Communities of Learning

“The world is our classroom.”

That was our motto when we opened a personalized learning lab school in the Houston, Texas Museum District.

50 young learners benefited from building their reading, writing, problem-solving, and character development skills by immersing themselves into a community of learners – those who worked and visited six diverse museums within the Houston district – instead of limiting themselves to a group of classrooms inside a school.

Communities of learning matter. They matter a lot. But support, especially from philanthropists, tends to go to traditional schools, and not to non-traditional communities of learning.

The inability to support non-traditional communities of learning especially impacts black, brown, and pool learners and their families – the folks who struggle the most in our traditional schools. Justice for them depends on the creation of alternate models of learning they can prosper in – including their own communities of learning.

Brian Carey Sims, founder and executive director of Jomoworks, an education management consulting firm specializing in partnership development between universities and K-12 schools, recently wrote about the importance of community in an article published in the March issue of the Stanford Social Innovation Review.

Sims writes,

“During the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, the global shutdown sparked an unexpected return to and reinvigoration of Indigenous culture in Peru. When the pandemic and government lockdown eliminated urban jobs, hundreds of thousands of people left Peru’s cities and walked home to their ancestral homelands. Termed ‘The Walkers,’ these newly migrant individuals and families found security in rural communities that were able to feed everyone throughout the shutdown, using traditional agricultural practices. Offering the world ‘a silent master class in resilience and sustainability,’ these Indigenous farming communities – which have weathered centuries of colonialism and racism and have long been stigmatized as places of poverty and shame – not only absorbed the sudden increases in population, but also integrated new members, including many youth, into community life and leadership.”

“Community-driven, collective leadership is tough to measure or understand using surveys or quantitative research methodologies. The knowledge in which it is rooted is borne out of generations of living and dying, singing and dancing, praying and working, and being. It is encoded in ceremonies and meals, transcribed in smiles, analyzed in barbershops, and disseminated through webs of relationships. Like those intact rural communities in Peru, communities all over the world know how to survive. They know what they need.”

“Perhaps the most important skill for people interested in supporting the leadership and wisdom of communities is the ability to know and trust it when they see it. For people who do not belong to a given community, this can be difficult. The faces of a community’s leadership can change on a month-to-month or even day-to-day basis. Frequently, the people who communities entrust with leadership, such as farmers who know the land but never attended college or street-smart neighborhood organizers who were previously incarcerated, are not the people who funders would entrust with it. When philanthropists seek to invest in leadership, they risk missing the leadership capacity that is right before their eyes.”

“Here are three tips from people who live and work close to injustice about how philanthropy can better recognize, support, fund, and center community-driven and collective leadership.”

“Fund and support the unique knowledge, cultures, and practices that shape community leadership.”

“Support community-defined leadership.”

“Value the research skills and creativity of community members.”

“These tips…that illustrate them show that leadership must be relational and anchored in the wisdom of communities – in their deep understanding of strengths, needs, and solutions. More importantly, they demonstrate the need for funders to support leadership already happening in communities and efforts that develop community-centered leaders, rather than designing programs based on a single, externally imposed definition of what constitutes leadership, or dismissing the leadership of people who don’t hold certain credentials.”

“Funding that takes this into account – including flexible, long-term resources allocated by grantees according to their own definitions of success – supports leadership that is unique to each community and context in which it is exercised. It also demonstrates trust: a central factor in shifting the funder-grantee relationship from transaction to transformation.”

Schools, especially those on the secondary level, have a difficult time building community. 45-minute classes, 5-minute passing periods, 8 AM to 3 PM school days, and a August to May school calendar do not lend themselves to kids building community. Because of these limiting factors, communities of learning usually appear outside of the traditional school setting, whether it be in an after-school program, a YMCA or Big Brother, Big Sister opportunity, or other community-based activity.

The problem with an out of school community learning opportunity is that the traditional school often does not recognize the learning that occurs there. It’s like there is a huge brick wall separating what kids learn in school and what they learn out of school.

This separation hurts kids, especially those who don’t learn well inside places called schools.

Til tomorrow. SVB