| This narrative case study was conducted for exploring the sustainability of a bottom-up growing learning community coined as RICH Teacher Community (RICH-TC) by focusing on this question:what are the sustainable factors of RICH-TC? Since its beginning in 1997,RICH-TC has been fulfilling a curriculum innovation on foreign language education at the College of Foreign Languages (CFL) of Zhejiang Normal University (ZJNU).RICH community was selected in this study based on its appearance as a highly sustainable professional learning community.Sustainable issues of learning communities for this study were chiefly based on Mitchell and Sackeny's insights of learning communities as living system and their "three capacities model",along with Palmer's "civic community" and Wenger's "community of practice". Data collected included observations of micro group collaborative work sessions, RICH teachers'forums,academic collaborative activities, and individual interviews with the core members, selected teachers, students,a focus group interview with the pioneers of RICH education practice, and document analysis of related artifacts as well as reading teachers and students'diaries.Two years and a half long ethnographic data collection process not only enriched the sea of data but also nourished my understanding of RICH-TC.Therefore, narrative inquiry as a research method was naturally adopted in the whole process of dada collection and analysis. Data analysis was mostly based on Sholes's scheme, reading, interpretation and criticism, involving three levels of my working as both a learner (reading) and a researcher (interpretation and criticism) in analyzing process.Several features emerged from the data, specifically regarding RICH-TC as a professional learning community and the sustainable factors in its developing landscape. RICH-TC does appear to be a sustainable professional community, characterized by RICH teachers'beings as a community of dream catchers, learners, students'learning supporters,leaders, and friends.Factors contributing to this entail centering on authentic learning, and forming a well-functioning team including the core members and the inspiring institutional leadership that highlight the sustainable issues of learning communities as living systems.Centering on authentic learning in RICH-TC can be spotlighted as focusing on the teachers and students'growing, recognizing the nonlinear character of learning, honoring the diversity of teachers and students' learning and culture background, assuring the excitement of learning, and initiating purposeful learning activities.A well-functioning team is characterized by the pioneers' having been refraining their professional narrative of foreign language education as RICH, transforming their belief system,co-constructing interpersonal trustworthy relationship,distributing the leadership among the teachers, and building a healthy, affective learning culture.The findings of this study also confirm that teachers do not refuse to change, but refuse to be changed. Therefore, the insights of this study call for shifting the focus on teacher development to empowering the teachers to nurture an awareness, and capacity of interpreting and appreciating the diversity and complexity of life, growing as leaders of their professional life.However, this can only be done through disturbing teachers' internal knowledge structure, their embedded educational philosophy through multileveled, overlapped collective inquiry activities.Moreover, experts and institutional leaders'direction should not be merely as importing external ideas and guidelines to teachers.Instead, this kind of direction must be based on the inside interpretation and understanding of the real situation of teachers' professional life. |
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