Learning as a communal process and as a byproduct of social activism (original) (raw)

2007, Outlines Critical Practice Studies

The purpose of this paper is to draw out the consequences of the communal character of learning approach promoted by a sociocultural framework. This approach has both descriptive-analytical and prescriptive-guiding power: it helps to analyze existing practices be they traditional, exclusive, or innovative but, what is, probably, even more important, it also helps to guide practitioners in the design of more inclusive educational practices. In the first part of the paper, we will provide a framework for analyzing the case of a shift from a traditional institutionalized perspective that understands learning as an individual process located in the head of the learner to the institutionalization of learning as a communal process -a regime which helps avoid constructing children in terms of a deficit model, disability, and academic failure. In the second part of the paper, we will discuss how treating learning as a communal process can guide an educational practitioner to develop a new pedagogical regime of a learning community of social activists that leads to inclusive pedagogy and eliminate "zones of teacherstudent disability." 1 Parts of this paper were presented at According to our socioculturally-based analysis of traditional education, the vitality and persistence of the deficit model in formal education is rooted not so much in attitudes of individual teachers or their educational philosophies as in the "pedagogical regime" of traditional, institutionalized, formal education . We define a "pedagogical regime" as a coherent set of emergent patterns of interaction that arise from the interplay of the participants' concerns and purposes and the organizational structures, cultural expectations, and normative interactions of the classroom community which organize the participants' social relations. The participants' concerns can be seen as emergent properties of complex systems and are shaped and constrained by institutions, practices, and cultural values. At the core of the traditional pedagogical regime is a split between and a discoordination of the relationship between the instructor's and the students' purposes and concerns -between their hopes and their fears. A central element of this traditional regime is that the instructor's concerns are individualistic -they are aimed at effecting desired changes within individual