• Introduction
• Some Organizational Background
• Ongoing Conversation about Learning
• Shared Learning
• New Opportunities for Learning
• A Note about the Writing
• A Non-Conclusion
• References
• Printable Text of Article

© Copyright 1998-99 by Anne Agee (aagee@gmu.edu), Susan Kehoe (skeho1@gmu.edu), Cindy Lont (clont@gmu.edu) and Ann Palkovich (apalkovi@gmu.edu).  The right to make additional exact copies, including this notice, for personal and classroom use, is hereby granted. All other forms of distribution and copying require permission of the author.

It takes a whole University to educate a student.

Anne: In Engaging the Future, George Mason University's first commitment is to be a learning-centered community. While this commitment has many implications, one of the most interesting is that it makes learning, and teaching, into public, social activities, rather than just private individual ones.

Teaching and learning have traditionally been conceived as having their focus in individual minds. To make an analogy to my own academic area of rhetoric, this conception is similar to that of writing as a private act of an individual writer where ideas are created in the mind of that individual and then expressed to the rest of the world. The reader then takes in the ideas and interprets them in his or her own mind. This model places a heavy emphasis on the knowledge, attitudes, thought patterns, and preferences of a single person.

However, if the paradigm shifts to that of a learning community, then the emphasis shifts also to the continuing interaction of minds with other minds and with the whole social fabric of teaching and learning. To continue the analogy with rhetoric, a collaborative model of writing presents the writer in a social context and emphasizes the collective knowledge, attitudes, thought patterns and preferences that help create discourse. This model does not deny individual creativity, but it does acknowledge the role of the whole community in producing ideas.

Cindy: This is in opposition to a Kuhnian model, where one paradigm (one mode of thought) is designated by the community as THE answer at the time.  In a learning community, there is no ONE approach, but multiple approaches to the same end.  This non-hierarchical, non-linear approach to learning opens up dialogues instead of shutting them down by pre-determining what is appropriate material to be discussed and what is not.

Anne: So, in a learning community, teaching and learning become a joint discovery process. Being a learning community means that we are all engaged in an ongoing conversation about the nature of learning, that we share our learning inside and outside the traditional classroom, that we create new opportunities to learn in ways that extend beyond a traditional imparting of knowledge from the more learned to the less learned. Creating a learning community involves the whole environment of the University. In this environment, a scholarship of teaching is also a scholarship of learning and investigates the whole learning process and all of its participants: students, faculty, administration and professional staff.

Ann: In "Making a Place for the New American Scholar,"  Eugene Rice makes a similar point. In the new interactive approaches to learning, he says, "the intellectual content of the field and the process have become inextricably intertwined (25)." As a result, he continues, the role of faculty changes. "It is a role that is public and shared with librarians, technicians, practitioners, graduate assistants, and peer mentors who are no longer supplemental and supportive, but colleagues in a new sense (26)."

Susan: So, in this article we would like to explore some of the ways that our unit--The Department of Instructional Improvement and Instructional Technologies (DoIIIT)--participates in and facilitates the scholarship of teaching in a learning community. As directors of various units within DoIIIT and with a variety of experiences as teachers, we think that we can offer a perspective that represents that kind of new public role of support professionals in the scholarship of teaching. We've deliberately chosen to set up our article as a dialogue to model the collaborative approach that we think is characteristic of our work in DoIIIT and of a learning community in general.

Next Section: Some Organizational Background