for instructors and students to take on the role of a peer mentor. Integrative learning difficulties have shown that the lack of comprehension and deep rumination has been a difficult obstacle to student learning. Scientists have demonstrated the growing contribution of educators to manual application of problem-solving methods. Rather than promoting the hyper-technical acceptance of career education, the study challenges the promotion of such innovative practices and demonstrates the use of training as a medium for life and self-improvement. The symposium also gives psychological encouragement.

One of the principal promising aspects brought about by the Community Classroom is that of the expansion of the knowledge-sharing process. The extent of this enhancement is as vast as the diverse and unique ways in which the system is employed. Whether as a primary means of education, interactive learning, a means of continued instruction, or for the establishment of links with foreign educational institutions, the new digital class documented success in knowledge transfer and increased student engagement. Just as casual conversations can optimize the educational activity by allowing teachers to monitor the classroom actively, the class also encourages student habits in communication, critical thinking, and the explication of reasoning during systematic discussions. Studies confirm that such practices can enhance lifelong learning and self-improvement.

Increased Motivation and Engagement

INCREASED MOTIVATION and engagement are evident across a range of qualitative and quantitative measures. By also capturing the degree of participant interaction via the frequency and content of their interactions, we show that increasing interactivity by providing learners the opportunity to give and receive feedback from their peers using methods like the communal crux, compared to learners who worked individually and submitted more solutions. Additionally, learners who were made aware that their solutions have appeared to more solvers were better connected to the larger network, compared to their counterparts. Threshold concepts in any content area are ideas or concepts that are challenging for students to understand but also foundational to their further learning. It is necessary to identify threshold concepts to better understand areas of struggle as well, in order to provide appropriate instructional support to learners that is required. The literature suggests that identifying such threshold concepts and misconceptions prior to the instruction is indeed key without wanting to spend that VPN to address more effectively and to reduce the size.

How can learners be motivated to persevere through delays in receiving feedback in a community classroom? We began by exploring the concept of future audience, whose support and engagement was hypothesized to motivate learners to persevere in large, massive learning environments. To test this hypothesis, we exposed learners in a MOOC to others in the course, i.e., to their immediate community, who would indeed look at and prove or disprove learners' solutions, offering feedback for the learner and engaging with the content. Over a period of 16 days, learners had the opportunity to provide feedback and solve each other's problems using this inverted classroom. Our preliminary investigation revealed some promising results. Through the availability of feedback of their solutions from different viewpoints and your peers [a study participant], you do get very motivated to consider a more creative and diverse set of solutions to a given problem. In fact, two-thirds of learners considered altogether more diverse solution sets (more unique ideas) when comparing their first to second replies.