B.09. Learning Communities as Transformative Environments: Bridging Local Action and Global Challenges
Cooperation between educational institutions and local organizations is crucial for future education. It fosters student and citizen agency, supports the transformation of socio-ecological systems, and drives local changes in response to global challenges. Partnerships among educational institutions, organizations, and collective movements promote the creation of learning communities (LCs), which advance collective knowledge while supporting individual learning. Examples include Italian community educational pacts, Viennese Bildungsgrätzln, and Community Schools in the UK. Despite various frameworks addressing LCs, there is a need to understand how to compare and implement these initiatives.
LCs represent a transformative approach to education, emphasizing collaboration and the co-creation of knowledge. They are living spaces of democracy, extending education beyond formal institutions to include informal environments. At a micro level, they consist of individuals who share common goals and engage in joint activities. At a broader level, they function as systems or networks involving groups, organizations, institutions, or collective movements that co-generate knowledge through a collective learning process, offering concrete solutions to current challenges.
This panel focuses on LCs as an innovative pedagogy and invites theoretical and practice-oriented contributions on:
- Pedagogical approaches that promote LCs, such as action research, project and problem-based learning, service learning, debate, or cooperative learning, also integrated with digital tools.
- Competences necessary to sustain democratic participation and agency development, such as critical and systems thinking, collaboration, and flexibility.
- Theoretical frameworks for LCs (such as ecological systems theory and socio-ecological approaches), and evaluation strategies and tools.
- Challenges, opportunities, drivers, and barriers in collective and interorganizational learning.