Community Learning Environments Research Articles

TEACHER EDUCATION FOR PREPARING TEACHER IN AN INCLUSIVE CLASSROOM

One innovative strategy for helping students with special needs and other forms of disability succeed in school is known as inclusive education (IE). The goal of inclusive education is to help all students succeed in school, but it prioritises helping children from low-income families and other groups who are more likely to experience prejudice and exclusion. Assuming a sufficient network of support services is in place, the approach suggests that all students, regardless of disability, should have equal access to public schools and community learning environments. The concept of inclusive education was reaffirmed at the 2000 World Education Forum in Dakar, Senegal, and was first accepted at the 1994 World Conference on Special Needs Education: Access and Quality in Salamanca, Spain. When it comes to creating an inclusive culture in the classroom, teachers have a pivotal role to play in terms of their attitude and ideals. Students' emotional well-being and sense of self-worth are profoundly and permanently impacted by the beliefs and demeanour of their educators. For inclusive education policies and initiatives to be effective, instructors must possess the necessary knowledge, skills, and values. A variety of viewpoints regarding the overhaul of our educational system continue to surface, touching on topics such as the redesign of course syllabi and the alteration of the learning environment. There are a lot of different viewpoints, but all the experts agree that insufficient teacher training is a huge problem. The career that paves the way for other professions, like all others, requires ongoing skill development. Keywords: Inclusive education, self-esteem, differently abled, LEAD, Inclusive Classroom.

Study on the Development Characteristics and Current Situation of Community Learning Environment in China

Study on the Development Characteristics and Current Situation of Community Learning Environment in China

Weaving critical theory, fashion, electronics, and makerspaces in learning: fashioning circuits – a case study

ABSTRACTFashioning Circuits is a humanities course designed to explore how fashion, electronics, social issues, and makerspaces interact with design and critical theory. Digital humanities scholars and practitioners have seen an emergence of public art and representation beyond the academy, specifically applying interdisciplinary university curricula to youth learners in the community. As this university course expands into the public domain, the social discourse around gender, technology, and fashion are threaded with the “making” opportunities to tinker and design in order to solve real-world problems in the community. This article is an ethnographic case study, which details the Fashioning Circuits learning experiences, specifically to understand how open education projects and shared curriculum knowledge can exist within the postsecondary and community learning environments. Through the intersection of media ecologies and contemporary fashion design offers this emerging pedagogical practice asks learners to build artifacts that engage with real-world problems. To encourage critical making, that is, an emphasis on the process rather than the product, it is important to center learning experiences around issues and ideas to find solutions and not focus on end technological outcomes alone.

Building Student Engagement, Inclusion, and Retention

ABSTRACTThis article presents experiential games and activities to enhance the community learning environment, and demonstrates their application and benefits for college students. The games and activities are community building in the sense that they are effective tools to develop productive student engagement through positive social interaction. They break down the walls of fear, isolation, and confusion, regardless of where students have lived or their cultural context and background, and they encourage student retention and success. These tools can help construct safe and inclusive learning environments where students can feel motivated to excel. Although presented for use with college students, they could easily be adapted to a variety of environments and age groups.

When style meets pattern in mentoring talk: implications for student teacher community learning environments in practice teaching

ABSTRACTThis study investigates how mentor talk unfolds in a community of learners during an entire school year in the context of practice teaching in university teacher education. Specifically, it focuses on how emergent styles and patterns of mentor’s talk shaped power relations in the discourse, promoting different kinds of learning environments. Data collection included 23 video-recorded meetings of the learning community of 11 student teachers and a university mentor and 25 semi-structured interviews with all participants including the mentor. Findings show that styles and patterns of mentor talk are central to how a particular learning environment in a community develops. Implications for pre-service mentors’ roles in the context of student teacher learning in a community are discussed.

Good Practices in School to Educate Critical Citizens. The Youth Parliament programme from the perspective of secondary school teachers in training*

This paper refers to the European project Erasmus + ELEF (European Learning Environment Formats for Citizenship and Democracy, Reference number 580426). The aim of this project is to develop, implement, evaluate and replicate democratic and innovative learning environments (good practices) in both educational institutions and informal and community learning environments. In this context, over the course of a year, a number of experiences considered relevant have been selected, which constitute the sample of this research on good practices. This contribution presents the educational programme “Youth Parliament”. This is a project with a long history and whose main objective is to train responsible citizens, with the collaboration of various educational agents. The evaluation carried out by the Secondary Education teachers in training on the potentialities and limitations of the programme is shown, based on the experiences carried out in the participating educational centres during the academic year 2016-2017.

Lifewide Learning for Early Reading Development.

The authors examine the relationships between children's reading abilities and the enabling environment for learning in the context of Save the Children's Literacy Boost program. They conceptualize the enabling environment at a micro level, with two components: the home literacy environment, represented by reading materials/habits at home, and the community learning environment (community reading activities). Using longitudinal reading scores of 6,874 students in 424 schools in 12 sites across Africa and Asia, there was 1) a modest but consistent relationship between students' home literacy environments and reading scores, and 2) a strong relationship between reading gains and participation in community reading activities, suggesting that interventions should consider both home and community learning environments and their differential influences on interventions across different low-resource settings.

A Semantic FAQ System for Online Community Learning

Knowledge is a product out of interaction. In online community learning, learners are encouraged to ask questions and discuss answers with each others. The value of participation and sharing during learning is emphasized. However, interactions between learners and between learner and instructor address a problem the instructor cannot be online all the time and it is not possible for the instructor to deal with lots of questions proposed from learners in a timely manner. Therefore, there is a need of an automated FAQ system to support learning efficiency of community learning that everyone in the learning system can share knowledge with and learn from each others. This article examines how to adopt online FAQ mechanism to facilitate knowledge share and demonstrates how a FAQ system can help knowledge generation, accumulation and share in an online community learning environment.

Community Learning Environments

Community Learning Environments

Learning from experience in the community: an ethnographic study of district nurse students.

This study seeks to gain an understanding of the learning experiences of district nurse students in the learning environment of the community, and to examine learning in the practice setting from the perspective of the student. Since the research depends upon the changing and differing interpretations of the individuals involved in the natural setting of the community, an ethnographic approach has been adopted. The experiences of students are monitored throughout the taught practice element of the district nurse course in both inner city and rural/urban locations. Data, collected through interview and observations, are analysed in the context of theory relating to adult learning and learning from experience. Three major categories are identified. Examples from these categories are identified and discussed. The categories are sequential and represent the learning process experienced by the students in the practice setting as they learn to fit into a new environment, test out their own ideas and compare the unreality of college with the reality of practice. Attention is drawn to the difficulties for students of fitting into new settings and trying out change, to the detrimental effect on learning of rigid practice routines and to the powerlessness of community practice teachers to exert a major influence on the learning environment. These issues are discussed in the context of changes in nurse education and evaluation of the community learning environment.

Behavior analysis of residential program development

When institutions are viewed not as locales but as forms of organizing and regulating human behavior, we see that we “deinstitutionalize” by changing the way we organize and regulate, not necessarily by moving people about. This paper examines residential program development as a process of designing and developing community learning environments. The paper asks “What are the essential behaviors of designing community environments?”, that is, what do residential program developers do? Six essential dimensions of program development are identified, and each dimension is critiqued in terms of contemporary practices and needs for innovation. The paper concludes that behavior analysts can play an important role in changing the nature of human service organizations.