Defining Dimensions of Learning Circles

Diversity of Participants

While learning circles are a form of "community" learning, the goal is to unite people with diverse perspectives, experiences, and backgrounds in contrast to collecting “like-minded” participants. Networked learning can extend the range of interactions helping participants from different regions or occupational sectors of society, different levels of skills, and different backgrounds, to understand how their contextual lenses provide different images and understanding of similar experiences. When differences held are honored, valued, and integrated, increasing the diversity of the participants who share a common goal can result in more meaningful and deeper knowledge construction. Trying to think from the perspective of people who have very different views on problems encourages a wider and more flexible form of thinking. Innovative creative thinking is a highly valued skill, but there is little consensus about how one develops these skills. Psychologists have described it as a "flow" state where time-consciousness fades (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990). Social-cultural theorists suggest that developmentally, the process is shaped and stretched by interaction with more capable peers (Vygotsky, 1978). Participants are challenged to participate in project development with people who have very different life experiences and knowledge communities and are asked to extend and apply their ideas in new contexts. In doing so, the goal is to facilitate structured interchange to create a zone of creative thinking that moves one away from their everyday mindset. The willingness to try to look at from the perspective of others, as imperfect a view as it might be, often provides new insights when the seer once again returns their focus on their own issues.

Essential to learning circles is a focus on collective cognitive responsibility for knowledge building (Scardamalia, 2002). Teaching is often seen as a process of creating well-vetted materials and sharing these with students who are to learn them. Learning in that context means being able to repeat back the material with high fidelity. Since this process does not always provide the link between experience and accepted knowledge, children are instructed to ignore what they see or feel and accept on faith what is known to be factual. Teaching in this manner treats knowledge as faith-based rather than evidence-based. Without respect for observational evidence and critical reasoning processes, the process of building knowledge is subjugated to the claims of authority. In learning circles, each participant is encouraged to share their thinking and knowledge structuring with the group. No single person is the expert with the final say on what is or is not the truth. Rather the group is charged with finding the basis for their knowledge. Young children might wrestle with how they can be sure that the sun is not, as it appears to be, setting at the end of the day. Adults might question the evidence that suggests the technology leads to higher levels of achievement, or how to compare online learning with other means of learning. The work of building and supporting ideas to create models that help make sense of the world is what is meant by knowledge-building dialogue. Consistent with Berieter's (2002) challenge of the "folk theory of the mind" as a file cabinet, a repository of knowledge, learning circle interaction conceptualizes the mind as a dynamic processor. Language is the power tool for constructing knowledge and given the dynamic, emergent properties of both the social and physical world and our means for understanding, knowledge building involves constant remodeling. The central role of knowledge-building dialogue means that everyone in the circle needs to pay attention to how they use language. It takes work to keep the focus on dialogue rather than monologues or heated exchanges. Structuring the work to include multiple projects with multiple participants encourages a process of shared sense-making--of collective cognitive responsibility.