I have spent a lot of this
month thinking about community. Of course, as those who read my blog know, I
have written a lot about community over the past year, but I’m teaching summer
classes and preparing my discussion notes prompted me to think about what I
have learned about community this summer.
Writing within a community
of writers has always been important to me as a writer and so I have always
worked to provide that same sense of community for my writing students, but
recently I have become very interested in what makes a community and how a
community is formed. I know that communities don’t form by accident and simply
assembling a group of people does not a community make. Last summer I wrote “What is a community?” and “Creating a Classroom Community;” however it is when I began learning more about social capital
theory that I was able better understand how community works. Social capital is
essentially the investment of your time, energy, and knowledge in a specific
community and the benefits you derive from that investment. A sense of
community is important to your willingness to invest and your level of
involvement and commitment plays an important role in what and
how much you will give to the community.
So what makes someone more likely to invest in
a community? Community members have to want to join. Possessing both power and
agency are also important for the members of a community to develop the trust
essential to social capital. This trust must encompass social controls as well
as reciprocity. Building a community requires willing members, trust, social
norms, and reciprocity. This summer as a National Writing Project Site Director
I’ve had the privilege to observe the formation of four communities of writers
(read more in “Transformations, Magic, and the Power of Writing and Writing
Teachers”). While I agree that those
qualities are essential to creating social capital in a community, I also
believe there is an essential ingredient missing from that list. I believe the
group members must share a common goal in order for a true community to form
from a group of individuals and for social capital to develop within that community.
It
seems as if I’m stating the obvious. Clearly the group formed for a particular
reason. What I mean is an actionable goal that they are ready, willing, and
able to do something about. It is more than believing or caring about the same
thing – it is working on something together. I think this is the reason why
some classroom communities thrive and others wither on the vine. I’ve long
known that we can make community work in an National Writing Project Summer
Institute – especially if we take care with recruitment and selection – but
this summer the Morehead
Writing Project tried an online Summer Institute for the first time and we were more
than a bit worried about our ability to create community without the
opportunity to bond over parking woes, shared meals, and all the side jokes
that come with sharing space for an extended period of time.
What
we have found is that we can create an online writing and learning community.
Our online group is working together, supporting each other, and bonding. I
feel it and see it but more important so do they – and most important of all
(to me anyway) is that they see the importance of this sense of community to
the growth and development of their own students. In their own words, they have
noted that what has made the difference for them in their sense of community is
the level of trust and sense of equality in the group as well as the open and
available communication streams. We use Twitter (#ENG608) as well as sharing
documents that we create together and comment upon those individually written.
Trust has been established because we have shared extensively and increasingly
openly our fears and failures. We also know that we can trust that help,
encouragement, and interest are there from the other members of the group. My
less-successful classroom communities did not have this level of trust and
reciprocity so this is something I will need to work on. However, a key part,
according to the online group, is the sense of equality. The students are
taking on leadership roles and with the use of contract grading I am really
able to steer clear of center stage and dominating the conversation. Of course,
this is easier to achieve at the graduate level so I remain uncertain about how
to make it work in an undergraduate class. All this is supported by social
capital theory, but I remain intrigued by my idea of a common cause in terms of
its impact on community.
Teachers
come to a National Writing Project Summer Institute because they want to become
better teachers of writing. NWP believes that teachers who write are better
teachers of writing and so a great deal of time and energy at an SI is focused
on transforming teachers into writers. Once they have experienced the magical
transformation and begin to grow in confidence, teachers then embrace this
foundational idea. I believe it is at this point that the true community forms.
They now have a common purpose and understand how the other teachers in the
room can help them learn and grow as writers as well as teachers, but perhaps
most important they understand how community can help other groups learn and
grow as well.
Similarly,
I visited two different writing camps offered by the Morehead Writing Project
this summer. Both developed writing communities and the kids had a lot of fun
writing, but the second camp focused very closely on “writing for change” and
even though the kids involved in that second camp had fewer previous
relationships I think they bonded more tightly as a group because they had the
mission in common. The first group grew as writers, but I think the second
group grew as writers and as people and as a community.
Ronfeldt writes “In Search of How Societies Work” that there are four major forms of
organization: Tribes, Institutions, Markets, and Networks. He posits that all
other forms are hybrids of these. His theory is that these forms have existed
since ancient times, but each “embodies a distinctive set of structures,
believes, and dynamics (with bright and dark sides) about how a society should
be organized” and each “involves different standards about how people should
treat each other.” I really want to think a lot more about his idea of networks
and their development as I think those ideas work in interesting ways with my
own ideas of community and social capital. I’ve taken a step forward in my
understanding of community and network formation as both a teacher and a leader
as a result of my teaching experience this summer and it has given me a lot to
ponder (and I expect write about) in the future. I'm already starting to ponder these lessons and ideas in terms of my professional writing students and my work as a technical communicator.
