The word community may seem an easy word to define, but getting at the actual essence of a community is much more difficult. As I understand it, community revolves around commonality and connectedness. Let us first consider the concept of commonality, something shared. What is shared could be related to geography or location (neighborhood, town, state), interest (voluntary clubs and organizations), people (family, friend circles), values (causes, charities, political parties), or need (child care, school, work). However, commonality alone does not make a community, or at least not a strong, successful one. It is when this shared thing is able to bring forth a feeling of belonging and connectedness to one another that community really happens and indeed thrives among individuals.
In a language-learning community, the commonalities are based around need and, hopefully but not always, interest. By itself, this doesn't really result in the springiest of springboards from which to launch into that great pool of connectedness! Therefore, we as teachers must be purposeful and thoughtful about the structures we build for our classes, so that there is a higher likelihood that they will be able to support the growth of the bonds necessary for a successful, thriving language-learning community.
I think many teachers and students today conceive of their classes as things - courses, classes or even the classrooms in which the classes take place. We talk about what will happen in my classroom; students talk about taking this or that class. The implication is of the class or classroom as this somewhat concrete thing, a space in which students amass as we work to teach them, or a collection of work which must be addressed and completed. In either scenario, the emphasis is often on doing the work, what happens when the work isn't done, and how students behave regarding the completion of tasks. Consider even the word task, which carries with it the idea of a small and perhaps fairly meaningless chore to cross off a list, an assignment for which to get a check in the grade book. For better or worse, whether we mean to or not, whether this is as a reaction to mandates and pressures or simply how we think school should be, I believe that as completion rather than accomplishment has, perhaps inadvertently, become inherent in much of the conventional text and subtext of education today, so too has the person each student is been unintentionally subsumed by the quantification of the work he or she has or has not done.
From this point forward, I would like to be adamant about the idea that this is a language-learning community rather than a language-learning classroom. We are our members, our students, not the space in which we are gathered. (Although in the name of establishing a cohesive community, I suggest that what is done with the space does indeed matter.) We are our members, our students, not necessarily the work that is or is not checked off in our grade books. Oh yes, work will be done here. And it will indeed be graded. But it will be more meaningful, I hope, than it has previously been, and it will be done in the pursuit of a greater goal, not just for the grade or to please parent or teacher. It is through the construct of community, with the recognition of individuals and how they interact within the whole, that I intend to create the conditions to support this.
As is often the case in discussing aspects of community, I have started defining our language-learning community by hinting at what it is not. It can oddly be easier sometimes to suss out the barriers and impediments to a thriving community rather than to articulate its actual qualities. Let me try to clarify what this community actually is, for me; you may emphasize different aspects than I do, but we will probably all land in the same general neighborhood of understanding.
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I believe that a language-learning community is a group of people (in this case students and teacher/s) who are working together to make meaning out of language. We want to understand what is being communicated and to communicate expressively for ourselves, using our learned language. We understand that mistakes are a necessary part of our process, and that each individual learns and processes language in different ways and at different paces. We support each other in our endeavors and only laugh with, never at, each other. We explore and experiment with our language and encourage each other to do so as well. We take our work seriously, as practice and preparation is necessary for language to stick. We are linguistic explorers who search for word root connections and stepping stones to understanding. We realize that no good work can be done unless we all feel safe and at ease, and we work to maintain that sense of security for each other. We understand that we are all doing the best we can, and that judging each other will not help anyone to feel more at ease. We understand that each of us has a role, and that it is integral to the success of the community for each of us to do our part. Above all else, we believe that learning language can be fun!
