Revisiting learning communities

The three co-editors of this special issue joined forces years ago to examine the current state of research on learning communities in the learning and instructional sciences fields. Our shared efforts included two full-day pre-conference workshops and one open meeting at successive conferences hosted by the International Society of the Learning Sciences (ICLS 2014, CSCL 2015; ICLS 2016). We also brought together researchers who designed Future Learning Spaces to support their learning communities as part of an ICLS symposium (Hod et al. 2016; Hod 2017). At the same time, we formed the Collaboration of International Researchers on Learning Communities (CIRCLES: lc.edtech.haifa.ac.il) and engaged in various research-related activities to advance the shared work and knowledge. Another thread involved an analysis of the entire corpus of articles in the Journal of the Learning Sciences (JLS) to examine the use of the term over time. Our findings of over 100 articles in JLS alone that advance the theory and/or practice on learning communities were consistent with other assessments of the field. For example, Lee et al. (2016) review of ISLS conference proceedings assert that “community” has grown to become one of the most frequently used words in the field. The collaborations and connections among international research efforts in the area of learning communities led to invitations to participate in a special issue of Instructional Science as part of an effort to explore this foundational construct more deeply, particularly in an era of advances in the learning sciences, technology, global collaborations, and participatory cultures (Collins and Halverson 2009; Jenkins et al. 2009; Thomas and Brown 2011).

After receiving over 40 original submissions for this special issue, the review process narrowed down the submissions to a set of four articles that (a) investigate learning communities situated within various contexts; (b) conceive, design, and implement different types of learning communities; (c) elucidate aspects of the learning processes that can each help complement the others; and (d) enrich the idea of what a learning community can be. Of course, the articles in this special issue on innovations in learning communities do not encompass the full spectrum of perspectives that are found within this healthy idea, for it would take much more than four articles to do this. Rather, our purpose in this special issue is to give more space to expanding contexts of research on learning communities and use this as an opportunity to reflect on, advance ideas, and set an agenda. In the remainder of this introduction, we make a modest attempt to frame the historic idea of learning communities within the modern context, show how the different pieces in this collection can help move the conversation forward, and look forward by highlighting areas of opportunity for scholarship on learning communities.

Learning communities and the sociocultural turn in the learning sciences

The 1990s were an exciting and generative time in the fields of the learning and instructional sciences and in the development of educational technologies. Akin to the cognitive revolution years earlier in the 1950s (e.g., Miller 2003), these fields were undergoing what was termed a “cultural turn” (Koschmann 1999) or “sociocultural revolution,” ushering in new theoretical frameworks and conceptual shifts where “learning and understanding are regarded as inherently social; and cultural activities and tools (ranging from symbol systems to artifacts to language) are regarded as integral to conceptual development” (Palincsar 1998, p. 348). Scholars and educators were crossing disciplinary and sub-disciplinary boundaries in anthropology, computer science, education, linguistics, psychology, sociology, and other fields; and changing what and how learning and teaching were studied. This included moving outside of laboratory settings to investigate learning “in the wild” of Weight Watchers classes (Lave 1988), Navy life (Hutchins 1995), science laboratories (Latour 2000), and schools (Rogoff 1994; Tharp and Gallimore 1988). The work was drawing from earlier conceptual theorists such as Mead, Dewey, Vygotsky, and Piaget (e.g., Resnick et al. 1991; Wells 1999) and generating new theoretical constructs of its own, such as situativity (Brown et al. 1989; Lave and Wenger 1991; Sawyer and Greeno 2006); communities of learners (Rogoff 1994), communities of practice and legitimate peripheral participation (Lave 1991; Lave and Wenger 1991), distributed cognition (Hutchins 1995; Salomon 1993) and design experiments (Brown 1992).

A paper by Katerine Bielaczyc and Allan Collins on classroom learning communities in 1999 provided an overview of the work of three research groups who were navigating this changing landscape and exploring its implications for the design of learning environments: Ann Brown and Joseph Campione’s Fostering a Community of Learners model (Brown 1992; Brown and Campione 1994), Marlene Scardamalia and Carl Bereiter’s Knowledge Building Communities (KBC) model (Scardamalia and Bereiter 1991, 1994), and Magdelene Lampert’s mathematical community model (Lampert et al. 1996). Based on their analyses of these models, Bielaczyc and Collins (1999) described the approach as a radical reconceptualization of educational practice where “the defining quality of a learning community is that there is a culture of learning in which everyone is involved in a collective effort of understanding” (p. 271). Reigeluth, the editor of the Instructional Design-Theories and Models book (1999) in which the piece appeared, populated the chapter with footnotes throughout calling attention to “the new paradigm” involving “the notion of culture as a method of instruction” (p. 272) and “the notion of a group as the focus for learning, rather than the individual” (p. 271).

This construct of learning communities paralleled Rogoff’s (1994) conception of communities of learners as an instructional approach “based on the premise that learning occurs as people participate in shared endeavors with others, with all playing active but often asymmetrical roles in sociocultural activity” (p. 209). Rogoff also underscores that classroom communities are specifically designed spaces:

…a community of learners in a classroom is a more self-conscious effort by adults to produce and manage learning by the children and is less focused on carrying on productive community activities than are the relations between adults and children in communities in which children’s learning proceeds as they participate in ongoing mature community activities (p. 213).

One key rationale for the use of learning communities in instructional settings hinges on the idea of authenticity (Hod and Sagy 2017). In their seminal paper called Situated Cognition and the Culture of Learning, Brown et al. (1989) explained that “too often the practices of contemporary schooling deny students the chance to engage the relevant domain culture, because that culture is not in evidence” (p. 34). Following the logic of authenticity, which relates the norms or culture of the classroom to that of those who practice the intended domain, learning environments are designed to approximate the culture of the authentic practitioners (Edelson and Reiser 2006). In general, there have been two approaches for this approximation: simulation and participation (Radinsky et al. 2001). Following the former approach, classroom learning communities are designed to simulate the intended culture. For example, tools like the Knowledge Forum in KBCs indicate when students read each other’s notes (awareness of contributions) or build on each other’s ideas—both of which are practices involved in knowledge advancement within the scientific enterprise (Zhang et al. 2009). Following the latter approach, learners have direct access to the actual learning community where the desired practices and knowledge are negotiated.

Over the years, the term “learning communities” has often been used synonymously with “communities of learners.” For example, the index of the second edition of the Handbook of the Learning Sciences states “learning communities. See communities of learners” (Sawyer 2014, p. 763). There have also been various learning environments that have been similarly structured and grounded in similar theoretical commitments as “learning communities” but have not been named as such, including work involving the creation of scientific communities in elementary school classrooms (Herrenkohl and Mertl 2010; Reddy et al. 1998) or the cultivation of a community of critical historical researchers among youth in a summer program (Rogers et al. 2007). In contrast, at times the term “learning communities” has been used quite freely to describe any collaborative gathering of learners, including discussion groups where learning is not seen as a joint enterprise of the collective. Grossman et al. (2001) even describe how “’community’ has become an obligatory appendage to every educational innovation… Even a cursory review of the literature reveals the tendency to bring community into being by linguistic fiat” (pp. 4–5). Although many learning and instructional scientists have found learning communities to be a central instructional structure based on sociocultural perspectives of learning, it remains a contested and often vaguely applied term in the educational field.

Looking back at learning communities

While modern conceptions of learning communities have been strongly influenced by sociocultural perspectives, the notion is used widely in fields that are not directly focused on learning or instruction, do not take this theoretical stance, or that predated the sociocultural turn. A historical examination of the idea of learning communities reveals that many of the central characteristics in our contemporary conceptions have been evident for millennia. Bielaczyc and Collins (2006) looked back at early Greek (Ionian) society—which has been credited by the late Carl Sagan as being one of the first scientific communities—to find that central characteristics of learning communities existed long ago (600 BCE) as part as the establishment of the scientific enterprise. These include principles such as freedom to pursue questions, diversity of perspectives, and collective knowledge advancements based on shared artifacts (i.e., writing as a tool for thinking).

Skipping forward to modern times, the idea of community itself has been important across the social sciences, in fields such as sociology, anthropology, psychology, business, and political sciences. Early sociologists like Tönnies, Durkheim and Weber all conceptualized “community” in their works. Sub-disciplines such as community psychology arose looking at this construct (Levine et al. 2005). By the 1950s, nearly 100 definitions of community were found within the literature (Hillery 1955), taking on a range of different perspectives but also lacking an integrated view. Clearly, the fragmentation around the idea of “community” further obscures the conceptualization of “learning community.”

Dewey (1897) was among the first to forcefully argue that school and society are intertwined entities, thereby positioning community as a vital concept within educational discourse:

I believe that the school is primarily a social institution. Education being a social process, the school is simply that form of community life in which all those agencies are concentrated that will be most effective in bringing the child to share in the inherited resources of the race, and to use his own powers for social ends. (p. 2)

Alexander Meiklejohn’s Experimental College (1932/1981) at the University of Wisconsin–Madison was one of the first well known examples of a learning community in an educational setting. The Experimental College had many reverberations, particularly among liberal arts undergraduate programs and interest groups. This is exemplified by Meiklejohn being portrayed on the Time magazine cover on October 1, 1928 and his earning the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1963. For Meiklejohn, freedom and social responsibility were central tenets in the creation of an intellectual community. At the Experimental College, students and teachers lived and learned together as they studied topics of common interest based on their intrinsic love of learning (Nelson 2001). While only lasting 5 years from 1927 to 1932 due, in large, to poor relations and tensions with the broader community and institution, Meiklejohn did report that “the college has become a genuine community” (Meiklejohn 1932, p. 225).

The humanistic movement of the 1950s and 60 s contributed significantly to this history, even though it is often overlooked or taken-for-granted in modern conceptions of learning communities. We can see this in Carl Rogers’ use of the term in his famous book, Freedom to Learn, where he envisioned classrooms as “communities of learners,” long before its 1990s framing (Rogers 1969, p. 105). Rogers articulated a theory of interpersonal learning and vision of a human science that today is found within many modern organizations and strongly resonates within learning community approaches (Rogers 1985). For example, the principle of creating a failure-safe environment (Bielaczyc and Collins 1999) is akin to Rogers’ ideas of unconditional positive regard and active listening; the principle of diversity of expertise (Brown and Campione 1994) is akin to making sure each person has a legitimate place within the community so they can be seen, valued, and have the freedom to explore their interests.

Peter Senge’s work on the “learning organization” has been widely influential, particularly within business contexts (Senge 1990), but also in the context of schools (Senge et al. 2012). Senge et al. (2012) explore a new metaphor for school change, moving away from a machine-based view where schools are broken and in need of fixing toward a systems-based view that positions schools as “a social institution under stress that needs to evolve” (p. 52). Learning communities developed across classrooms, schools, and neighborhoods are part of the “methods and infrastructure that make it possible for everyone to foster one another’s success deliberately” (p. 120).

Clearly, the practice of learning communities has become profuse and applied in a range of (sometimes overlapping) contexts and foci for different purposes. The contexts include peer-, college- or higher-education-, residential-, professional-, school-, classroom-, and online- learning communities, just to name a few. The different foci, all associated with the broader learning community approach, have included communities of inquiry (Garrison et al. 1999; Lipman 2003), interest (Fischer 2001), innovation (Coakes and Smith 2007), thinking (Harpaz 2013), discourse (Fish 1980; Wuthnow 2009), teachers (Shulman and Sherin 2004), and the like. Finally, the different rationales and purposes for creating learning communities—ranging from theoretical issues to more practical such as the disconnection between school and society or high attrition rates in particular programs (Hill 1985)—have also influenced the different approaches taken. Thus, learning communities have rich historical roots and a broad reach of branches across humanistic ideas, sociological and psychological concepts, organizational learning, and even more practical considerations, all of which will continue to play a large role in the promulgation and advancement of this idea. Looking backwards into these wide ranging uses reveals the rich nature of this construct and enriches the ongoing dialogue around it.

Looking across the articles

Of the original three research groups reviewed by Bielaczyc and Collins (1999), Scardamalia and Bereiter’s KBCs has continued as part of what Bereiter (2006) calls one of the “longest running design experiments in education” (p. 18). Given this richness and longevity, it is not surprising to see the explicit connections that three of the papers in this special issue make with the body of research on knowledge building communities:

  • The paper by Dan Tao and Jianwei Zhang situates its research within a classroom implementation of the KBC approach.

  • The paper by Yotam Hod and Dani Ben-Zvi points to the KBC approach as the exemplary model of idea-centeredness, and, through an integration with Rogerian person-centeredness, introduces a framework for “humanistic knowledge building communities.”

  • The paper by Crescencia Fong and Jim Slotta focuses on implementations of the Knowledge Community and Inquiry (KCI) approach, which brings together the persistent, technology-supported community knowledge base of the KBC model and the ritualistic participant structures of Brown and Campione’s FCL model (1994).

Further, all three papers take a design approach to the study of learning communities in formal classroom settings (in a 5th grade United States classroom, a graduate-level course in an Israeli university, and a grade 5/6 classroom in a Canadian school, respectively).

A fourth paper in the issue, by Rogers Hall and Jasmine Ma, takes us into novel territory for learning communities research—an investigation of the “ensemble learning” of a high school marching band. Through their ethnographic study of the band’s performance season, they illuminate both designed and emergent representational and social infrastructure and the roles such infrastructure plays in supporting learning in a community.

The four papers thus provide an opportunity to both delve more deeply into an examination of one type of learning community—to explore the expansion of the KBC model through its integration with other lines of research—and to broaden the conceptualization of learning communities themselves through the exploration of ensemble learning contexts. After summarizing what we see as the major contributions of each paper, we attempt to draw out a major theme of research cutting across these pieces.

Innovations in theory and practice

Hall and Ma’s paper, Learning a part together: Ensemble learning and infrastructure in a competitive high school marching band, provides a multi-layered behind-the-scenes examination detailing how a 115-person marching band develops the capacity to perform “The Show”, a synchronized ensemble performance. Their study concerns how people come to learn things that are not possible to do alone and where learning must happen in the course of group performance. Historically, learning communities research has navigated a tension between the collective and the individual—research on classroom learning communities involves examining learning as a collective phenomenon, however the school context values examining the performance of individual learners. This has typically led to shifting the lens from the joint enterprise in order to examine the impact that participating in learning communities has on individual learners. The Hall and Ma paper helps to “discipline the perception” of the reader (Stevens and Hall 1998) as to what to attend to and how to interpret the learning of the collective through the ensemble performance. The central contributions of the work include providing illustrative examples of (1) the distinctive roles that representational infrastructures and social infrastructure play in the learning and performance of the ensemble; (2) the types of shifts in understanding that occur as the ensemble performances progressively improve (such as moving from using external paper representations to coming to understand “how their bodies fit together with those around them” as part of a “more fluid, form-driven understanding”); and (3) the significance of a multigenerational learning community, including both the external alumni to this 25-year old band program and the internal dynamics between “old-timers” and new participants within the band.

Tao and Zhang’s paper, Building shared inquiry structures to support knowledge building in a Grade 5 community, focuses on the ways that a classroom community constructs public inquiry structures to capture and guide their knowledge building. It is often difficult for those outside of knowledge building classrooms to understand or trust that distributed student-driven inquiry can result in coherent collective investigation processes and shared meaning-making without extensive teacher pre-scripting and step-by-step guidance. The paper attempts to demystify this process by examining the ways in which students and their teacher are able to work together to create supportive structures that they re-visit and adapt over the course of a year as their inquiry progresses. Tao and Zhang theorize this process through the construct of “reflective structuration” and document how the structures support students not only in building knowledge of the human body, but in making public aspects of inquiry that support discourse and reflection on knowledge building itself. The work suggests how the co-construction of such structures provides a means to build an understanding of inquiry processes across individual, small group, and collective levels.

In the paper Co-development of knowledge, experience, and self in humanistic knowledge building communities, Hod and Ben-Zvi propose a conceptual framework based on the integration of two lines of scholarship, idea-centeredness (the advancement of knowledge) and person-centeredness (the advancement of self, or self-actualization). The framework is examined within the context of a university graduate course that has been designed as a Humanistic Knowledge Building Community (HKBC), and used to chart the impact on one of the community participants across the course trajectory. In their empirical examining of this student, Hod and Ben-Zvi elucidate different ways idea-improvement and self-improvement are interdependent and intertwined. This includes documenting how the here-and-now of any learning community can be viewed as the sum of the individual participants’ complex lives, and which is in constant negotiation with the there-and-then—the knowledge, experience, and selves of the participants that they carry with them (often unknowingly) into the community. Further, Hod and Ben-Zvi do not just theorize and/or analyze learning this way, but they design for it through activities based on KBC principles along with those of encounter groups (Rogers 1969). This creates a synergy unlike either one on its own.

Finally, Fong and Slotta’s paper, Supporting communities of learners in the elementary classroom: The Common Knowledge learning environment, tackles the difficult challenge of trying to script and orchestrate complex, collective inquiry within the constraints of the short time period of a given curricular unit. Fong and Slotta conceptualized their design within a technology-activity-discourse system which, most significantly, tried to have students create a shared knowledge base to serve as a resource for further inquiry on ecology and astronomy units. Their analysis focused on teachers’ orchestration patterns and discourse moves to foster engagement in these activities. They found that teachers utilized an orchestration cycle of reflect-refocus-release as a way to manage the ongoing inquiry. Teachers also engaged in four discourse orientations (teacher reflection, individual student reflection, community reflection, and community instruction) and highlighted different implications for these orientations with regard to independent inquiry among students. While the next steps are needed to examine the specific learning outcomes related to the different discourse orientations, the contribution of this paper is in showing how their Common Knowledge technology could support KCI design principles in a way that helped the teachers succeed in getting the students to work together as a learning community to build a common knowledge base and use each other’s ideas as resources.

Major themes cutting across the four papers

It is undoubtedly an accomplishment in itself to create a learning community, as it requires building trust, working through interpersonal conflicts to develop productive community norms, and finding ways to encourage and benefit from the diverse expertise of the participants (Brown and Campione 1994). Numerous researchers have taken group developmental perspectives to elucidate this process (Carabajal et al. 2003; Dooner et al. 2008; Hod and Ben-Zvi 2015; McInnerney and Roberts 2004), even going so far to suggest that social failure is an inherent and even productive aspect of doing so (Hod et al. 2018). In recent years, the question of how to create and sustain learning communities has become an important theme (e.g., Bereiter et al. 2017), pitting approaches like scripting, scaffolding, and orchestration (Weinberger et al. 2005) against principle-based innovations that conceptualize and try to work with unknown emergences (Zhang et al. 2011).

In addition to the continuous construction and reconstruction of the social surround, another potent theme across learning community scholarship has to do with the way the individual and community are in constant negotiation, where both high level activity (i.e., what and how the community is inquiring) must be coordinated with the different actions of the participants. Indeed, the individual-collective tension has been a central question from the foundation of socioculturally-grounded learning community approaches. For example, Salomon (1993)—in theorizing distributed cognitions—argued that such analyses often go too far in removing the individual from the picture altogether. Rogoff (1995) explained that just like the effort to understand the human body cannot be done by examining each organ separately, one must look across personal, interpersonal, and community planes. Traversing these planes of analysis continues to be a main theme across learning sciences research (e.g., Stahl 2012). Looking across the special issue contributions, we see this central theme intertwined with the question of structures in each of the four papers. To get a glimpse at the different ways these themes are dealt with, we articulate how each of the contributions deals with the nature and degree of structuration vis-a-vis the individual-collective activity.

In their paper, Tao and Zhang examined two types of reflective processes that they showed served as structures for the community to sustain (“monitor personal and collective inquiry practices”) and advance (“deliberating deeper inquiry actions”). Collective wondering areas were a collection of student-organized “juicy” research questions that framed the shared focus of the unfolding inquiry strands. The collective research cycle model was a collectively developed artifact that represented different aspects of inquiry that the students were engaged in (e.g., asking a question, revise your theory, etc.) as well as the relations between them. Tao and Zhang show how both evolved and were co-constructed throughout the inquiry process to frame both the what and the how of the knowledge building process: What topics or questions should the members of the community inquire into, and how to structure the community’s inquiry practices. Tao and Zhang suggest that these reflective structures are essential in implementing the high-level agency of the individual students needed to sustain the unfolding course of inquiry. Thus, with this idea of structuration, we can see the relationship between individual and collective units of analysis advanced in this paper, as well as a means for negotiating between them.

While Tao and Zhang note that the students’ interests and experiences frame their inquiry (e.g., a girl who frequently catches a cold in the winter began to research how exercise helps our body), Hod and Ben-Zvi extend this to investigate the reflexivity between the community interactions and the students’ interests and experiences within Humanistic Knowledge Building Communities, illuminating how the learning community can lead students to an ever-deepening understanding of their own interests and experiences. At the individual level, each participant actively negotiates the multiple communities that they inhabit, as their microanalysis of one student shows. The collective idea-advancements are situated within the ongoing meta-discourse of who we are as individuals and the community. The community tree activity—where each student must describe who they are in relation to the rest of the community—reflects this individual-collective tension that is negotiated overtly. Likewise, the group norms discussions reflect the way their personal interests and the social interests of the whole are in constant tension. Thus, for Hod and Ben-Zvi, the central structure that sustains the learning community is the negotiated identity of the whole and the individuals within it. Given that identity is, at least by some definitions, an inseparable or core part of who a person is (Gee 2000), it is clear why the authors report such high levels of intrinsic motivation, along the lines of that reported on in encounter groups (Lieberman et al. 1973). One of their key points (which they show in their analysis of Abby) that the negotiated knowledge is situated within this ongoing self-negotiation is thus the structure for knowledge building which sustains the community. Because the process of negotiating identity and the knowledge about learning overlap, they feed each other. Stated differently, what sustains the community in the knowledge advancement process is that the negotiated identity of the learning community is composed of the collection of individuals that are continually reflected on, deepened, and explored throughout the process.

Fong and Slotta add further insights into the individual-collective tension involved in sustaining communities within their design study. Instead of focusing on longer-term inquiry as in the other three papers, they deal with the challenge of orchestrating collective inquiry activities within the constraints of elementary curricular units. The relatively short-term focus across two classroom implementations provided an opportunity to examine how the technology and teacher moves could help enact the theoretical ideas conceived in their learning community model (KCI). Their analysis, which foregrounded the teacher orchestration cycle and their discourse patterns, provided less direct evidence of the negotiation between the individual and collective of the learners than the other papers. Yet, it suggested that the different structures must be tightly coupled for the students to be able to engage in their own individual-collective negotiation. Particularly, their findings that in the second implementation the students engaged in more independent inquiry demonstrates how sensitive these activity systems can be to even slight changes in different parts of the system.

Hall and Ma’s research adds yet another dimension to this question of the individual-collective tensions that exist in sustaining communities. Their ethnography is particularly illuminating as it spans a five-month time period where the level of engagement was high, with students learning together after school and over long weekends. It was also poignant because—more so than in other well-known learning communities (e.g., FCL and KBCs), including those featured in this special issue—the final performance (“The Show”) required the individuals to converge around a shared performance in order to learn how to become full participants in the group. Representational and social infrastructure investigated by Hall and Ma provide insight into the largely invisible ways (especially to outsiders) that activity within learning communities is mediated. While preparing for their final performance, the individual-collective tension was central to the negotiated practice. This occurred through a process of “cleaning” the performances, particularly to avoid “tears” where the complex coordination required of the ensemble would break down. At the individual level, students would “look down” by copiously studying and following instructions from their dot sheets to guide their exact movements. At the collective level, students needed to “look up” at the dynamic and proximal forms of marchers so they could position themselves accordingly. Hall and Ma report that the tension often involved the inexperienced band members attending too closely to their individual parts—a phenomena called “Dot Nazis”—instead of focusing on the collective activity. Elements of social infrastructure developed in conjunction with this representational infrastructure, as more experienced band members positioned themselves as teachers in order to support or guide the novice band members. The negotiation of tensions between individual and collective drivers of the learning community occurred in a particular case involving a struggling band member who was re-assigned a role off the field by the adult leaders who designed and directed “The Show.” A set of more-experienced members protested that such a move was at odds with their collective purpose as a band and smoothed over the conflict.

In showing how these four examples all address the individual-collective tensions involved in sustaining learning communities, we underscore that this is a vital research perspective that requires further attention. As we set an agenda for future learning community research, we feel that it is important that these often invisible structures between the members of communities and the way the community-as-a-whole functions become further theorized and explicated.

Looking forwards: future directions for research on learning communities

There are, of course, a wide range of directions for future research in the area of learning communities. Here we explore three future trends and changes taking place and how they affect and are affected by learning communities. Our aim is to highlight some of the key issues that scholarship on learning communities must contend with.

Where are the learning and instructional sciences going?

The sociocultural perspective has and continues to be profoundly influential in the learning sciences, among the most significant developments in contemporary educational research (Cobb and Yackel 1996). It allows researchers to focus on different parts of the complex system just as understanding the human body requires close looks at different organs without losing sight of their interdependence with the whole (Rogoff 1995). With this frame of mind, we identify two trends within the learning and instructional sciences which, we argue, should serve as a call-to-action for learning communities research. These trends include the spatial and affective “turns” in learning.

Considering societal changes in the age of technology provides a rich way to think about learning communities. In recent years we have seen increasing evidence of a “spatial turn” in research about learning. This adds to the sociocultural paradigm that has undergirded significant scholarship within the learning sciences by addressing the changing societal landscape where people are increasingly connected (Hod 2017).

There are numerous examples of exciting research suggesting that the spatial turn is in the works. The work of Erstad and Sefton-Green (2013) and the Stanford Life Center (Banks et al. 2007) examine the way people’s identities are continuously coordinated between the formal and informal, on- and offline communities they participate in. Research as part of the Learning in a Networked Society (LINKS) center has examined insights on the way learning that occurs within designed technology-enhanced environments can be applied to ambient environments, and vice versa (Kali et al. 2015). The Scratch environment allows users to bring in their own interests as they create, share, and re-mix others’ block-based computer programs in an online community that includes millions of kids around the world (Resnick et al. 2009). Clegg et al. (2017) explore how wearable digital devices can disrupt traditional setups and rules around how spaces are used, in what has recently been conceptualized as hybrid spaces and third places that intertwine scientizing with learners’ everyday lives, cultures, and values. Roschelle et al. (2017) report on the relatively new research field of cyberlearning, which has been awarded 279 United States National Science Foundation (NSF) grant awards by Summer 2017. One of the main principles of this exciting area is that learners “move across boundaries in space and time and interact with a wide variety of people and places. While some cyberlearning research concentrates on the individual learner, much of the research investigates a community of learners” (p. 8). In recent years, new online tools have been developed to allow classroom knowledge building communities to look across the databases of other communities, both past and present, to compare knowledge around different inquiry threads (Zhang et al. 2018). All of these examples show the remarkable ways in which technology has changed the learning dynamics of space and time.

While the spatial turn has been echoed widely, it also requires caution, as “we need more sophisticated developmental studies that help us understand pathways to expertise, since they often seem to involve both informal and formal learning opportunities as people move across the multiple life-spaces they inhabit” (Bransford et al. 2006, p. 42). These calls present one of the most significant challenges as well as exciting opportunities for perspectives of learning communities compared with the 1990s, as the boundaries between where the learning community starts and ends—the mobilities between time and space (Leander et al. 2010)—have become increasingly blurred.

Another trend within the learning and instructional sciences is a growing focus on the “soft” sides of learning, or what has been referred to as the “affective turn” (Polo et al. 2016). These include socio-emotional, personal, humanistic, and holistic views that enrich the epistemic, knowledge building, socio-cognitive, idea-centered, or computational perspectives which have been in the spotlight of the learning and instructional sciences. Learning communities provide a powerful way to frame these intertwined and inseparable aspects of social interaction in human learning.

Exciting research relating to the affective turn has been taking place. Research on productive failure (Kapur and Bielaczyc 2012), mindset (Dweck 2006), and grit (Duckworth et al. 2007) all deal with the way individuals or collaborative groups persist in the face of setbacks, challenges, or obstacles. Personal qualities along these lines are particularly important in today’s economy, where self-direction is arguably more of a requirement for successful learning than ever (Collins 2017). Research on mindfulness in learning has gained traction, with a surge in the number of mindfulness-related publications in recent years (Powietrzynska and Tobin 2016). A book by Baker et al. (2013) on Affective Learning Together, and a review of socially-shared regulation of learning (Panadero and Järvelä 2015) attest to the variety of educational settings and disciplines where research along these lines is taking place. Moreover, recent research has expanded sociocultural notions by viewing cognition and affect as aspects of the same phenomena. This can be found in research on group emotion in collaborative learning settings (Polo et al. 2016), or epistemic affect where “affect and motivation as [are] part of the disciplinary substance” (Jaber and Hammer 2016, p. 190). Building on these notions, Herrenkohl and Mertl (2010) and Hod et al. (2016) both view learning as an interplay of knowing or knowledge, doing or experience, and being or self.

Lines of learning into affective aspects of learning have much to contribute to the learning communities research. When researchers examine collaborative learning in small groups, the way individuals deal with the challenges of solving ill-structured problems, or how socioemotional norms are regulated, they are adding important details to the way learning occurs in communities.

Together, the spatial and affective turns in the learning and instructional sciences open up new opportunities for research on learning communities. Research examining the convergence of these turns within the context of learning communities are an exciting future direction.

Where is the educational system going?

Looking at how the educational landscape is changing also raises several new challenges and opportunities for learning communities research. Recent books looking at rethinking education in the age of technology (e.g., Bates 2015; Collins and Halverson 2009) provide well-reasoned views of the changes taking place. These include an educational system that allows for customized learning based on the interests of students, that fosters students to develop “growth mindsets” so they can be self-directed, and that engages them in systems thinking on a number of pressing socioscientific issues, like global warming. Collins (2017) points to school learning communities like Deborah Meier’s (2003) design for Central Park East Secondary School in Manhattan as the exemplary formal educational model to meet these new challenges.

While the needs for students in the future appears to be moving in the direction of greater autonomy and higher-level thinking, there are many contradictions in the direction the educational system is moving. The latest Horizons Report, which examines global trends in schooling and technology, notes the growing tension between standardized assessment with the need to measure complex thinking of students (Freeman et al. 2017). Although they see the implementation of authentic learning environments—the basis of learning community approaches—as one “we understand and know how to solve” (p. 26), most schools still have rigid curricula and content standards. The 2002 No Child Left Behind law as well as the 2009 Race to the Top legislation in the United States reflects this overwhelming push towards achievement and accountability that act as barriers to many of the needed reforms.Footnote 1

While we cannot say with any certainty where the future of education is heading, we can relate to a “future that is already here” (Isaacson 2011). Certainly many significant changes are in the works, such as redesigning learning spaces (Ellis and Goodyear 2016; Hod 2017), mobile learning and 1-to-1 classrooms (Sharples and Pea 2014), and coding (Freeman et al. 2017). To make a point, we focus on distance education, which is one of the most significant, “exploding” trends cross the educational sector (Collins and Halverson 2009, p. 21). The ubiquity of distance education, in forms such as massive open online courses (MOOCs), raises the challenge of how to create a virtual learning community where hundreds or thousands of users learn together. Although MOOC’s are often referred to as “online learning communities,” in the same way that we do not consider most lecture halls to fit the criteria of a learning community, we should not consider most MOOCs to be. Further, we believe that the person-centered notions involved in building relationships and personalization offer an important contrast to the more typical idea-centered views. For example, many consider Wikipedia as a learning community by pointing to the unprecedented knowledge building that goes on around shared goals and common artifacts (Ben-Zvi 2007; Cress et al. 2016). From a humanistic sense, however, the focus would be more around the small interest groups that form within this massive context and the way they continually expand the knowledge-base in different directions. The fast-changing educational landscape justifies the need to continually rethink our definitions so we can characterize, and in this way guide, the educational changes that are occurring through the prism of learning communities.

Where is the world going?

The Oxford dictionary’s words of the year for 2016 and 2017, respectively, are “post-truth” and “youth-quake”.Footnote 2 Both of these reflect significant and unsettling social and political trends and the vital role of a participatory society to maintain a robust democracy. We believe that one of the most important issues that society is faced with is to overcome divisions and learn to live and work together. Framing diversity as a strength and working together across differences is at the heart of the learning communities approach. Much of the work to date in learning communities (and innovative education, more generally) has focused on the power of the diversity of ideas for co-constructing knowledge. What is needed is a research agenda that helps to deepen our understanding of how to work together across differences in cultural perspectives, race, languages, and belief systems. This may require drawing from disciplines outside of the traditional canon of learning and instructional sciences, as well as broadening the sociocultural lens to encompass a sociopolitical perspective (Nasir and Hand 2006).

A long line of social research has already established that just putting people together is not enough to create a community culture where decency and respect for differences are the norms. This line of research goes back to social contact theory and the contact hypothesis, which showed that certain conditions like equal status are required to achieve desired effects between groups (Allport 1954). In recent decades, the field of Peace Education has contributed to this line of work, highlighting the challenges of maintaining views like tolerance and respect for differences that tend to erode over time (Salomon 2006), while also offering new hopes and innovative ideas for how technologies can be leveraged to bring different communities together (Amichai-Hamburger and McKenna 2006; Yablon 2007). Complementing this is work focused on transforming understanding and interactions among diverse stakeholders in civic institutions and business organizations through creating space for mindful connection and “presencing,” systems thinking, and ever-deepening dialogue and collective action (Briskin et al. 2009; Isaacs 1999; Senge et al. 2004; Scharmer and Kaufer 2014).

One area of research in the learning sciences that seems particularly promising is that concerned with “navigating interculturality” (e.g., Bang et al. 2012; Warren and Rosebery 2011). In this work, learning and teaching are framed as intercultural processes where

…diverse points of view, histories, meanings, and sense-making practices come into contact in real time as students and teachers navigate academic subject matter, and likewise understanding that this navigation inevitably takes place at powered boundaries of culture, race, class, and language… These boundaries are powered because they are governed by “the settled expectations of Whites” (Harris 1993/1995, p. 1731) regarding what counts as knowing and who counts as knowledgeable (Martin 2009). Through these expectations, certain meanings and certain practices—certain ways of knowing, seeing, speaking, writing, acting, valuing—are privileged over others, in society as in school… (Warren and Rosebery 2011, p. 99).

Through research focused on deepening understanding of the strengths that exist in the diversity of cultural, linguistic, and intellectual resources of all persons, work along these lines can provide insight into ways of creating opportunities for transformative actions among learners as they come into contact and navigate across multiple communities. Further, research into learning communities can be advanced by positioning participants in learning communities as meta-level investigators into the workings of their communities through teacher research and youth research (e.g., Ballenger and Rosebery 2003; Park et al. 2017), thereby moving from “research on” learning communities toward “research with” by validating and gaining the richness of perspectives from within the communities themselves.

In summary, by looking at these three important and interrelated trends, we can see a large and distributed collection of research and practice on learning communities and create an agenda for moving forward. Indeed, we can think of the research and practice of learning communities as a learning community in itself. We can prize the fact that there is diverse expertise within it, with the understanding that the members of this community have other commitments and identities at the same time and in this way enrich the ongoing scholarship. We hope that this special issue has refined some of the key points that need to be addressed which can help sharpen the research agenda for the exciting years to come.