Community in the Classroom

There are several ways to conceptualize community in the classroom. This entry reviews ways to bring community into the classroom through developing new social conditions or participation structures in the classroom; treating cultural diversity as a valuable part of instruction; having students conduct participatory action research; and using new literacies such as virtual social networks.

The first approach focuses on the arrangement in classrooms of new social conditions or participation structures that facilitate enhanced ways of interacting between teachers and students. The classic research of Susan Philips on participation structures and of Kathy Au on talk-story reading both attempt to make pedagogical contact with ways of interacting in the broader school community and represent examples of this reorganization of classroom participation. This work has served as a model for much subsequent research in classrooms.

A second way of bringing community into classrooms has been to treat cultural diversity, especially social practices, forms of discourse, or modes of reasoning, as an asset for instruction. This entails helping teachers envision the value of these practices while guiding them in connecting them strategically to the process and content of classroom instruction. Carol Lee's research on “cultural modeling,” for instance, seeks to establish productive pedagogical connections between students' everyday experiences and academic learning by starting with everyday experiences from African American students' lives, analyzing texts by African American writers who use African American Vernacular English (AAVE) and the rhetorical strategies of that culture, and then analyzing other literary traditions. Norma González, Luis Moll, and Cathy Amanti collaborated with teachers in conducting ethnographically informed household research to identify and document the “funds of knowledge” of students' families. Working in collaborative teams, teachers then conceptualized how to transform what they learned from the families into curricular goals, lesson plans, and practices. In these examples, teachers must both overcome any deficit assumptions about the students, families, or their practices and avoid dismissing the value of working-class families' knowledge when compared to the academic curriculum. This capacity to understand and appreciate others who may be significantly different from oneself, and make connections through students' experiences to classroom learning, while positioning oneself strategically both in and out of classrooms, represents a difficult but fundamentally important challenge for contemporary teachers, especially given changing student demographics. Recent research provides documentation of various ways to bring community into classrooms, including home–school relations, connections between home and school literacy, and as part of broader educational reforms.

A third way of bringing community into classrooms has been through the participatory action research of students, where the community itself becomes a site for research about issues that matter to students or their families. Research by Julio Cammarota, for example, depicts how high school students satisfy their social science requirements for their senior year while learning how to apply ethnographic methods to the study of their schools and communities. Students conduct observations of social settings, carried out weekly for several months, and document their findings in multiple modes, such as field notes, poetry, photos, and videos. These become tools for expanding students' thinking. The process of observing and documenting creates new student-generated knowledge concerning the details of social problems, such as racism or poverty, and their connection to school conditions. Students share their insights with others, including school officials, their families, and professional researchers, which, in turn, motivates students to prepare themselves academically and become advocates for social justice.

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