1.1 Purpose, Identity, and Values
"Ideally, everything in a community - its members, its activities, its processes, its values - point back to and strengthen the same thing: the organization’s purpose."
-- The Community Canvas Framework
A community has a purpose: a mission or reason for existing that is a critical part of its identity. Because community tends to emanate from the connections of people with shared values and goals, virtually all healthy communities can answer what values their group believes in or identifies with. We can see why these aspects of community make up the innermost ring of the community canvas framework.
Another way to see identity is the boundaries between the inside and outside of the community space and time. Even communities that claim not to have boundaries are still typically composed primarily of people who want to be in the group, making them most likely for group membership. Membership gives individuals safety and security, which means that group intimacy can develop. Membership also provides individuals with a sense of belonging and identification. This characteristic is a feeling, belief, or expectation that one fits in with the group and has a place within it. It is a sense of acceptance by the group. Individual members lend their energy and participation to the community in exchange for membership in it. Members share a symbolic requires a system of shared symbols.
Purpose
HPL as a course gives students familiarity with certain foundational understandings of the educational discipline. As a constructivist course based on situated learning within communities of practice, it also posits, to some extent, that these understandings are in flux, and learners themselves are positioned to help create the knowledge that informs them as a community of practice.
The course also coincides with most of its students’ first experience at HGSE, making it their first offering. Most students will experience it as the entry point to their M.Ed degree at HGSE and the broader Harvard community. For many, it is their first graduate school course, their first American educational experience, or their introduction to the field of education. It will also likely represent an introduction to the “constructivist” educational format for many students.
This plethora of "firsts" brings up an important question. What is the relationship of this experience to the larger learning ecosystem of their Ed.M. experience at HGSE? To what degree should HPL - as an opportunity for leveraging foundational insights, interfacing with the community, and exploring the issues of the field - also function as a preparation or exploratory experience for HGSE, with opportunities to network and build community with new classmates?
This tension is actually at the center of students’ experience of HPL and the course itself. Over the previous year, students, in their evaluations of the 2020 course, spoke of how applicable the academic content was in engaging with the year ahead, whether they had a background in education or not. However, many also identified confusion about the thru-line between HPL and HGSE. Additionally, half of the students felt “not well connected” to other students in the course, and some stated that they wished they had learned more about members of their cohort before exiting.
Although we will deal with this mostly in other sections - particularly about onboarding and course content - here it is argued that HPL is more than well-equipped to serve both the purposes of delivering academic information and fostering a community that centers students in the HGSE experience. Although it may not be an “official” introductory experience to HGSE yet at the time of writing, due to its placement at the very outset of students’ HGSE careers, HPL will, to some extent, be interpreted as such.
As students are looking for guides to orient themselves and their experience in the HGSE community, an intentional onboarding process that emphasizes the significance of community can ultimately help leverage these social connections in a way that enhances the course's community of practice. By anticipating this need for students to orient themselves, we can create suitable support systems to reinvest student time and effort towards engagement with the community of practice and course content.
The tension between those two goals - we might call them HPL and HGSE-facing, respectively - is also a bit of a false dichotomy and does not need to cause any trouble. The more positive a students’ experience in HPL, the better overall their HGSE career. Throughout this paper, it is claimed that, with some minor changes of perspective in the way community is embedded throughout the course, student motivation can be leveraged so that the community “runs itself” (indeed, there would be no other way for it to run). By inspiring students to be accountable for the community as co-owners, students will naturally begin to shift their thinking away from a “top-down” emphasis on community - as a requirement or protracted “offering” to be “offered” to students by the teaching team and appraised at arm’s length for relevance - towards an emphasis on individual members as the agents of community.
Values and Identity - Who Are We, and What Do We Believe In?
HGSE has a mission emblazoned in one phrase: “Learn to Change the World”. This mission captures a core belief shared by the wider HGSE community, that education can change the world, signifying that HGSE is a place where people “learn to change the world”.
HGSE also has a set of core values by which it attempts to maximize the effects of its mission. These are called the Three C’s, and they are as follows:
Cultivate Innovators and Leaders
Collaborate on Questions that Matter
Communicate with the Field
Likewise, HPL has a set of core values to optimize the experience of its students.
Professional Identity
Equity
Agency
Demonstrating Mastery
Situated Learning
Communities of Practice
HPL’s core values tell us a lot about how its community members relate to the course community and how it sees its members. Two apparent themes that are obvious from the goals are that 1), HPL respects its members as professional and equals, capable of participating actively in their own learning experience and community and demonstrating mastery in various ways, and 2), HPL takes care to arrange these learning experiences to be relevant and connected.
In the next section, we will discuss how these visualizations of members contribute to our community’s values.
What are How People Learn’s objectives for the community? The sixth core value, communities of practice, states that “though learning may be personalized in various ways in HPL, it is not an isolated, individual experience. Our hope is that you contribute to and feel included in a community of learners that includes classmates, faculty members, and course facilitators. HPL is embedded within a larger learning ecosystem and is related to the rest of your Ed.M. experience.” Therefore, an important aspirational component of HPL's identity to craft experiences in a way that promotes a collaborative and networked learning experience that connects back to HGSE.
In the next section we will also ask, what do the members of such a community do and think?
Citations:
Community Canvas, The. (2020). The Community Canvas Framework. Retrieved from https://community-canvas.org/