Learning Community

The research, aroused by puzzles in concept of, research on and construction of learning community and beginning with analysis of the two basic components, learning and community, focuses on learning community from sociocultural perspectives. The basic topics are: What kinds of meanings and characteristics does community hold to support learning? On what relations are the connections of learning and community based? What is the mechanism of learning in learning community? What are the basic elements for designing learning community? The dissertation aims at making a mid-level analysis to learning community and constructing a framework for understanding learning community and relating research.The dissertation includes six chapters:In the first chapter (introduction), the dissertation, on the basis of literature research and experimental research, defines the problems to be researched, including many different meanings and understandings of learning community and conflicts between efforts in constructing learning community and traditional viewpoints on learning in schooling. The problems require further research on epistemological, sociological and anthropological mechanism underlying learning community. The chapter also introduces perspectives of the research, i.e., a mid-level research from social constructivist and sociocultural approach to knowledge and learning.The second chapter discusses the meanings and implications of learning in learning community, dealing mainly with sociological foundation of learning community. The dissertation explores here community and society, community and organization, and their different sociological meanings and research contexts. The concept of community changes over time and age. Community, in the sense of re-constructed meaning in contemporary context rather than original meaning,constitutes the platform to support learning as knowledge construction and meaning negotiation.Why knowledge and learning rely on community as setting is the focus of chapter three dealing with epistemological foundation of learning community. The chapter discusses in turn the following points: the viewpoint that knowledge is socially constructed provides the theoretical foundation of situating research on learning in the context of community; extension of knowledge to epistemological and ontological dimensions makes knowledge acquisition go beyond its dependence on individual and explicit dimensions; participation in practice becomes new metaphor of learning; extension of knowledge to knowing in practice facilitates participation and practice as approach to knowledge acquisition and also views learning itself as practice; reinventing education through building learning community is in fact practice of re-constructing learning.The fourth chapter explores how meanings are negotiated in community of practice, what aspects constitute common characters of communities of practice of different shape, and how learners develop in community of practice. Practice and identity are analyzed in parallel to reveal mechanism of meaning negotiation and learner development.What can be designed to cultivate learning community is treated in the fifth chapter. The essential characters revealed in chapter four are quoted to define a design space for cultivating learning community. The space concerns tensions in four dimensions: participating-reificating, designed-emergent, local-global, and identifying-negotiating. The chapter draws and analyzes several cases to probe into approaches to designing learning community in these tensions.The last chapter defines in retrospect a proper standpoint for the foregoing research and tries to consider values and tasks of different researches on learning community. Starting from analysis and design of community of practice, the chapter adopts a three-level analysis model for understanding learning community and extends both upward anddownward. The dissertation advocates designing multiple learning spaces on the base of research on learning community and, with such standpoi...