My Practice and Community---part 1

In past 30 years, I was taught in traditional knowledge based teaching environment and actually I was doing good in that system and had never questioned that learning system until a few years ago. When I ran a workshop for children, I realized that traditional learning method doesn't fit in those new generation children, who had no interest to learn those knowledge which they can easily gain from the internet. So does my personal learning. I suddenly found although I didn't go to library as before, but I did learned daily from internet, such as Coursea, from my working place or from somewhere else.I was confronted by this challenge, if school doesn't fit in the learning need, how and where should children learn? what is the teacher's role in this learning mode. This question puzzled me until until I finished my study and worked in a kindergarten at NZ. The idea of "Community of practice" is key.

In community learning theory by Lave and Simens(), COP is defined as "group of people who share a concern or passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly." My personal understanding to learning at COP is: Children can learn more actively and in a meaningful way if they can find or build up their communities. As a teacher in community, the main task has been transformed from knowledge transfer to community builder and facilitator. The relationship of children, community and teacher can be simplified as relationship between seed(children), garden(community) and gardener(teacher).As long as gardeners build and sustained the garden, the seed find their way and grow to a big tree one day. Because of this reason, context of each community is very important for children's learning.


When I looked at my working place again from the view of community of practice, the single working place has transformed to a much wider communities.Here I list context and learning of each community.

• First, Let me introduce the physical layout and design of my kindergarten. here are some photos.

This photo showed us the craft/creation corner in our room, we just re-layout that corner to make crafting convenient and enlightening so that children can try their creations easily anytime in that corner. Most crafting materials and tools had been setup that can be easily approached by children themselves. Considering preschool children's age, sometimes also work together with older children to create working manual, such as above "light saber making" manual for younger children's reference. 

Based on constructivism theory, learning is a positive loop with imagine,create,play, share, reflect process. To enhance children's sharing, a "Proud of Wall" was setup to let chidlren share what they are proud of, which in turn boost their active learning. 

Internet is one of the key element in my kindergarten's context. We use computer and online service a lot to do some research or game play, which extended children's learning to a much wide area. 

 The good context need always echo to imagination from children. When a lot of our children showed interest to make "superhero or frozen" wearable, we create this living "wearable art" corner to capture their creations, children visit that place frequently to gain idea from others sharing.

The above photos just give you a glimpse of the physical context of my working place. Actually, there are more than those photos. Such as our outside playground had been layout to encourage children to explore and interact with nature. And Toys are setup to encourage their team playing, Even the outside weekly visiting dump truck can also be part of the context which children got idea of re-cycling and put it into their block game playing as below.

Being meaningful is very important in the community learning and community context design. I can share one of my learning when I just started to work as kindergarten teacher. At that time, I saw a video about making milk painting with milk,food coloring and dish detergent,which was very cool in my view. So in the next day, I copied the idea and made the same run at my preschool room and was expecting Wow from our children. But actually they didn't. After watching my show, children ran away. Why? One year later when I was inspired by the cyclone Pam and tried to link that experiment to simulate cyclone Pam and our daily weather report again, I received the excitements from our children because it is hooked up to their life finally. 

• Parents are also a big context of my community. As as teacher, We will not be successful without parents support. When we ran "Topic news" to help children talk and communicate, a lot of time we need our children to bring the objects(toys or suits) or photos into our classroom. When we ran fund raising in "Daffodils Day", we need permission to get their children outside of preschool.All those projects can't be successful unless get our parents supports. But parents involvements are not simply treated as help only. In our eyes, we think the messages we want to send out to our children in those involvement are: we are all part of the bigger community and help them to learn social responsibility in those living experience. By involving children themselves in all poster or biscuit making, fund raising etc in real life, the impression of social responsibility in our children is better than any teaching in classroom. (this is also one of the key missing part in my home country, where parents had much less involvement in social activities with children). The right attitude and active involvement from parents gave vivid model to our children. Because of that reason, building and maintaining a smooth relations between parents and teachers is a big part of job. Besides feedback parents the progress of their children daily, we also ran regular family activities, such as "Parents Day" to boost that relationship.

• The outside communities around my working kindergarten also , such as library, SPCA, fire department,extends the learning to outside preschool. Every week, children will get chance to visit the local library, where they had schedule kids story time. Children also learned how to read and follow the traffic light while walking outside and how to behavior in a public place.Frequently visit from fire department and SPCA rendered the children emergency skills in a fun way in their early age. All those activities help to build up children's sense of belonging and identity. And by situated in those living experience, knowledge is not abstract and symolic, but is provisonal, mediated and socially-constructed.(Berger and Luckmann, 1966; Blacker, 1995)

SPCA visit with guiding dog

Children after library visit was playing the cars and simulating the traffic jam in their play. 

•  Above contexts and communities are very important for me to be a teacher.but that is not enough for me. Going back to my personal life, I was surrounded by online learning communities, such as Coursera, Edx and my maker space community. Those online communities help me to keep on building my knowledge on demand and keeping my personal learning fun. 

I was teaching at maker space in shanghai

As Lave(1996) said, learning in community is not limited to "isolated" schools and treated as individual's psychological process, but is treated as socially situated learning. All above contexts enriched the learning process and make it more fun. In most of the processes, you possible can't see traditional teaching as I experienced 30 years ago, or maybe you will not thinking we are teaching,but under the big contexts, children and myself are learning anywhere, anytime without feel any traditional boring feeling. That is just the beauty of the community learning. The learning and working experience here totally transformed my view of learning and teaching. Actually, I am trying to avoid using "teaching" now because as a teacher in communities, our major role had stepped back from the dominant knowledge source and direct teaching to the community facilitators.It also released me from focusing on teaching to observing, thinking, facilitating and guiding in my daily life.Only thing left for community teacher to do is: wait and be patient, watching the growth of children under the magic power of community learning...:)