Building community appears to be a popular enterprise in these times. If not the actual construction, at least the appearance or the symbolic assertion of community marks an important dimension of contemporary American society and schooling. To strive for community can denote efforts to mend the fragmentation of the social fabric, to redress personal alienation, or, among other things, to strengthen social (e.g., national) identity. Similarly for schooling, establishment or rebuilding of community can inspire improved school or class “spirit,” can spark social conscience toward a flurry of public service activities, and can signal initiatives to reduce biases and divisions. Common circumstances (e.g., Miss Spearman's 2nd grade class) or shared and presumed intentions (e.g., “learners”) also signify characterizations of or hopes about types of educational communities. Not only is the sense of community ambiguous in these examples, very important elements of community likely are absent.
Easily recognized is that most of these references usually indicate relationships between individuals that are distant or impersonal, even theoretical. That is, for example, individuals can hold membership in such groups with only impersonal or even no personal relationship with another individual, by self-recognition of the asserted or claimed community or by assent to administrative decision. Consequently, individual “members” of such groups frequently find that they are “bowling alone.” They are not just “by themselves.” They neither offer nor receive support, encouragement, care, or concern from others; they simply are not involved in a mutuality of relationships. These types of groups properly are societal structures. However, they are falsely represented as communities.
The point of this distinction, however, is not definitional. Our ordinary lives as well as our uses of language routinely accommodate vast ambiguities of meaning. However, our society and especially our schools need increased clarity of understanding about community, especially in these times. Consideration of the nature of community certainly can aid the pursuit of enhanced educational quality. Moreover, that prospect must not be a fad.
One notion is central to community: mutuality of relationships.1
This mutuality is personal, interactive, and immediate. In community, persons cannot be distant or remain marginal. Individuals in community also are active, not passive. They act, but they are not acted upon.
Each person in a community supports, encourages, and cares about the others, not for his or her own ends, but rather for those of the others. Unquestionably, this characteristic feature of community constitutes a set of high expectations. Many Americans, certainly many educators, likely will label such high expectations as abysmally unrealistic and unachievable, especially in schools, and confidently will predict failures and compromises as certain outcomes. These perceptions and predictions, moreover, probably are correct, at least in the short term. On the other hand, this notion of community is not an achievement. It is an undertaking.
Thus, intentions of persons who would be in community are not just important; they are crucial. Still, these intentions are not so much inviolate criteria as they are matters for action, reflection, deliberation, commentary, and revision. Within these conditions, persons in community confidently can know that their every step will not be sure, that they will stumble and falter as they interact, that they will fail and that they can build from their mistakes, that they will never “get it all right for all times,” and that they have the sure support of their community to participate in the invention of fresh trials. A productive community “is a continuity of action, not process.”2
Most individuals, indeed, have abundant experience in such a community, specifically in the family of which they are one among several members. Their experience in such a community instantly enables them to recognize that individuals in this particular mutuality of relationship do not always “get along,” nor are all activities positive or successful. Nevertheless, individuals continue to pursue this mutuality even when it is stressed to unimaginable limits. They never seem to “arrive.” In most cases, they continue the undertaking.
Classroom groups can become communities in fact and not simply in myth. So, also, can teachers and educational leaders become identifiably productive communities. Availability of time and study as well as situation and motivation can aid the deliberate development of such communities. On the other hand, community cannot be mandated, asserted, nor managed into existence. It cannot be so maintained. Only individuals in relation can become and sustain community.
Building community in education must extend beyond popular commentary and advocacy into action. Community will engage many individuals' ideas and actions, not just those of teachers and parents and legislators. It also will involve the reflective interactions of students as agents, not as objects or actors. In this undertaking of community, some attributes of schooling as it presently is known may, but may not, change. Likely, however, the undertaking of community will strengthen individuals' lives, and it certainly will enhance their understandings. Such probable consequences merit the resources, leadership, and nurture necessary to the enterprise.