A more explicit understanding of this connection is paramount with the economic, social and environment challenges facing our communities. Maude Barlow talked about situations where citizens are driving the learning, defining the issues themselves. It may not be called “learning communities” but nevertheless groups are empowering themselves to act through self-directed learning projects. How these groups or learning communities communicate the information or knowledge they acquire is another aspect to understanding learning communities.
“Learning Communities is a hopeful concept – while recognizing the difficulty of putting a frame around it....”Responder, Elayne Harris
Learning communities are often synonymous with community development, closely associated with social capital and overlapping with social movements. Research on learning communities will generate valuable opportunities to work across disciplines.
Common terminology will be integral to further discussions and research. For example, the term “community” can be applied to locality, interest, and affinity. The goal is not to say what learning communities should look like, but to identify the principles that would allow people to define for themselves what they want in their community and what they need to learn in order to act.
Special thanks to recorders Nancy Jackson and Jenny Horsman
The State of the Field Report on Adult Literacy was led by Allan Quigley with Sue Folinsbee, (presenter) and Wendy Kraglund-Gauthier as research assistants, all from St. Francis Xavier University. The practitioner responses were given by Charles Ramsey with the National Adult Literacy Database (NALD) and Anne Marie Downey from Literacy Nova Scotia.
This State of the Field Review was assessed as the most comprehensive that has been done in Canada in decades. It examined literacy within different contexts for different groups including aboriginal literacy, first language literacy, women and literacy, and literacy and work. Besides an extensive literature review it also consulted with organizations and literacy experts.