Learning Communities and Community Organizations
a proposal to the learning sciences institute
Douglas D. Perkins & Paul W.
Speer
Department of Human &
Organizational Development
Daniel B. Cornfield
Department of Sociology
abstract
The
study of learning is naturally drawn to formal educational and work settings.
Yet even in the most highly educated, post-industrial societies, from the
perspective of life-long learning and human and community development, we spend
only a fraction of our daily lives (and, for most, even less personal and
emotional investment) in school or at work (Galbraith, 1995). In other
societies, formal education and training play even less of a role. We aim to
examine the contexts in which learning occurs – contexts that lie largely
outside of formal instructional settings.
Our aim is to research the way that formal and informal networks of
community, in all their social and organizational complexity, are vehicles of
learning – from cultural transmission between generations, to the adaptation of
people and populations, to mutual assistance within groups and organizations,
to social change in individuals, families, organizations and society.
Organizations and communities
develop through stages much like individuals do. They learn and this process can become the
means for incremental social change (Senge,
1990). Our interest in understanding
learning communities and learning organizations will be approached in two
interrelated areas of research to be conducted locally in Nashville:
1.
Learning in the context of
communities and organizations in culturally diverse settings:
We will study civic learning processes within multicultural and intracultural settings among local immigrant and other demographically-defined
communities (e.g., race, ethnicity, religion, nationality, neighborhood)
through the voluntary associations that represent and serve them. This part of the study is expected to build
on a pending inter-university consortium to
assess Nashville immigrant community organizations, needs, and services;
2. Mediating structures as settings for
learning at the interface between individuals, families, local communities, and
mass society:
Civic learning and the development of social capital occurs, not only in
culturally-defined communities and organizations, but in many kinds of
voluntary associations. We aim to conduct an ecological analysis of
neighborhood-based community organizations (e.g., religious and human service
organizations, school-community partnerships, resident associations) that
provide opportunities for human development, learning, and empowerment in the
face of large, bureaucratic, and often unresponsive government, corporate,
media, and human service institutions.
The central purpose of our pilot
study will be to identify and collect baseline data on the full range of
community organizations in Nashville that exist to serve the multicultural,
citizenship, social support, community development and social change needs of
residents. We aim to measure specific
characteristics of identified organizations, such as their active membership,
the nature and extent of their activity, what explicit and implicit goals they
have, the extent to which they are achieving those goals; and what learning
processes are being employed to achieve them.
A key feature of our methodological approach to both this pilot study
and the extramural proposals to follow will be the incorporation of service-learning
course projects as both a means of organizational discovery and data collection
and, in the subsequent follow-up studies, one of our independent variables in
predicting learning and other outcomes by organizational members. The greatest
gap in the empirical literature on service-learning is its impact, not on
student, but on the material well-being of the communities served and the
learning by community organizational hosts or their clients and members (Cruz
& Giles, 2000; Ferrari & Worrall, 2000).
The
necessary first step toward externally-funded, longitudinal studies of local
and international neighborhood-based learning organizations is to gather
systematic and detailed information on the social ecology of community
organizations through which individuals learn and become socialized, as well as
the network of organizations from which communities learn to respond and adapt
to local, regional, national and global issues.
Hence, this pilot study will be used to help secure external funding for
two larger, longitudinal follow-up studies: (1) it will serve as a pilot for a
series of collaborative international “field school” action-research projects
now being developed by faculty in the Departments of Human and Organizational
Development and Leadership and Organizations; (2) it will provide critical
organizational data as well as qualitative indicators toward developing
quantitative learning-process measures for a Nashville-based in-depth study of
civic learning and social capital development.
problem statement
Communities, in all their social and
organizational complexity, are the principal vehicles of adaptation, mutual
assistance, social change and cultural transmission between generations. Values and norms, character and citizenship,
beliefs and aspirations are learned to a large extent in communities through
socialization of the young and lifelong learning. These processes are part and parcel of what
may be called “learning communities.”
Many
organizations in the community contribute to socialization. Formal educational institutions, together
with other major institutions of society, build their interventions in ways
that may be complementary or contradictory depending on, not only the nature of
those interventions, but also and importantly the characteristics, needs, and
organizational capacity (including existing skills, knowledge base, and other
resources) of the particular local communities.
That capacity is shaped in large measure by the learning that occurs via
those community organizations and the larger institutions’ ability to connect,
understand, and interact with them.
The
idea of “learning organizations” derives from the fields of organizational
behavior and organizational development and has been the basis for
interventions that have been shown to positively affect group and
organizational communication, culture, job satisfaction, and performance (Argyris, 1993; Boisot,
1995; Chawla & Renesch,
1995; Senge, 1990). The learning organization concept was
generalized to “learning communities,” with an implicit intellectual debt to
the philosophy of John Dewey (Ahluwalia, 1992; Dewey, 1928; Wenger, 1998).[1]
The
learning communities idea has become closely linked to the concept of social
capital for application to both educational reform (Coleman, 1988; Nieto, 1999)
and community development organizations and policies (Campbell, 2000; Falk,
1997; Falk & Harrison, 1998; Shapiro & Levine, 1999). Social capital is generally defined as the
norms, networks, and mutual trust of “civil society” facilitating cooperative
action among citizens and institutions (Coleman, 1988; Perkins, Hughey &
Speer, forthcoming; Putnam, 2000; Saegert, Thompson
& Warren, 2001). Social capital has
been an extremely popular and influential concept. Thus far, however, the learning and other
psychological bases for social capital remain largely untested (see below) and
learning organization processes and outcomes in small non-profit and voluntary
organizations and communities have not been as well established as they have
been in larger for-profit corporations and have received less empirical
attention.
In
1998, Doug Perkins delivered a keynote address at the first international
conference on “Learning communities, regional sustainability and the learning
society” (Perkins, 1998). (The HOD
Department is bringing the organizer of that conference, Dr. Ian Falk, to visit
the Program in Community Research & Action in HOD in July, 2002, to consult
on the proposed project.) This was a watershed event, as over one hundred
scholars and community development leaders from around the world presented case
studies and other analyses of mostly local, and some regional and
national-level, learning-based policies and programs to produce social
capital, organizational capacity, and economic development in areas depressed
by decades of industrial relocation and/or centuries of colonial
exploitation. Ideas and programs ran the
gamut from service-learning projects and micro-enterprise training and loan
programs to statewide and international networks of internet-based learning
centers and communities. Some of the
learning models were work-based, a few school-based, but many focused on
community mediating structures (Falk, 1998; 2002).
One
conclusion that can be drawn from the various approaches and results is that centralized
policy development and forced (top-down) policy implementation serve to
undermine the development of social capital, innovation, and culturally
sensitive and ecologically valid
solutions that are the very goals of those policies (Cornfield, et.al, 1998; Muktasam & Chamala, 1998; Perkins, 1995). Another conclusion is that existing models of
learning communities and social capital lack a multi-level framework for
understanding how individual-level community-focused motivations (e.g., communitarianism, place attachment), cognitions (e.g.,
learning, sense of community, collective efficacy) and behaviors (e.g.,
neighboring, participation) relate to group, organizational, and community
network-level social capital (Perkins & Long, in press). At the network level, social capital must be
more clearly related to empowerment (including political access), capacity
(including learning of skills and political process), and resources (including
economic and other material outcomes (Cornfield & Hodson,
1993; Perkins, Hughey & Speer, forthcoming; Speer & Hughey, 1995).
Key questions that our ultimate
program of research will address include:
What is the web of learning influences stemming from the formal and
informal organization of relational networks about the individual? How do young people and adults reconcile
diverse beliefs, values and expectations learned in their communities with the
culture of educational and other institutions of their society? How do community organizations learn to
interact effectively with societal institutions including educational,
governmental, business and religious institutions? How are life-long learning skills acquired in
recurrent, iterative community learning experiences and how do these fit formal
learning in educational settings? Can we
better understand community development interventions as “learning
activities?” How do an individual’s
community-focused learnings, motivations, cognitions,
and behaviors relate to the political, material and social capital outcomes for
groups, organizations, and communities?
The scope of this initiative
includes organizations, especially those in low-income areas of Nashville and,
through outside funding beyond this proposal, in other communities in the U.S.
and in developing countries. The
research and teaching agenda outlined here posits the community as a major
actor in the nexus of learning experiences throughout a person’s lifetime, and
specifically focuses upon the connections and/or disconnections between
community learning and learning within educational institutions both
domestically and internationally.
Field School. A
major goal of the project will be to lay the groundwork for developing a
pedagogical/ research innovation called the “field school.” It is a strategy for involving both graduate
and undergraduate students in structured
team research in communities in domestic or international settings. Each field school itself will act as a kind
of collaborative learning community. We
plan to take a participatory action research approach (Fals
Borda & Rahman, 1991) to the creation of teams of
organization and resident leaders, students, and faculty. The teams will create, disseminate and apply
locally-specific, practical knowledge on community problems, resources, and solutions.
Faculty
will offer a two-semester seminar sequence in which students and faculty in one
semester jointly prepare a research project (i.e., gather secondary data,
conduct organizational analyses, establish historical contexts, formulate
research designs and methods, etc.) to be carried out in the next semester’s
field school, conducted in one or more communities in the US or abroad (where
primary data will be gathered from community participants, development
intervention agents, institutional officials, and others at the local
level). The field school experience may
be developed as an official internship option for both graduate and
undergraduate HOD students, but will be open to any student with relevant background
and interests from any major. The
present project in Nashville will serve as the pilot field school.
research design
Prior
to conducting this study, the co-principal investigators will meet together
over the summer to submit IRB paperwork (by the July meeting), review plans and
timelines, conduct more literature reviews, identify doctoral students for
research assistantships and contact potential community partners.
Beginning in the Fall 2002 semester, we will
first gather data from several sources about the existence of diverse community
organizations in Nashville. We will
gather source books of local organizational directories compiled by the Council
of Community Services, purchase CD-Rom data with reverse telephone directories
and SIC identification for non-residential listings, contact intermediary
sources such as the United Way, Nashville Neighborhood Alliance, Nashville New
Americans Coalition, and others, and conduct key informant interviews with the
purpose of both (a) collecting information about organizational structure, membership,
and learning-related and other goals and activities and (b) identifying
questions to be included in the follow-up survey.
Third, we will compile these data into a database of organizations in Nashville with both location and contact information, as well as any classification data assembled from these sources. Fourth, we will prepare a survey instrument to identify key characteristics of organizations, such as membership size and demographic make-up, organizational purpose and goals and inter-organizational relationships within the Nashville community.
Fifth,
we will pilot test, modify and implement the survey. Our exact data gathering method may be
modified based on our experiences in the earlier stages of this research
project, but we expect to survey through the mail, telephone calls and
in-person interviews. One key challenge
in this process is the expected range of organizational capacities. Some organizations will not possess the
infrastructure to be able to accurately or reliably provide the answers to
information we seek to gather. Relatedly, the individuals within the organizations we
contact will vary in their responses to our questions. As a result, multiple methods and careful
monitoring of the data collection phase is required. Support in this data collection process (as
well as qualitative interviewing – see below) will be provided through HOD
courses 2600 & 2470/3470 in the Fall and 2610 & 2620 in the Spring. These courses, being taught by Professors
Perkins and Speer, are being integrated for pedagogical purposes and
participation in this proposed study will enhance this classroom learning.
Sixth,
we will add the data gathered into our existing database to allow the data
analysis to begin. In the analysis, we
will both factor and cluster analyze attribute data to explore for types of
organizations in an effort to understand the ecology of organizations in
Nashville. Descriptive findings will
depict the types of organizations, their levels of activity, the demographic
composition, goal orientations, and learning approaches of these
organizations. The analysis will also
explore this organizational ecology from a geographic perspective by
scrutinizing the spatial distribution of organizations and an analysis of
spatial typologies. Network analysis
will be conducted on relational data to begin to understand the
interrelationships among organizations throughout Nashville. The organizational ecology will be analyzed
for nodal positioning, density and centrality.
This analysis will be conducted for all organizations and for
organizations by typology.
Simultaneous
to the data analysis, interviews will be conducted with a set of approximately
25 organizations. The selection of the
subset of organizations will be based on the results of the factor and cluster
analyses. These interviews will seek to
discover and observe learning processes at an organizational level of
analysis. The analyses at this stage of
the study, using NVIVO, will seek to take an in-depth look at the processes of
social reproduction and cultural transmission within organizations.
The last
stage of this study will be to prepare both a manuscript for publication from
these data and grant applications for a long-term research support. Future funding will target Carnegie
Corporation’s “Strengthening U.S. Democracy Program” which has identified a
funding theme in strengthening non-profits through improved management and
civic engagement. Additional potential funders include U.S. Department of Education and U.S.
Department of Housing and Urban Development, Ford Foundation, Kellogg
Foundations and the Frist Foundation locally.
chronology
This study will be conducted over a
12-month time-period. Funding decisions are
made in June, study preparations will be made through the summer of 2002 and
the study will be launched in September.
Below, a gantt chart depicts the timeline and
resources to complete this project.
contact
information
The co-principal investigators who
may be contacted for more information:
Dr. Douglas D. Perkins, Human and
Organizational Development
Room 107 Mayborn, 322-3386 / 343-2661 (fax)
douglas.perkins@vanderbilt.edu
Dr. Paul W.
Speer, Human and Organizational Development
Room 106 C Mayborn, 322-3117 / 343-2661(fax)
Dr. Daniel
B. Cornfield, Sociology
Room 309
Garland Hall, 322-7535 / 322-7505 (fax)
daniel.b.cornfield@vanderbilt.edu
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