essay on learning community

How to Write the Community Essay – Guide with Examples (2023-24)

September 6, 2023

Students applying to college this year will inevitably confront the community essay. In fact, most students will end up responding to several community essay prompts for different schools. For this reason, you should know more than simply how to approach the community essay as a genre. Rather, you will want to learn how to decipher the nuances of each particular prompt, in order to adapt your response appropriately. In this article, we’ll show you how to do just that, through several community essay examples. These examples will also demonstrate how to avoid cliché and make the community essay authentically and convincingly your own.

Emphasis on Community

Do keep in mind that inherent in the word “community” is the idea of multiple people. The personal statement already provides you with a chance to tell the college admissions committee about yourself as an individual. The community essay, however, suggests that you depict yourself among others. You can use this opportunity to your advantage by showing off interpersonal skills, for example. Or, perhaps you wish to relate a moment that forged important relationships. This in turn will indicate what kind of connections you’ll make in the classroom with college peers and professors.

Apart from comprising numerous people, a community can appear in many shapes and sizes. It could be as small as a volleyball team, or as large as a diaspora. It could fill a town soup kitchen, or spread across five boroughs. In fact, due to the internet, certain communities today don’t even require a physical place to congregate. Communities can form around a shared identity, shared place, shared hobby, shared ideology, or shared call to action. They can even arise due to a shared yet unforeseen circumstance.

What is the Community Essay All About?

In a nutshell, the community essay should exhibit three things:

An aspect of yourself, 2. in the context of a community you belonged to, and 3. how this experience may shape your contribution to the community you’ll join in college.

It may look like a fairly simple equation: 1 + 2 = 3. However, each college will word their community essay prompt differently, so it’s important to look out for additional variables. One college may use the community essay as a way to glimpse your core values. Another may use the essay to understand how you would add to diversity on campus. Some may let you decide in which direction to take it—and there are many ways to go!

To get a better idea of how the prompts differ, let’s take a look at some real community essay prompts from the current admission cycle.

Sample 2023-2024 Community Essay Prompts

1) brown university.

“Students entering Brown often find that making their home on College Hill naturally invites reflection on where they came from. Share how an aspect of your growing up has inspired or challenged you, and what unique contributions this might allow you to make to the Brown community. (200-250 words)”

A close reading of this prompt shows that Brown puts particular emphasis on place. They do this by using the words “home,” “College Hill,” and “where they came from.” Thus, Brown invites writers to think about community through the prism of place. They also emphasize the idea of personal growth or change, through the words “inspired or challenged you.” Therefore, Brown wishes to see how the place you grew up in has affected you. And, they want to know how you in turn will affect their college community.

“NYU was founded on the belief that a student’s identity should not dictate the ability for them to access higher education. That sense of opportunity for all students, of all backgrounds, remains a part of who we are today and a critical part of what makes us a world-class university. Our community embraces diversity, in all its forms, as a cornerstone of the NYU experience.

We would like to better understand how your experiences would help us to shape and grow our diverse community. Please respond in 250 words or less.”

Here, NYU places an emphasis on students’ “identity,” “backgrounds,” and “diversity,” rather than any physical place. (For some students, place may be tied up in those ideas.) Furthermore, while NYU doesn’t ask specifically how identity has changed the essay writer, they do ask about your “experience.” Take this to mean that you can still recount a specific moment, or several moments, that work to portray your particular background. You should also try to link your story with NYU’s values of inclusivity and opportunity.

3) University of Washington

“Our families and communities often define us and our individual worlds. Community might refer to your cultural group, extended family, religious group, neighborhood or school, sports team or club, co-workers, etc. Describe the world you come from and how you, as a product of it, might add to the diversity of the UW. (300 words max) Tip: Keep in mind that the UW strives to create a community of students richly diverse in cultural backgrounds, experiences, values and viewpoints.”

UW ’s community essay prompt may look the most approachable, for they help define the idea of community. You’ll notice that most of their examples (“families,” “cultural group, extended family, religious group, neighborhood”…) place an emphasis on people. This may clue you in on their desire to see the relationships you’ve made. At the same time, UW uses the words “individual” and “richly diverse.” They, like NYU, wish to see how you fit in and stand out, in order to boost campus diversity.

Writing Your First Community Essay

Begin by picking which community essay you’ll write first. (For practical reasons, you’ll probably want to go with whichever one is due earliest.) Spend time doing a close reading of the prompt, as we’ve done above. Underline key words. Try to interpret exactly what the prompt is asking through these keywords.

Next, brainstorm. I recommend doing this on a blank piece of paper with a pencil. Across the top, make a row of headings. These might be the communities you’re a part of, or the components that make up your identity. Then, jot down descriptive words underneath in each column—whatever comes to you. These words may invoke people and experiences you had with them, feelings, moments of growth, lessons learned, values developed, etc. Now, narrow in on the idea that offers the richest material and that corresponds fully with the prompt.

Lastly, write! You’ll definitely want to describe real moments, in vivid detail. This will keep your essay original, and help you avoid cliché. However, you’ll need to summarize the experience and answer the prompt succinctly, so don’t stray too far into storytelling mode.

How To Adapt Your Community Essay

Once your first essay is complete, you’ll need to adapt it to the other colleges involving community essays on your list. Again, you’ll want to turn to the prompt for a close reading, and recognize what makes this prompt different from the last. For example, let’s say you’ve written your essay for UW about belonging to your swim team, and how the sports dynamics shaped you. Adapting that essay to Brown’s prompt could involve more of a focus on place. You may ask yourself, how was my swim team in Alaska different than the swim teams we competed against in other states?

Once you’ve adapted the content, you’ll also want to adapt the wording to mimic the prompt. For example, let’s say your UW essay states, “Thinking back to my years in the pool…” As you adapt this essay to Brown’s prompt, you may notice that Brown uses the word “reflection.” Therefore, you might change this sentence to “Reflecting back on my years in the pool…” While this change is minute, it cleverly signals to the reader that you’ve paid attention to the prompt, and are giving that school your full attention.

What to Avoid When Writing the Community Essay

Avoid cliché. Some students worry that their idea is cliché, or worse, that their background or identity is cliché. However, what makes an essay cliché is not the content, but the way the content is conveyed. This is where your voice and your descriptions become essential.
Avoid giving too many examples. Stick to one community, and one or two anecdotes arising from that community that allow you to answer the prompt fully.
Don’t exaggerate or twist facts. Sometimes students feel they must make themselves sound more “diverse” than they feel they are. Luckily, diversity is not a feeling. Likewise, diversity does not simply refer to one’s heritage. If the prompt is asking about your identity or background, you can show the originality of your experiences through your actions and your thinking.

Community Essay Examples and Analysis

Brown university community essay example.

I used to hate the NYC subway. I’ve taken it since I was six, going up and down Manhattan, to and from school. By high school, it was a daily nightmare. Spending so much time underground, underneath fluorescent lighting, squashed inside a rickety, rocking train car among strangers, some of whom wanted to talk about conspiracy theories, others who had bedbugs or B.O., or who manspread across two seats, or bickered—it wore me out. The challenge of going anywhere seemed absurd. I dreaded the claustrophobia and disgruntlement.

Yet the subway also inspired my understanding of community. I will never forget the morning I saw a man, several seats away, slide out of his seat and hit the floor. The thump shocked everyone to attention. What we noticed: he appeared drunk, possibly homeless. I was digesting this when a second man got up and, through a sort of awkward embrace, heaved the first man back into his seat. The rest of us had stuck to subway social codes: don’t step out of line. Yet this second man’s silent actions spoke loudly. They said, “I care.”

That day I realized I belong to a group of strangers. What holds us together is our transience, our vulnerabilities, and a willingness to assist. This community is not perfect but one in motion, a perpetual work-in-progress. Now I make it my aim to hold others up. I plan to contribute to the Brown community by helping fellow students and strangers in moments of precariousness.

Brown University Community Essay Example Analysis

Here the student finds an original way to write about where they come from. The subway is not their home, yet it remains integral to ideas of belonging. The student shows how a community can be built between strangers, in their responsibility toward each other. The student succeeds at incorporating key words from the prompt (“challenge,” “inspired” “Brown community,” “contribute”) into their community essay.

UW Community Essay Example

I grew up in Hawaii, a world bound by water and rich in diversity. In school we learned that this sacred land was invaded, first by Captain Cook, then by missionaries, whalers, traders, plantation owners, and the U.S. government. My parents became part of this problematic takeover when they moved here in the 90s. The first community we knew was our church congregation. At the beginning of mass, we shook hands with our neighbors. We held hands again when we sang the Lord’s Prayer. I didn’t realize our church wasn’t “normal” until our diocese was informed that we had to stop dancing hula and singing Hawaiian hymns. The order came from the Pope himself.

Eventually, I lost faith in God and organized institutions. I thought the banning of hula—an ancient and pure form of expression—seemed medieval, ignorant, and unfair, given that the Hawaiian religion had already been stamped out. I felt a lack of community and a distrust for any place in which I might find one. As a postcolonial inhabitant, I could never belong to the Hawaiian culture, no matter how much I valued it. Then, I was shocked to learn that Queen Ka’ahumanu herself had eliminated the Kapu system, a strict code of conduct in which women were inferior to men. Next went the Hawaiian religion. Queen Ka’ahumanu burned all the temples before turning to Christianity, hoping this religion would offer better opportunities for her people.

Community Essay (Continued)

I’m not sure what to make of this history. Should I view Queen Ka’ahumanu as a feminist hero, or another failure in her islands’ tragedy? Nothing is black and white about her story, but she did what she thought was beneficial to her people, regardless of tradition. From her story, I’ve learned to accept complexity. I can disagree with institutionalized religion while still believing in my neighbors. I am a product of this place and their presence. At UW, I plan to add to campus diversity through my experience, knowing that diversity comes with contradictions and complications, all of which should be approached with an open and informed mind.

UW Community Essay Example Analysis

This student also manages to weave in words from the prompt (“family,” “community,” “world,” “product of it,” “add to the diversity,” etc.). Moreover, the student picks one of the examples of community mentioned in the prompt, (namely, a religious group,) and deepens their answer by addressing the complexity inherent in the community they’ve been involved in. While the student displays an inner turmoil about their identity and participation, they find a way to show how they’d contribute to an open-minded campus through their values and intellectual rigor.

What’s Next

For more on supplemental essays and essay writing guides, check out the following articles:

How to Write the Why This Major Essay + Example
How to Write the Overcoming Challenges Essay + Example
How to Start a College Essay – 12 Techniques and Tips
College Essay

Kaylen Baker

With a BA in Literary Studies from Middlebury College, an MFA in Fiction from Columbia University, and a Master’s in Translation from Université Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis, Kaylen has been working with students on their writing for over five years. Previously, Kaylen taught a fiction course for high school students as part of Columbia Artists/Teachers, and served as an English Language Assistant for the French National Department of Education. Kaylen is an experienced writer/translator whose work has been featured in Los Angeles Review, Hybrid, San Francisco Bay Guardian, France Today, and Honolulu Weekly, among others.

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Key Concepts

Learning Communities

Learning communities provide a space and a structure for people to align around a shared goal. Effective communities are both aspirational and practical. They connect people, organizations, and systems that are eager to learn and work across boundaries, all the while holding members accountable to a common agenda, metrics, and outcomes. These communities enable participants to share results and learn from each other, thereby improving their ability to achieve rapid yet significant progress.

There are large, well-researched bodies of knowledge about learning communities, communities of practice and purpose, and collective impact. At the Center, we draw from that expert knowledge and apply it to our innovation approach. We see learning communities as critical components for building distributed leadership and scaling promising practices by connecting organizations, agencies, and philanthropies who both share the community’s goal and have the capability to operate at scale. The features of learning communities most relevant to our work are described below.

What does a learning community do?

Jessica Sager, Co-Founder and Executive Director of All Our Kin, shares the benefits of participating in FOI and its learning community.

It connects people. Learning communities convene change agents across sectors, disciplines, and geographies to connect, share ideas and results, and learn from each other. Communities may work together in-person and virtually.
It sets goals and measures collective progress. These communities align participants around common goals, metrics (ways of measuring achievement), theories of change , and areas of practice.
It enables shared learning. Communities share learning from both successful and unsuccessful experiences to deepen collective knowledge.
It supports distributed leadership . The scope of a learning community allows it to offer a wide range of leadership roles and skill-building opportunities.
It accelerates progress toward impact at scale . These communities facilitate fast-cycle learning, measure results to understand what works for whom, and bring together the key stakeholders who can achieve systems-level change.

Why are learning communities important?

Achieving widespread change in the early childhood field requires tackling an interrelated set of complex social problems. To solve these problems, the field needs a strong community of learning and practice that will work to identify multiple intervention strategies for different groups of children and families. Rather than replicate “successful” programs in different contexts — where they may or may not achieve the same results — learning communities share results and metrics to figure out what works best for whom and why. This approach provides a highly targeted and effective way to achieve impact at scale.

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How to Write Stanford’s “Excited About Learning” Essay

This article was written based on the information and opinions presented by Johnathan Patin-Sauls and Vinay Bhaskara in a CollegeVine livestream. You can watch the full livestream for more info.

What’s Covered:

Choosing an idea vs. an experience, learning for the sake of learning, learning as a means to other ends, be specific.

Stanford University’s first essay prompt asks you to respond to the following:

“ The Stanford community is deeply curious and driven to learn in and out of the classroom. Reflect on an idea or experience that makes you genuinely excited about learning. (100-250 words)”

For this short answer question, your response is limited to a maximum of 250 words. In this article, we will discuss considerations for choosing to write about an idea or experience, ways to demonstrate a love or enthusiasm for learning, and why you should be as specific. For more information and guidance on writing the application essays for Stanford University, check out our post on how to write the Stanford University essays .

Regardless of if you choose either an idea or experience that makes you genuinely excited about learning as a topic, there are a few considerations for each.

Most people gravitate towards writing about an idea. One challenge that arises with an idea-focused essay is that applicants who are passionate about an idea often become hyper focused on explaining the idea but neglect to connect this idea to who they are as a person and why this idea excites them.

When writing about an experience, it is important to strike a balance between describing the experience and analyzing the impact of the experience on you, your goals, and your commitment to learning.

This essay question allows you to expand on your joy for learning and your genuine curiosity. Stanford is searching for students who are naturally curious and enjoy the process of learning and educating themselves. For example, a compelling essay could begin with a riveting story of getting lost while hiking the Appalachian Trail and describing how this experience led to a lifelong passion for studying primitive forms of navigation.

There is a strong tendency among applicants to write about formal academic coursework, however, the most compelling essays will subvert expectations by taking the concept of learning beyond the classroom and demonstrating how learning manifests itself in unique contexts in your life.

If you’re someone for whom learning is a means to other ends, it is important that you convey a sense of genuine enthusiasm and purpose beyond, “I want to go to X school because it will help me get Y job for Z purpose.” You may be motivated to attend college to obtain a certain position and make a comfortable income, however these answers are not necessarily what admissions officers are looking for. Instead, it can be helpful to relate an idea or experience to something more personal to you.

Academic & Professional Trajectory

Consider relating the idea or experience you choose to a major, degree program, research initiative, or professor that interests you at Stanford. Then go beyond the academic context to explain how the idea or experience ties into your future career.

For instance, if you are interested in the concept of universal health care, then you might describe your interest in applying to public health programs with faculty that specialize in national health care systems. You might then describe your long term career aspirations to work in the United States Senate on crafting and passing health care policy.

Personal Values & Experiences

Another way to tie the ideas in this essay back to a more personal topic is to discuss how the idea or experience informs who you are, how you treat others, or how you experience the world around you.

You could also focus on an idea or experience that has challenged, frustrated, or even offended you, thereby reinforcing and further justifying the values you hold and your worldview.

Community Building & Social Connectedness

You may also explore how this idea or experience connects you to a particular community by helping you understand, build, and support members of the community. Stanford is looking to find students who will be engaged members of the student body and carry out the community’s core mission, values, and projects, so this essay can be an opportunity to highlight how you would contribute to Stanford.

Be specific in your choice of idea or the way in which you describe an experience. For example, a response that focuses on the joys of learning philosophy is too broad to be particularly memorable or impactful. However, the mind-body problem looking at the debate concerning the relationship between thought and consciousness is a specific philosophical idea that lends itself to a rich discussion.

Defining learning communities

Knowing what we mean when we use the word community is important for building understanding about best practices. Shen et al. ( 2008 ) concluded, “[H]ow a community of learners forms and how social interaction may foster a sense of community in distance learning is important for building theory about the social nature of online learning” (p. 18). However, there is very little agreement among educational researchers about what the specific definition of a learning community should be. This dilemma is, of course, not unique to the field of education, as rural sociologists have also debated for decades the exact meaning of community as it relates to their work (Clark 1973 ; Day and Murdoch 1993 ; Hillery 1955 ).

In the literature, learning communities can mean a variety of things, which are certainly not limited to face-to-face settings. Some researchers use this term to describe something very narrow and specific, while others use it for broader groups of people interacting in diverse ways, even though they might be dispersed through time and space. Learning communities can be as large as a whole school, or as small as a classroom (Busher 2005 ) or even a subgroup of learners from a larger cohort who work together with a common goal to provide support and collaboration (Davies et al. 2005 ). The concept of community emerges as an ambiguous term in many social science fields.

Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of researching learning communities is the overwhelming acceptance of a term that is so unclearly defined. Strike ( 2004 ) articulated this dilemma through an analogy: “The idea of community may be like democracy: everyone approves of it, but not everyone means the same thing by it. Beneath the superficial agreement is a vast substratum of disagreement and confusion” (p. 217). When a concept or image is particularly fuzzy, some find it helpful to focus on the edges (boundaries) to identify where “it” begins and where “it” ends, and then work inward to describe the thing more explicitly. We will apply this strategy to learning communities and seek to define a community by its boundaries.

However, researchers have different ideas about what those boundaries are (Glynn 1981 ; Lenning and Ebbers 1999 ; McMillan and Chavis 1986 ; Royal and Rossi 1996 ) and which boundaries are most critical for defining a learning community. In our review of the literature, we found learning community boundaries often defined in terms of participants’ sense that they share access, relationships, vision, or function (see Fig. 1 ). Each of these boundaries contributes in various ways to different theoretical understandings of a learning community.

Community defined by access

Access might have been at one point the easiest way to define a community. If people lived close together, they were a community. If the children attended the same school or classroom, then they were a school or class community. Some researchers and teachers continue to believe that defining a community is that simple (For example, Kay et al., 2011 ).

This perception about spatial/geographic communities is common in community psychology research, but also emerges in education when scholars refer to the “classroom community” as simply a synonym for the group of students sitting together. Often this concept is paired with the idea of a cohort, or students entering programs of professional or educational organizations who form a community because they share the same starting time and the same location as their peers.

However, because of modern educational technologies, the meaning of being “present” or having access to one another in a community is blurred, and other researchers are expanding the concept of what it means to be “present” in a community to include virtual rather than physical opportunities for access to other community members.

Rovai et al. ( 2004 ) summarized general descriptions of what it means to be a community from many different sources (Glynn 1981 ; McMillan 1996 ; Royal and Rossi 1996 ; Sarason 1974 ) and concluded that members of a learning community need to have “ready access” to each other (Rovai et al. 2004 ). He argued that access can be attained without physical presence in the same geographic space. Rovai ( 2002 ) previously wrote that learning communities need a common meeting place, but indicated that this could be a common virtual meeting place. At this common place, members of the community can hold both social and intellectual interactions, both of which are important for fostering community development. One reason why many virtual educational environments do not become full learning communities is that although the intellectual activity occurs in the learning management system, the social interactions may occur in different spaces and environments, such as Twitter and Facebook—thus outside of the potential community.

The negotiation among researchers about what it means to be accessible in a learning community, including whether these boundaries of access are virtual or physical, is still ongoing. Many researchers are adjusting traditional concepts of community boundaries as being physical in order to accommodate modern virtual communities. However, many scholars and practitioners still continue to discuss communities as being bounded by geographic locations and spaces, such as community college math classrooms (Weissman et al. 2011 ), preservice teachers’ professional experiences (Cavanagh and Garvey 2012 ), and music educator PhD cohorts (Shin 2013 ). More important is the question of how significant physical or virtual access truly is. Researchers agree that community members should have access to each other, but the amount of access and the nature of presence needed to qualify as a community are still undefined.

Community defined by relationships

Being engaged in a learning community often requires more than being present either physically or virtually. Often researchers define learning communities by their relational or emotional boundaries: the emotional ties that bind and unify members of the community (Blanchard et al. 2011 ). Frequently a learning community is identified by how close or connected the members feel to each other emotionally and whether they feel they can trust, depend on, share knowledge with, rely on, have fun with, and enjoy high quality relationships with each other (Kensler et al. 2009 ). In this way, affect is an important aspect of determining a learning community. Often administrators or policymakers attempt to force the formation of a community by having the members associate with each other, but the sense of community is not discernible if the members do not build the necessary relational ties. In virtual communities, students may feel present and feel that others are likewise discernibly involved in the community, but still perceive a lack of emotional trust or connection.

In our review of the literature, we found what seem to be common relational characteristics of learning communities: (1) sense of belonging, (2) interdependence or reliance among the members, (3) trust among members, and (4) faith or trust in the shared purpose of the community.

Members of a community need to feel that they belong in the community, which includes feeling like one is similar enough or somehow shares a connection to the others. Sarason ( 1974 ) gave an early argument for the psychological needs of a community, which he defined in part as the absence of a feeling of loneliness. Other researchers have agreed that an essential characteristic of learning communities is that students feel “connected” to each other (Baker and Pomerantz 2000 ) and that a characteristic of ineffective learning communities is that this sense of community is not present (Lichtenstein 2005 ).

Interdependence

Sarason ( 1974 ) believed that belonging to a community could best be described as being part of a “mutually supportive network of relationships upon which one could depend” (p. 1). In other words, the members of the community need each other and feel needed by others within the community; they feel that they belong to a group larger than the individual self. Rovai ( 2002 ) added that members often feel that they have duties and obligations towards other members of the community and that they “matter” or are important to each other.

Some researchers have listed trust as a major characteristic of learning communities (Chen et al. 2007 ; Mayer et al. 1995 ; Rovai et al. 2004 ). Booth’s ( 2012 ) focus on online learning communities is one example of how trust is instrumental to the emotional strength of the learning group. “Research has established that trust is among the key enablers for knowledge sharing in online communities” (Booth 2012 , p. 5). Related to trust is the feeling of being respected and valued within a community, which is often described as essential to a successful learning community (Lichtenstein 2005 ). Other authors describe this feeling of trust or respect as feeling “safe” within the community (Baker and Pomerantz 2000 ). For example, negative or ineffective learning communities have been characterized by conflicts or instructors who were “detached or critical of students and unable or unwilling to help them” (Lichtenstein 2005 , p. 348).

Shared faith

Part of belonging to a community is believing in the community as a whole—that the community should exist and will be sufficient to meet the members’ individual needs. McMillan and Chavis ( 1986 ) felt that it was important that there be “a shared faith that members’ needs will be met through their commitment to be together” (p. 9). Rovai et al. ( 2004 ) agreed by saying that members “possess a shared faith that their educational needs will be met through their commitment to the shared goals and values of other students at the school” (p. 267).

These emotional boundaries not only define face-to-face learning communities, but they define virtual communities as well—perhaps more so. Because virtual communities do not have face-to-face interaction, the emotional bond that members feel with the persons beyond the computer screen may be even more important, and the emergence of video technologies is one method for increasing these bonds (Borup et al. 2014 ).

Community defined by vision

Communities defined by shared vision or sense of purpose are not as frequently discussed as boundaries based on relationships, but ways members of a community think about their group are important. Rather than feeling like a member of a community—with a sense of belonging, shared faith, trust, and interdependence—people can define community by thinking they are a community. They conceptualize the same vision for what the community is about, share the same mission statements and goals, and believe they are progressing as a community towards the same end. In short, in terms many researchers use, they have a shared purpose based on concepts that define the boundaries of the community. Sharing a purpose is slightly different from the affective concept of sharing faith in the existence of the community and its ability to meet members’ needs. Community members may conceptualize a vision for their community and yet not have any faith that the community is useful (e.g., a member of a math community who hates math). Members may also disagree on whether the community is capable of reaching the goal even though they may agree on what the goal is (“my well intentioned study group is dysfunctional”). Thus conceptual boundaries of a community of learners are distinct from relational ties; they simply define ways members perceive the community’s vision. Occasionally the shared conception is the most salient or distinguishing characteristic of a particular learning community.

Schrum et al. ( 2005 ) summarized this characteristic of learning communities by saying that a community is “individuals who share common purposes related to education” (p. 282). Royal and Rossi ( 1996 ) also described effective learning communities as rich environments for teamwork among those with a common vision for the future of their school and a common sense of purpose.

Community defined by function

Perhaps the most basic way to define the boundaries of a learning community is by what the members do. For example, a community of practice in a business would include business participants engaged in that work. This type of definition is often used in education which considers students members of communities simply because they are doing the same assignments: Participants’ associations are merely functional, and like work of research teams organized to achieve a particular goal, they hold together as long as the work is held in common. When the project is completed, these communities often disappear unless ties related to relationships, conceptions, or physical or virtual presence [access] continue to bind the members together.

The difference between functional boundaries and conceptual boundaries [boundaries of function and boundaries of vision or purpose] may be difficult to discern. These boundaries are often present simultaneously, but a functional community can exist in which the members work on similar projects but do not share the same vision or mental focus about the community’s purpose. Conversely, a group of people can have a shared vision and goals but be unable to actually work together towards this end (for example, if they are assigned to different work teams). Members of a functional community may work together without the emotional connections of a relational community, and members who are present in a community may occupy the same physical or virtual spaces but without working together on the same projects. For example, in co-working spaces, such as Open Gov Hub in Washington D.C., different companies share an open working space, creating in a physical sense a very real community, but members of these separate companies would not be considered a community according to functional boundaries. Thus all the proposed community boundaries sometimes overlap but often represent distinctive features.

The importance of functional cohesion in a learning community is one reason why freshman learning communities at universities usually place cohorts of students in the same classes so they are working on the same projects. Considering work settings, Hakkarainen et al. ( 2004 ) argued that the new information age in our society requires workers to be capable of quickly forming collaborative teams (or networked communities of expertise) to achieve a particular functional purpose and then be able to disband when the project is over and form new teams. They argued that these networked communities are increasingly necessary to accomplish work in the 21st Century.

Relying on functional boundaries to define a learning community is particularly useful with online communities. A distributed and asynchronously meeting group can still work on the same project and perhaps feel a shared purpose along with a shared functional assignment, sometimes despite not sharing much online social presence or interpersonal attachment.

Many scholars and practitioners agree that learning communities “set the ambience for life-giving and uplifting experiences necessary to advance an individual and a whole society” (Lenning and Ebbers 1999 ). Because learning communities are so important to student learning and satisfaction, clear definitions that enable sharing of best practices are essential. By clarifying our understanding and expectations about what we hope students will be able to do, learn, and become in a learning community, we can more precisely identify what our ideal learning community would be like and distinguish this ideal from the less effective/efficient communities existing in everyday life and learning.

In this chapter we have discussed definitions for four potential boundaries of a learning community. Two of these can be observed externally: access (Who is present physically or virtually?) and function (Who has been organized specifically to achieve some goal?). Two of these potential boundaries are internal to the individuals involved and can only be researched by helping participants describe their feelings and thoughts about the community: relationships (Who feels connected and accepted?) and vision (who shares the same mission or purpose?).

Researchers have discussed learning communities according to each of these four boundaries, and often a particular learning community can be defined by more than one. By understanding more precisely what we mean when we describe a group of people as a learning community—whether we mean that they share the same goals, are assigned to work/learn together, or simply happen to be in the same class—we can better orient our research on the outcomes of learning communities by accounting for how we erected boundaries and defined the subjects. We can also develop better guidelines for cultivating learning communities by communicating more effectively what kinds of learning communities we are trying to develop.

Application Exercises

Evaluate your current learning community. How can you strengthen your personal learning community? Make one commitment to accomplish this goal.
Analyze an online group (Facebook users, Twitter users, NPR readers, Pinners on Pinterest, etc.) that you are part of to determine if it would fit within the four proposed boundaries of a community. Do you feel like an active member of this community? Why or why not?

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Foundations of Learning and Instructional Design Technology Copyright © 2018 by Richard E. West & Gregory S. Williams is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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The Importance of Virtual Learning Communities Essay

Introduction, the importance of virtual learning communities, challenges of building a virtual learning community.

Virtual learning communities are those “based on shared purpose rather than actual geographical location” (Lewis & Allan, 2004). The learners from different parts of the world are drawn together and they can form their learning groups formally or informally. This is facilitated by appropriate information and communication technologies such as the internet and video conferencing (Lewis & Allan, 2004).

Since virtual learning communities are based on real-time communication, the learners can be taught at the same time by a single instructor. Consequently, most online degree programs focus on building virtual learning communities to enhance their teaching and students’ learning process. This paper seeks to analyze the importance of virtual learning communities in an online degree program. The challenges likely to be faced while building such communities will be illuminated.

Initial Cohort Seminars

Most online degree programs have an initial course that focuses on introducing the students to the online learning process. Such courses facilitate the building of social relationships among the students. Through such relationships, the online instructor and the students can easily explore both social and academic challenges faced by distance students (Assaf, Elisa, & Fayyuoum, 2009).

To build strong relationships between the instructors and the students at the beginning of the program, they must interact for a long period. This means that the normal online class time needs to be extended through a system that facilitates a seamless exchange of information among the students and their instructors. This objective is best achieved through a virtual learning community that promotes unlimited exchange of ideas among the stakeholders in the learning process (Assaf, Elisa, & Fayyuoum, 2009). This is because the students can integrate their office hours with the learning process thus enabling them to access more information.

Continuous Mentor Involvement

According to the behaviorism theory, learning is enhanced if students can follow and master the facts or skills taught by the instructors (Lewis & Allan, 2004). This means that the instructor must be constantly in touch with his or her students to impart knowledge effectively. The virtual learning communities enable instructors in online degree programs to share knowledge with the students as well as get frequent feedback from them (Brown, 2001).

This helps in assessing the students’ progress as well as recommending timely remedies for the underperformers. In addition to this, the virtual learning communities enable the online degree programs to provide a student mentor. The mentor, through the virtual learning community, works closely with the learners throughout the program (Brown, 2001). Through the mentorship programs, students can acquire skills that enable them to overcome the challenges they face in learning. The motivations accruing from the mentorship programs thus facilitates a high completion rate.

Content-Based Learning

According to the constructivist theory, students learn new ideas through active interactions with their peers (Lewis & Allan, 2004). The virtual learning communities bring together students and instructors from different walks of life. Consequently, the students can share their diverse experiences, ideas, and skills seamlessly. The learning communities enable the instructors and the students to volunteer their questions (McEliath & McDowell, 2008).

The questions and their proposed answers are normally challenged by different students. This not only enhances a better understanding of the question or the topic under discussion but also facilitates the discovery of new ideas. Besides, the insights on the question or topic under discussion will be readily available to all the students using the learning community. Thus each participant will expand his or her critical thinking as they acknowledge diverse perspectives. This will enable them to “construct a fuller understanding of the topic of investigation” (McEliath & McDowell, 2008).

Instructor’s Role in Learning

Most online degree programs are characterized by an e-moderator who presents the course content to the students. In most cases, the e-moderator dominates the video conferences used to impart knowledge. In such a case, the students play a passive role in the learning process. However, this strategy of teaching is less effective since the students tend to lose interest in the course as they lose control over the learning process. To avoid this problem, the role of the e-moderator should shift from addressing the technical or social concerns of the students to facilitating the learning process.

This means that the moderator’s task should be limited to facilitating “exchange of information, knowledge processing as well as practical processing” (Vesely & Bloom, 2007). This can only be achieved if the moderator’s authority and control over the learning process is progressively shifted to the students. The students should have greater autonomy over the learning process to encourage active participation and better results. The virtual learning communities enable online degree programs to give students autonomy over the learning process (Vesely & Bloom, 2007). The students set the pace that suits their abilities while the e-moderator clarifies communication and encourage diverse perspectives from students.

Organization of Resources

Under normal circumstances, students usually categorize and organize online resources in different ways. Their diverse organization process is meant to suit their specific searching habits and conveniences (Williams & Humphrey, 2007). However, the lack of a standard method for organizing online resources makes it difficult to access such resources. Thus the online resources will not be of any value if they can not be accessed by the majority of the students and this leads to poor quality education.

In response to this challenge, many online degree programs embark on the use of virtual learning communities to distribute the learning materials as well as enabling students to share their learning materials effectively (Williams & Humphrey, 2007). The virtual learning communities not only use standard methods of accessing information but also have a dedicated support team that assists students to access the needed materials.

Despite the benefits of a virtual learning community to an online degree program, building it is often characterized by several challenges. Some of the challenges experienced by online degree programs in their attempt to build an effective virtual learning community include the following.

Communication Barriers

Since most students enrolled in online degree programs are from diverse socio-cultural backgrounds, they tend to speak different languages. Most online degree programs use English as the official instructional language even though not all students are proficient in English. Lack of a good command of the language used in the virtual learning community can limit the students’ ability to share information with their peers as well as their instructors (Fontainha, 2008). Besides, the intended meaning of a text may change due to the improper use of language.

This presents a great difficulty in the learning process since information will not be shared seamlessly. Attempts to solve this problem through the translation capabilities of the internet have yielded little results since the internet can only translate English into a limited number of languages (Fontainha, 2008). In some cases, students with poor listening and writing skills have failed to benefit from the virtual learning communities by misinterpreting information. Thus presenting information in a manner that is highly understandable given the communication capabilities of the students is the main challenge in building a virtual learning community.

Diverse Technical Backgrounds

Users of virtual learning communities have diverse technological backgrounds. The students’ ability to use modern information and communication technologies depends on their prior exposure to such technologies in their countries of origin (Vesely & Bloom, 2007). However, due to disparities in economic development and technological advancements across the globe, some students have a richer technological background as compare to their colleagues. The consequence of this technological imbalance is that students with little exposure to modern communication technologies will not benefit from the virtual learning communities (Brown, 2001).

The greatest challenge thus is to develop a virtual learning community that takes into account the diverse technological background of its users. This has been difficult as most learning communities embark on modern and sophisticated technologies to enhance efficiency. Thus students who are not able to use the learning community due to their poor skills will have to invest in further training. However, such training further increases the cost of the online degree hence lowering its demand. From a learning perspective, the inability to use the virtual learning community will lead to poor learning outcomes (McEliath & McDowell, 2008). This is because the students will not be able to fully access all the needed information.

Technological Constraints

Due to disparities in financial status and technological advancement, students from various parts of the world use diverse equipment to access virtual learning systems (Fontainha, 2008). For example, students who use a fast internet based on optical cable technology will benefit more from the virtual learning community as compared to those who use outdated technologies. The computer operating systems used by the students might also not be compatible with the technology that supports the virtual learning community system. Thus the main challenge is developing a learning community software package that is compatible with a variety of both hardware and software packages. This has discouraged most online degree programs from using the learning communities.

Social Challenges

These include varying levels of understanding and the intentions of the users. Students have different levels of understanding. Consequently, some of them can not understand the course content if they do not get personalized instructions (McEliath & McDowell, 2008). Providing personalized instructions has always been difficult since most instructors focus on the “learning community as an entity rather than individuals” (Brown, 2001). Varying intentions of using the learning communities also limits the students’ ability to share information.

The above discussion indicates that a virtual learning community is a system that brings together learners from diverse backgrounds (Lewis & Allan, 2004). Most online degree programs have adopted it to enhance learning. Its main benefit is facilitating the seamless sharing of information and networking among students. However, implementation has been difficult due to the reasons discussed above. Thus to overcome the above challenges, the system should be flexible enough to accommodate the communication and learning needs of the students. Besides, real-time support should be available to enhance usage.

Assaf, W., Elisa, G., & Fayyuoum, A. (2009). Virtual eBMS: a virtual learning community supporting personalized learning. International Journal of Web Based Communities, 5(2) , 238-254.

Brown, E. (2001). The process of community-building in distance learning classes. Journal of Asynchronous Learning,5(1) , 18-35.

Fontainha, E. (2008). Communities of practise and virtual learning communications: benefits, barriers and success factors. Journal of Online Teaching and Learning, 3(2) , 120-130.

Lewis, D., & Allan, B. (2004). Virtual learning communities: a guide for practitioners. New York: McGraw-Hill.

McEliath, E., & McDowell, K. (2008). Pedagogical strategies for building community in graduate level distance education courses. Journal of Online Teaching and Learning, 4(1) , 117-127.

Vesely, P., & Bloom, L. (2007). Key Elemnts of building online community: comparing faculty and student perceptions. Journal of Online Learning and teaching, 3(1) , 234-246.

Williams, R., & Humphrey, R. (2007). Understanding and fostering interactions in threaded discussions. Journal of Asynchronous Learning, 11(1) , 129-143.

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Center for Engaged Learning

Learning communities.

Learning communities emphasize collaborative partnerships between students, faculty, and staff, and attempt to restructure the university curriculum to address structural barriers to educational excellence.

In their 1990 publication Learning Communities: Creating Connections Among Students, Faculty, and Disciplines, Faith Gabelnick, Jean MacGregor, Roberta S. Matthews, and Barbara Leigh Smith describe a learning community as “any one of a variety of curricular structures that link together several existing courses – or actually restructure the curricular material entirely – so that students have opportunities for deeper understanding and integration of the material they are learning, and more interaction with one another and their teachers as fellow participants in the learning enterprise” (1990, p. 19). The authors promote the idea that learning communities can “purposefully restructure the curriculum to link together courses or course work so that students find greater coherence in what they are learning as well as increased intellectual interaction with faculty and fellow students” and that they “can address some of the structural features of the modern university that undermine effective teaching and learning” (1990, p.5). As a necessarily collaborative enterprise, learning communities usually incorporate “collaborative and active approaches to learning, some form of team teaching, and interdisciplinary themes” (Gabelnick, et al., 1990, p. 5).

Nancy Shapiro and Jodi Levine (1999) cite Alexander Astin’s (1985, p. 161) view of learning communities:

Such communities can be organized along curricular lines, common career interests, avocational interests, residential living areas, and so on. These can be used to build a sense of group identity, cohesiveness, and uniqueness; to encourage continuity and the integration of diverse curricular and co-curricular experiences; and to counteract the isolation that many students feel.

They expand on Astin’s definition to assert basic characteristics that learning communities share:

Organizing students and faculty into smaller groups
Encouraging integration of the curriculum
Helping students establish academic and social support networks
Providing a setting for students to be socialized to the expectations of college
Bringing faculty together in more meaningful ways
Focusing faculty and students on learning outcomes
Providing a setting for community-based delivery of academic support programs
Offering a critical lens for examining the first-year experience (Shapiro & Levine, 1999, p. 3).

Finally, Lenning et al. (2013) define a learning community as an “intentionally developed community that exists to promote and maximize the individual and shared learning of its members. There is ongoing interaction, interplay, and collaboration among the community’s members as they strive for specified common learning goals” (Lenning, et al., 2013, p. 7).

More broadly, Kuh (1996) describes any educationally purposeful activity , such as learning communities, as “undergraduate activities, events, and experiences that are congruent with the institution’s educational purposes and a student’s own educational aspirations.” In a later study he and his co-author describe a learning community as “a formal program where groups of students take two or more classes together, [that] may or may not have a residential component” (Zhao and Kuh, 2004, p. 119). They cite four generic forms of learning communities: curricular, classroom, residential, and student-type (p. 116).

In the 2008 publication High-Impact Educational Practices: What They Are, Who Has Access to Them, and Why They Matter, George Kuh states the key goals for learning communities are “to encourage integration of learning across courses, and to involve students with ‘big questions’ that matter beyond the classroom. Students take two or more linked courses as a group and work closely with one another and with their professors. Many learning communities explore a common topic and/or common readings through the lens of different disciplines. Some intentionally link ‘liberal arts’ and ‘professional courses’; others feature service learning” (p. 10).

A group of students and faculty work together in a coffee shop

What makes it a high-impact practice?

High-impact educational activities, such as learning communities, share common characteristics that make them especially effective with students . In Adding Value: Learning Communities and Student Engagement , Chun-Mei Zhao and George D. Kuh (2004, p. 124) enumerate the benefits of participating in learning communities in particular. Specifically, participating in learning communities is uniformly and positively linked with:

Student academic performance
Engagement in educationally fruitful activities (e.g., academic integration, active and collaborative learning, interaction with faculty members)
Gains associated with college attendance
Overall satisfaction with the college experience.

Pulling from multiple sources, Lenning and Ebbers (1999, p. 51-52) cite the numerous benefits for college students participating in learning communities. Well-designed learning communities emphasizing collaborative learning result in improved GPAs, and higher retention and satisfaction for undergraduate students. In addition, various studies have verified other significant benefits:

A lower number of students on academic probation;
Amount and quality of learning;
Validation of learning;
Academic skills;
Self-esteem;
Satisfaction with the institution, involvement in college, and educational experiences;
Increased opportunity to write and speak;
Greater engagement in learning;
The ability to meet academic and social needs;
Greater intellectual richness;
Intellectual empowerment;
More complex thinking, a more complex world view, and a greater openness to ideas different from one’s own;
Increased quality and quantity of learning;
The ability to bridge academic and social environments; and
Improved involvement and connectedness within the social and academic realms.

Research-Informed Practices

Two students (one pushing a bicycle) talk as they walk along a brick pathway

In looking at high-impact educationally purposeful activities, Kuh (2008, p. 19-20) strongly recommends that institutions “make it possible for every student to participate in at least two high-impact activities during his or her undergraduate program, one in the first year, and one taken later in relation to the major field. The obvious choices for incoming students are first-year seminars, learning communities, and service learning… Ideally, institutions would structure the curriculum and other learning opportunities so that one high-impact activity is available to every student every year” (Kuh, 2008, p. 19-20).

Schroeder and Mable (1994, p. 183) offer six specific principles or themes that should be incorporated in the development of learning communities. Themes one through three are characteristic of both residential-group communities and learning communities. Themes four through six apply only to residential learning communities.

Learning communities are generally small, unique, and cohesive units characterized by a common sense of purpose and powerful peer influences.
Student interaction within learning communities should be characterized by the four I’s – involvement, investment, influence, and identity.
Learning communities involve bounded territory that provides easy access to and control of group space that supports ongoing interaction and social stability.
Learning communities should be primarily student centered, not staff centered, if they are to promote student learning. Staff must assume that students are capable and responsible young adults who are primarily responsible for the quality and extent of their learning.
Effective learning communities should be the result of collaborative partnerships between faculty, students, and residence hall staff. Learning communities should not be created in a vacuum; they are designed to intentionally achieve specific educational outcomes.
Learning communities should exhibit a clear set of values and normative expectations for active participation. The normative peer cultures of learning communities enhance student learning and development in specific ways.

Gabelnick, et al. (1990, p. 51) also offers guidelines for how to create learning communities that achieve the best possible results for learners:

Broad support from both faculty and staff is essential — collaboration must be present from the inception of the learning community development process.
Stable leadership and an administrative “home” will ensure a greater chance for long-term stability and success.
Selection of an appropriate design and theme to appeal to students’ academic and personal goals is important. Learning communities should utilize required general courses or pre-major courses, such as pre-law, pre-health, and pre-engineering.
Choose a faculty team with complementary skills and roles.
Properly manage enrollment expectations and faculty load.
Develop effective strategies for recruitment, marketing, and registration.
Ensure appropriate funding, space, and teaching resources.

Golde & Pribbenow (2000) investigated the experiences of faculty members in residential learning communities, from which they formulated recommendations for navigating the sometimes dicey waters that separate faculty from administrative staff. Some of their recommendations included:

Faculty hold a deep concern for undergraduate education, and wish to know students better. However, some were surprised about the desire of students to be more personal than faculty had expected (p. 32, 36).
Faculty were enticed by the idea of participating in interdisciplinary and innovative education (p. 32).
They were also both excited and concerned with being accepted into the learning community, both by students and veteran faculty members (p. 32, 33)

Some barriers to faculty participation in learning communities included familiar challenges:

Time — faculty reward system must be addressed and taken into account when expecting faculty participation in learning communities (p. 32)
Faculty had little awareness of, and in some cases little respect for, the work of student affairs professionals on their campus. Similarly, student affairs staff held a limited view of how faculty might contribute in a residential setting (p. 35).

Golde and Pribbenow conclude that faculty are the best recruiters of other faculty into learning community participation, and that it is important to both include faculty in planning efforts, but also to give them well-defined roles within the community (p. 37-38).

The National Resource Center for Learning Communities website , hosted by the Washington Center at The Evergreen State College, identifies three essential components of effective learning communities :

“A strategically-defined cohort of students taking courses together which have been identified through a review of institutional data
“Robust, collaborative partnerships between academic affairs and student affairs
“Explicitly designed opportunities to practice integrative and interdisciplinary learning”

The National Resource Center also emphasizes that learning communities should be designed with attention to an institution’s unique goals and priorities.

A professor and group of students talk together around a small conference table.

Embedded and Emerging Questions for Research, Practice, and Theory

In their exhaustive review of previous learning community assessment studies, Learning Community Research and Assessment: What We Know Now , Taylor et al. (2003) indicated four key future directions for learning community research and assessment:

Identifying and assessing a broader scope of learning community outcomes – for students, faculty, and institutions;
Exploring the specific pedagogical and structural characteristics that lead to positive outcomes;
Pursuing longitudinal inquiry to examine the long-term impact of learning communities – for students, faculty, and institutions; and
Improving presentations and publications about learning community research. Taylor et al. (2003, pp. 65-66) note that studies should describe the learning communities program, its institutional context, and its participants; identify inquiry questions and methods; clearly communicate results and corresponding recommendations; exhibit critical self-reflection; and be accessible to readers.

Lenning & Ebbers (1999, p. 88) offer ideas about further areas of study, given that evidence at the time suggested some learning communities are more effective than others, but existing studies were not clear cut in their evidence and were not intended as comparative studies:

Which student learning communities and combinations thereof are most effective?
How do we optimize the performance and effectiveness of student learning communities of different kinds?
How do we motivate faculty to participate fully in student learning communities?
What do we know about the characteristics of students who do not participate, and how to motivate them?

The allocation of resources also raises concerns for the success of learning communities on campus, if universities continue to be evaluated on the kinds of students they admit, rather than the kinds of leaders they graduate. The current definition of quality in higher education preferences schools that accept excellent high school students with excellent ratings. However, there is no value placed on what happens during college. A school could accept excellent high school students and teach them nothing and receive high ratings, while another school may accept mediocre students and teach them a great deal. In the current valuation system, a campus that wants to increase its prestige shifts resources to competitive admissions, not practices to improve learning. These criteria of excellence do little to encourage schools to create supportive learning environments for the diverse groups now in college ( Greater Expectations , 2002, p. 17).

Key Scholarship

Benjamin, Mimi, ed. 2015. Learning communities from start to finish: New directions for student services, Number 149. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

About this Edited Book:

This edited collection provides theoretical foundations for learning communities and recent research on institutional structures that foster success in implementing, maintaining, and assessing learning communities. Chapters include:

“A history of learning communities within American higher education” by John e. Fink and Karen Kurotsuchi Inkelas
“Theoretical foundations of learning communities” by Jody E. Jessup-Anger
“With educational benefits for all: Campus inclusion through learning communities designed for underserved student populations” by John E. Fink and Mary L. Hummel
“Aligning needs, expectations, and learning outcomes to sustain self-efficacy through transfer learning community programs” by Jennifer R. Leptien
“Utilizing online learning communities in student affairs” by Daniel W. Calhoun and Lucy Santos Green
“Utilizing peer mentor roles in learning communities” by Laura Jo Rieske and Mimi Benjamin
“Assessing the ‘learning’ in learning communities” by Ann M. Gansemer-Topf and Kari Tietjen
“Learning community literature: Annotated bibliography” by Sarah Conte

Gabelnick, Faith, Jean MacGregor, Roberta S. Matthews, and Barbara L. Smith, eds. 1990. Learning Communities: Creating Connections Among Students, Faculty, and Disciplines. New Directions for Teaching and Learning, #41. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

In this early comprehensive look at learning communities, the authors draw from the foundational work of Dewey, Meiklejohn, and Tussman and present five basic models of learning communities: linked courses, learning clusters, freshman interest groups, federated learning communities, and coordinated studies. Learning communities are defined as “any one of a variety of curricular structures that link together several existing courses, or restructure the curricular material entirely, so that students have opportunities for deeper understanding and integration of the material they are learning, and more interaction with one another and their teachers as fellow participants in the learning process.” They assert that students should experience a learning community at least once and early in their college career, and that membership in at least one such supportive community may be enough to ensure a student’s persistence. They offer a practical checklist for issues of implementation and sustainability, and address strategies and difficulties related to teaching in learning communities through collaborative design and planning. Two chapters of the book address student and faculty experiences and responses to learning communities, and the final chapter looks ahead to the future of learning communities and curricular reform. There is also a section of resources provided.

Kuh, George D. 1996. “Guiding Principles for Creating Learning Environments for Undergraduates.” Journal of College Student Development 37 (2): 135-148.

About this Journal Article:

The author presents six principles “to guide institutional efforts to enhance student learning and personal development by more purposefully integrating curricular goals and outcomes with students’ experiences outside the classroom.” Based on existing research, the author shares ten conditions that foster student learning and personal development that when implemented together represent an institution with a seamless learning environment, that is, an environment that takes once separate parts of the academic experience (e.g., in-class and out-of-class, academic and non-academic, curricular and co-curricular, on- and off-campus experiences) and blends them into a whole and continuous experience. The six principles reflect the broad scope of activities that must be implemented to move toward an ethos of learning: generate enthusiasm for institutional renewal; create a common vision for learning; develop a common language; foster collaboration and cross-functional dialogue; examine the influence of student cultures on student learning; and focus on systemic change. Some institutions may require additional interventions not described in the six principles. The principles are also not presented as a “hierarchy of activities” – an institution may begin with any one of the activities to move toward an ethos of learning, though all must be addressed.

Leary, Margaret, Tina M. Muller, Samantha Kramer, John Sopper, Richard D. Gebauer, and Mary Ellen Wade. 2022. “Defining Collaboration Through the Lens of a Delphi Study: Student Affairs and Academic Affairs Partnerships in Residential Learning Communities.” The Qualitative Report 27 (3): 664-690. https://doi.org/10.46743/2160-3715/2022.5276 .

A multi-institutional research team from the 2017-2019 research seminar on Residential Learning Communities as a High-Impact Practice examines collaboration between student affairs and academic affairs. Using a Delphi method, the team explored how academic and student affairs professionals define collaboration in residential learning communities and distilled a definition through multiple rounds of feedback. The research team’s resulting definition is: “Collaboration between academic and student affairs is the continuous process of cultivating an independent relationship where each stakeholder is mutually committed to working toward the shared purpose of holistic student learning” (p. 671).

Lenning, Oscar T., Denise M. Hill, Kevin P. Saunders, Alisha Solan, and Andria Stokes. 2013. Powerful Learning Communities: A Guide to Developing Student, Faculty and Professional Learning Communities to Improve Student Success and Organizational Effectiveness. Sterling, VA: Stylus.

About this Book:

A current, comprehensive and highly practical guidebook for the planning and implementation of learning communities, this book moves through the entire process of creating learning communities from introducing concepts and key terms, to defining the scope and types of learning communities, to preparing for and planning, all the way through to assessing outcomes and preventing potential problems. The authors also offer chapters on creating optimal face-to-face, virtual, and hybrid learning communities; conceptual frameworks; achieving optimal student success using the various types of learning communities; and legal and ethical considerations. There are also extensive appendices that provide further information and tools for institutions. Each chapter begins with a “What’s the Story?” feature that highlights a real-life scenario that gives context to the chapter’s content, with a corresponding “The Rest of the Story” section that offers a recap of the scenario and possible actions and solutions. A 90-page PDF companion resource is also available online .

Shapiro, Nancy S., and Jodi H. Levine. 1999. Creating Learning Communities: A Practical Guide to Winning Support, Organizing for Change, and Implementing Programs. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Shapiro and Levine present a comprehensive handbook for the implementation of learning communities on college campuses. In the first two chapters they define and describe the characteristics of learning communities, highlight historical influences and contemporary settings, and describe current models and approaches to learning communities. The next three chapters articulate the types of transformative changes that need to occur for learning communities to take root and flourish in higher education environments, which includes practical advice on human and fiscal resources, curricular implications, and the importance of changing faculty roles and reward structures. Chapters six and seven deal in the practical aspects of administrative partnerships and logistics – planning, registration, marketing, and community building. Following that are two chapters devoted to evaluation and assessment, with the final chapter offering helpful lessons and advice.

Zhao, Chun-Mei, and George D. Kuh. 2004. “Adding Value: Learning Communities and Student Engagement.” Research in Higher Education 45 (2): 115-138.

This study was conducted in order to determine whether student success can be linked to participation in a learning community, success being defined as student engagement in educationally purposeful activities, self-reported gains in a variety of outcomes, and overall satisfaction with the college experience. For the purposes of the study, a learning community was defined as a formal program where groups of students take two or more classes together, that may or may not have a residential component. The study used the National Survey for Student Engagement (NSSE), an annual survey of first-year and senior students, that measures the degree to which students participate in educational practices linked to the desired outcomes of college. The survey sample was 80,479 randomly selected first-year and senior students from 365 4-year colleges and universities who completed the survey in the spring of 2002. The results support the assertion that participating in learning communities is “uniformly and positively linked with student academic performance, engagement in educationally fruitful activities, gains associated with college attendance, and overall satisfaction with the college experience.” The article goes on to describe these effects in detail.

Limitations of the study include the wording of the question (it is impossible to determine if students had already participated in a learning community or if they were planning to do so); inability to distinguish between the different types of learning communities in which students had participated; the reliability of some of the scales employed in the study; and the measures are based on self-reported data. The study does, however, provide evidence that learning communities do warrant classification as a high-impact educational practice, and based on this the authors recommend two actions: 1) every campus should evaluate how many and what kinds of learning communities exist on campus and the numbers of different groups of students who are participating in them; 2) efforts should be focused on creating additional learning communities and attracting underrepresented students to participate them, such as male students, transfer students, and part-time students as these are the groups least likely to participate in learning communities before graduation.

See all Learning Communities entries

Model Programs

Elon University Living-Learning Communities
Evergreen State College Learning Communities
Indiana University – Purdue University Indianapolis Themes Learning Communities
LaGuardia Community College Liberal Arts Clusters
Seattle Central College Learning Communities
University of Missouri – Columbia Research Learning Communities and Freshmen Interest Groups
The University of Texas at Austin First-Year Interest Groups and TIP Scholars
University of Washington First-Year Interest Groups
US News & World Report College Ranking Lists>Learning communities

Challenges and Opportunities of Hyperbonding in College Relationships

Sense of belonging is a key predictor of student success for college students (Strayhorn 2008; 2012). This sense of belonging can be enhanced when students find peers that they can identify with and develop relationships with (Gravett and Winstone 2020;…

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Featured Resources

Elon statement on residential learning communities as a high-impact practice.

Download a printer-friendly [PDF] copy of the Elon Statement on Residential Learning Communities By Mimi Benjamin, Jody Jessup-Anger, Shannon Lundeen, and Cara Lucia Twenty scholars participated in the Center for Engaged Learning research seminar on Residential Learning Communities (RLCs) as…

Association of American Colleges & Universities. 2002. Greater Expectations: A New Vision for Learning as a Nation Goes to College. Washington, DC.

Astin, A.W. 1985. Achieving Educational Excellence , San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Gabelnick, F. MacGregor, J. Matthews, R.S., and Smith, B.L. (eds). 1990. Learning Communities: Creating Connections Among Students, Faculty, and Disciplines . New Directions for Teaching and Learning, no. 41. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Golde, C.M. and Pribbenow, D.A. 2000. “Understanding faculty involvement in residential learning communities.” Journal of College Student Development , 41(1), 27-40.

Kuh, G.D. 1996. Guiding principles for creating learning environments for undergraduates. Journal of College Student Development, 37(2), 135-148 .

Kuh, G.D. 2008. High-Impact Educational Practices: What They Are, Who Has Access to Them, and Why They Matter . Washington, DC: Association of American Colleges & Universities.

Lenning, O.T. and Ebbers, L.H. 1999. The Powerful Potential of Learning Communities: Improving Education for the Future . ASHE-ERIC Higher Education Reports, 26.

Lenning, O.T., Hill, D.M., Saunders, K.P., Solan, A., and Stokes, A. 2013. Powerful Learning Communities: A Guide to Developing Student, Faculty and Professional Learning Communities to Improve Student Success and Organizational Effectiveness . Sterling, VA: Stylus.

Schroeder, C.C. and Mabel, P. 1994. Realizing the Educational Potential of Residence Halls. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Shapiro, N.S., and Levine, J.H. 1999. Creating Learning Communities: A Practical Guide to Winning Support, Organizing for Change, and Implementing Programs . San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Taylor, K., Moore, W.S., MacGregor, J. and Lindblad, J. 2003. What We Know Now about Learning Community Research and Assessment. National Learning Communities Project Monograph Series. Olympia, WA: Washington Center for Improving the Quality of Undergraduate Education, The Evergreen State College.

Zhao, C. and Kuh, G.D. 2004. “Adding value: Learning communities and student engagement.” Research in Higher Education , 45(2), 115-138.

The Center thanks Stacie Dooley for contributing the initial content for this resource.

Classroom Q&A

With larry ferlazzo.

In this EdWeek blog, an experiment in knowledge-gathering, Ferlazzo will address readers’ questions on classroom management, ELL instruction, lesson planning, and other issues facing teachers. Send your questions to [email protected]. Read more from this blog.

Response: The Value of ‘Small Learning Communities’

This week’s question is:

What are ‘Small Learning Communities’ (dividing large campuses into special interest small schools) and how do they work?

Having worked for the past ten years in a school that is divided into “Small Learning Communities,” I can’t imagine teaching in any other kind of environment. I’ll leave it to Ted Appel, the extraordinary principal of our school, to explain how it works in today’s first response. Educators ReLeah Cossett, PJ Caposey and Tom Hoerr also contribute their commentaries today sharing different perspectives on what a “small learning community” might look like. Plus, you can listen to a ten-minute conversation I had with Ted and ReLeah on this topic at my BAM! Radio Show .

I’ve collected additional materials at The Best Resources For Learning About Small Learning Communities .

Response From Ted Appel

Ted Appel is the principal of Luther Burbank High School in Sacramento, California:

In 2001, the Sacramento City Unified School district launched an initiative for high school reform. The initiative. which was supported by a grant from the Carnegie Foundation, resulted in Luther Burbank High School reorganizing its 2000 students and approximately 100 teachers from a centrally organized and administrated program into eight small learning communities. Each small learning community consists approximately 250 students who take all their core classes (English, Math, Social Science and some science) with teachers assigned to the small learning community. Each SLC has a dedicated counselor assigned to it. There is a career path theme to each small learning community such as Law and Social Justice or Health and Medical Sciences. Electives are aligned to the career path theme.

The most fundamental aspect of the small learning community is the opportunity for teachers to believe they have an opportunity to have an impact on the success of the students in their community and the belief that their actions make a significant contribution to the community. In my view, the most significant motivator you can give a teacher is the opportunity to make a difference. Because teachers work collaboratively with other teachers and counselors , and because they can engage with their students beyond one period a day for one semester or year, they believe their ongoing work can have that impact. They establish relationships that reflect a concern for their students beyond the short period of time the student may be in their class. This, in turn, changes the way the students think about their teachers.

Additionally, SLCs provide teachers with more varied opportunities to lead and be part of the school community. Each small learning community creates an assortment of roles and responsibilities for teachers. These include facilitation of SLC meetings, chairing a career day or awards celebration and monitoring parent contacts. Giving teachers roles and responsibilities for the betterment of their community connects teachers to the overall community success.

Finally, small learning communities make teachers and students less anonymous. In a large school some teachers and many students believe they can exist unnoticed. For both, this can mean feeling like you can get away with doing less than your best. It is much more difficult to pass unnoticed when you collaborate with colleagues on regular basis and each student knows that each teacher knows all of their other teachers. This breakdown of anonymity is the first step toward accountability.

Response From ReLeah Cossett

ReLeah Cossett Lent is an educational consultant, speaker, and author of numerous articles and books , including Literacy Learning Communities , Overcoming Textbook Fatigue , and, most recently, Common Core CPR :

Small learning communities can effectively change the impersonal nature of large schools, but their success depends upon the unique population of students as well as the interests and expertise of the faculty. Many schools seeking the advantages of “schools within schools"--lower drop-out rates, higher achievement, reduced isolationism (for teachers as well as students), and a surge in engagement-- create academy-type programs related to particular themes such as technology, law, music, international studies or fine arts. Though academy students must accrue appropriate credits, the coursework is more closely related to the theme of the academy, and often courses are multi-year, allowing participants to delve more deeply into topics than they might in traditional classes. The process for applying to such programs may be a learning experience in itself. Students sometimes undergo a rigorous interview along with the presentation of a portfolio that includes sample work, letters of application, and teacher recommendations.

The smaller community concept is at the heart of many well known “school within school” programs, for example the International Baccalaureate program which targets high-achieving students and provides an international context for learning. Similarly, STEM programs offer an academic focus, specifically on science, technology, engineering and math. Ninth-grade academies are popular all across the nation and are sometimes physically removed from the rest of the high school population. The most successful learning communities have their own budget, faculty, administrators, and governance, making it a true school within a school.

Strong support networks and personalized attention are generally hallmarks of any smaller community, components of learning that are especially important if there is little support at home. Students often develop lasting relationships not only with other students, but with teachers and community partners. In one school, for example, the local bar association created a law library at the school and offered internships during the summer for students in the law academy. If project-based, interdisciplinary learning is a component of study, as it often is, students have increased opportunities to apply what they’ve learned and prepare for college and career in authentic ways.

Teachers seem to flourish in smaller communities as well since they often are free to try new approaches and work more closely with their colleagues in planning curriculum and sharing tasks.

As might be expected, there seem to be few downsides to this “smaller” approach to learning, one that values individuals, relationships, autonomy, and shared interests.

Response From Tom Hoerr

We learn best under the same conditions as do our students. We learn best when the content is developmentally appropriate, relevant, and engaging. And we flourish when we are part of a smaller group so that we can be part of a team, learning with and from one another. That last phrase, “learning with and from one another,” is Roland Barth’s definition of “collegiality” (from his book, Improving Schools from Within). As a school leader, a major task of mine is to create a culture where collegiality is the norm so that our teachers are learners and their students will benefit.

Small learning communities increase the likelihood that collegiality will develop and flourish. Particularly in a large school, it can be difficult to create a feeling of team and a pattern of teamwork among faculty members, and it is hard to develop a sense of trust among everyone. Small work groups, though, more readily become learning communities in which the members get to know, rely upon, and trust one another. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos uses the “two pizza rule” for limiting the size of his work teams: If two pizzas aren’t enough for a meal, the group is too large.

By dividing a faculty into learning groups, we not only gain benefits in collegiality and teamwork, we are also able to simultaneously pursue several thrusts on student achievement. One group could look at how to differentiate instruction, another might investigate how to incorporate non-cognitive skills into the curriculum, and still another at what teachers and principals can do to foster grit, for example. By narrowing the focus for each of these learning communities, they are more likely to succeed in understanding the issue, becoming knowledgeable about needs and resources, and in developing strategies. Depending upon the length of time that these communities operate, periodic reports and updates should take place so that everyone understands what’s happening in each group. It’s important that the work of smaller learning communities be coordinated so that their efforts are in sync and synergy can occur. Ultimately, the learning communities share their findings and recommendations with the school’s administration and the larger faculty.

A small learning community might last for a semester, an entire year, or it might work with a shorter time frame. Regardless, we should be sure that the members are engaged and that their efforts are meaningful.

Response From PJ Caposey

PJ Caposey is an award-winning educator specializing in school culture and evaluation. He is Superintendent of the Meridian (Illinois) School District and a member of the ASCD Emerging Leader class of 2013:

Small Learning Communities can work!! They can serve students wonderfully, increase student achievement, and according to some studies increase student achievement and even enrollment in to post-secondary institutions.

Large learning communities can work!! They can serve students wonderfully and increase student achievement. In fact, according to US News and World Report , the top non-selective enrollment school in my home state of Illinois serves 4,031 students.

So, what gives??

The Gates Foundation champions the success of the Small Learning Community model with more influence by the than any other institution and is often met with critique and opposition. The Gates Foundation in and of itself is polarizing, and this subject too attracts its share of critics, including educational superpower Diane Ravitch. This debate has proven two things - there is plenty of research to support either the ‘in favor’ or the ‘opposed’ perspective and the other qualities the Gates Foundation has deemed essential for a school to be high performing are pretty dead on. It is difficult to argue that schools should not have a common purpose, high expectations, use technology as a learning tool, focus on performance, allow time for collaboration, and have a personalized focus for each student. So - minimally, everyone should be able to agree on some of the core beliefs behind the Small Learning Community movement.

I too have my personal bias - seeing that I have spent the last 6 years of my life serving Districts that house high schools of 600 students or fewer. Do I think small schools and small learning communities potentially provide an experience a large, traditional school cannot - absolutely. I also believe that in the small learning community the following things are what really make the difference - not the enrollment number of the school:

People - The quality of a school cannot exceed the quality of its teachers. I am not the first to say it, but there is nothing that could possibly make me believe in that statement more. As a school leader, give me great teachers and we can do great things - period.
Purpose - Leadership provides direction and vision. A school without a clear focus and/or too many foci will not achieve great results. The ability to set out upon a course and stay true without deviation (even when new, shiny initiatives present) is what makes schools great.
Personalization - Anybody who does not believe that socio-emotional issues impact learning at a nearly unquantifiable rate at the secondary levels simply has not taught in one. The personalization of an education is not just about the things that manifest in to test scores - it is about serving the whole child.
Resources - Functioning well as a small learning community takes appropriate resources. Being small, poor, and unable to provide the resources necessary to serve kids appropriately solves no problems. The bottom line is that there are haves and have-nots in education - too frequently the have-nots are the schools serving kids who need the most resources.

Thanks to Ted, ReLeah, PJ and Tom for their contributions!

Please feel free to leave a comment your reactions to the topic or directly to anything that has been said in this post.

Consider contributing a question to be answered in a future post. You can send one to me at [email protected] .When you send it in, let me know if I can use your real name if it’s selected or if you’d prefer remaining anonymous and have a pseudonym in mind.

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Living-Learning Communities: What to Know

Students live and take classes with peers who share a similar academic interest, identity or hobby.

Living-Learning Communities

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These communities are college residential programs that connect students with similar academic interests, like community engagement, outdoor recreation or environmental sustainability.

First-year college students typically have less flexibility in choosing their housing compared to upperclassmen, as many schools require freshmen to live on campus as a way to help ease the adjustment.

Roommates are generally either requested or picked at random once students submit a compatibility survey covering, for example, cleanliness and sleep habits. But there's sometimes another option for first-year students and beyond: applying to a living-learning community.

These residential communities provide students the opportunity to live with peers who share a common academic interest or hobby.

"One of the benefits of living on campus is that you're developing a sense of belonging that is really intended to enhance your academic experience," says Bobbie Denise Cole, assistant vice president of student life and Title IX coordinator at William Peace University in North Carolina and a board member of the Association of College and University Housing Officers – International. "There's so much power in becoming connected to the campus environment and growing as a person outside of the learning that you're doing in the classroom. And so living-learning communities are really intended to kind of take that experience to the next level."

What Are Living-Learning Communities?

Learning communities are college residential programs that connect students with similar academic interests, identity or passions, like community engagement, outdoor recreation or environmental sustainability. These students often live on the same floor or wing of a residence hall. Depending on demand, some schools have entire buildings for living-learning community cohorts to live together.

Each community has different requirements, including enrolling in classes together, upholding a certain GPA or attending planned themed activities or workshops throughout the semester. Off-campus excursions are typically covered by the residence life office or college, but sometimes students must pay fees.

In many ways, being part of a living-learning community is similar to living in a traditional residential setting. However, the programming for living-learning communities is more intentional, says Victoria Gebel, director of residence life and community standards in residence life at Nazareth College in New York.

"The events that the (residential advisors) put on are going to be more catered towards that student's particular interest," she adds. "So for example, students who are interested in the leadership living-learning community may have bulletin boards or programs that are specifically geared towards growing their leadership skill set."

Not only do living-learning communities provide an opportunity to build relationships with peers, they also connect students with faculty members outside the classroom.

"The faculty are a huge part of our living-learning communities," says Ariel Leget, assistant director for academic initiatives and diversity education in the residence life department at Rutgers University—New Brunswick in New Jersey. "Oftentimes, faculty come into the residence halls to do some of the programming with students."

Since their focus often revolves around helping with the adjustment to college life, living-learning communities are targeted more toward first-year students. For instance, many provide peer mentors – upperclassmen who routinely check on participants and create events.

"They are really keeping the pulse of the community and making sure everyone is OK in their transition" to college, Leget says.

Examples of Living-Learning Communities

Types of living-learning communities vary at colleges and universities across the country. For instance, Rutgers offers several that are culturally based, such as Asian American identities and images, French language and culture, Latin images and the Paul Robeson community, where students learn about the African diaspora.

"You don't have to identify with any particular group. It's about gaining a deeper knowledge about the particular culture," Leget says.

The school also has theme-based housing, such as for students interested in broadcast meteorology or engineering.

Meanwhile, schools like East Carolina University in North Carolina have more academic living-learning communities available, like art and design, biology, business, chemistry and physics, criminal justice, education, engineering, nursing , kinesiology, music , theater and dance. These programs all have course requirements.

There are also some living-learning community options specifically open to upperclassmen or transfer students . ECU, for example, has a living-learning community called Quest, which is designed to help transfer students make a smooth transition.

Why Join a Living-Learning Community?

Students, particularly males, in living-learning communities are more likely than others living on campus to return to school the following year, according to a 2021 report by the Association of College and University Housing Officers – International.

Living-learning community participants are also more likely to become engaged in other aspects of campus life, like joining a club or taking on a leadership role, Gebel says. These students "may report a smoother transition to college life because they are already coming into a somewhat created community," she adds. "It helps to ease some of that social anxiety."

For students wondering if such an experience is the right fit for them, experts suggest reaching out to their chosen college's residence life office to ask questions and learn more about program options and expectations.

"You are only going get out of it what you put into it," says Peter C. Groenendyk, associate vice chancellor for campus living at ECU. "So you do want to be invested in being a member of that community."

However, it's not for everyone. "If they are not particularly interested in an LLC theme, they certainly wouldn't want to sign themselves up for that because they are not going to be able to take as much out of the experience," Gebel says.

How to Apply to a Living-Learning Community

Though it varies by institution, students typically apply to a living-learning community at the same time they apply for housing. For first-year students, that's often during the spring semester of their senior year of high school.

Some communities are more competitive than others, so slots can be limited. Sizes vary from single digits to hundreds of students.

Applicants may be required to write an essay and uphold a certain GPA . Meanwhile, returning students typically need to demonstrate that they were active participants in their living-learning community during the prior year.

"At many institutions, college is what you make of it. And you want to take advantage of all the opportunities available to you," Cole says. "For students already living in the residence halls anyway, why not take advantage of an opportunity that's going to contribute positively to your college experience?"

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Essay: Professional Learning Communities

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Professional Learning Communities

Educators today are very familiar with the term, Professional Learning Communities or PLCs. In fact, many schools and school districts are utilizing the construct as a way to bring about school improvement. Although we are all familiar with the term ‘professional learning communities,’ we do not all share a common understanding of what a PLC is. Depending on whom you ask, explanations of what a PLC is can range from the simple, such as ‘a group of teachers working together to plan lessons’ to a more specific description: A small group of educators who commit to their own learning in order to improve student learning. They meet regularly, form a trusting environment in which members openly discuss (their own and their students’) learning and teaching. Their work is self-directed and reflects the professional opinions of all members of the community about the unique challenges they face, individually and collectively. Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) shift the focus of school reform from restructuring to re-culturing (DuFour, 2006). A PLC is an ongoing process used to establish a school wide culture that requires teachers to learn and develop as leaders focused on increasing student learning. Through participation in PLCs, teachers enhance their leadership capacity while they work as members of ongoing, high-performing, collaborative teams that focus on improving student learning (Rentfro, 2007). The hallmark of a PLC is long-term learning and collaboration. In some cases, leaders may find it necessary to explicitly direct and teach the skills teachers need to collaborate effectively. Organizations that encourage lifelong learning and collaboration have a common understanding of collegial behavior, share a common vocabulary and know how to engage in non-threatening conversations with peers. Within a PLC framework, teachers have an environment for assessing student work and intervening with individual students that need additional help. In this way academic interventions are timely and directive, so that students ‘catch up’ rather than fall behind. At the same time, teachers collaboratively decide, based on student performance, the need to change, adjust, and/or improve learning plans and classroom practices. DuFour asserts that in effective PLCs, teachers take ‘collective responsibility’ to make sure they are working together to analyze and improve their classroom practice. Moving beyond collegiality, PLC members analyze the best practices that generate the best results in terms of student learning. DuFour goes on to say, ‘Teachers work in teams, engaging in an ongoing cycle of questions that promote deep team learning. This process, in turn, leads to higher levels of student achievement.’ How does a school develop a professional learning community? Richard DuFour (2004) answers this question most best: ‘To create a professional learning community, focus on learning rather than teaching, work collaboratively, and hold yourself accountable for results.’ ). Collaboration is a means to an end, not the end itself. Collaboration does not lead to improved results unless people are focused on the right issues. In many schools teachers are willing to collaborate on a variety of issues, but still insist on shutting the door to their own classroom practice. In a PLC, collaboration is the process by which teachers work together to impact their classroom practice. For DuFour, and many other leading experts/practitioners, the purpose of a PLC is to provide educators an opportunity to work together to find ways to improve learning. Instead of focusing on the teacher and whether the unit or lesson has been properly developed and presented, the emphasis is on whether or not the students are learning what is being taught. A teacher may be wholeheartedly committed to teaching specific content, developing outstanding lessons and follow up assessments; however, if students are not learning, it does not matter how technically perfect the lessons may have been. As DuFour points out, ‘The relevant question in a PLC is not ‘Was it taught’? but rather, ‘Was it learned”? (2004) Despite the attention to them in recent years, the model of professional learning communities is not new. Discussions relative to PLCs circulated in education circles in the 60’s as researchers attempted to identify strategies to help teachers work collaboratively to improve student learning. During the eighties, Rosenholtz (1989) brought workplace factors into the discussion surrounding the quality or instruction, asserting that teachers who were committed to their own lifelong learning and felt supported in their classroom practice were more effective than those who did not feel the same affirmation. Being connected and supported to a network of colleagues, cooperation among coworkers, and increased responsibility and leadership augmented teacher effectiveness in meeting their students’ needs. Further, Rosenholtz found that teachers with a high sense of efficacy were more likely to adopt innovative classroom practices and were also more likely to remain in the field of education.

These assertions began to be formalized in the early 90’s with the publication of Peter Senge’s book, The Fifth Discipline. Although Senge’s book was geared toward the business community, it garnered attention among educators when he suggested that learning organizations are places where people continually expand their capacity as they learn how to learn together. These ideas evolved into the construct of professional learning communities that we know today. (Senge, 2006) In 1993, McLaughlin and Talbert assimilated these findings, suggesting that when teachers had opportunities for collaborative inquiry and the learning related to it, they were able to develop and share a body of wisdom gleaned from their experience. Adding to the discussion, Darling-Hammond (1996) cited shared decision making as a factor in curriculum reform and the transformation of teaching roles in some schools. In schools which provide teachers with structured time to work together in planning instruction, observing each other’s classrooms, and sharing feedback, teacher satisfaction and efficacy was ranked the highest. It is no coincidence that these are the very attributes that characterize professional learning communities. Based upon the considerable amount of research that exists regarding PLCs, it is clear that PLCs work. The research also indicates that there is no single model of what the ideal PLC should ‘look like.’ Because the work of each PLC is aligned with each school’s mission and vision, and the needs of its own student body, teachers in the PLCs design strategies and classroom practice to fit their own school communities. The literature on professional learning communities repeatedly gives attention to the attributes of such organizational arrangements: supportive and shared leadership, shared values and vision, supportive conditions, and shared personal practice. Additionally, the literature clearly recognizes the role and influence of the school leadership (principal, and sometimes assistant principal) as to whether change will occur within the school. Creating a culture of lifelong learning amongst teachers in a school requires the support of the leaders and the cultivating of the entire staff’s development as a learning community. We can look at schools wherein the staff is a professional learning community as a starting point for describing what learning communities look like and the role the principal play. In these school, the school leader "accepts a collegial relationship with teachers, to share leadership, power, and decision making.’ Carmichael goes on to recall the position of authority and power typically held by principals, in which the staff views them as all-wise and all-competent (1982). ‘Principals have internalized this omnicompetence. Others in the school reinforce it, making it difficult for principals to admit that they themselves can benefit from professional development opportunities, or to recognize the dynamic potential of staff contributions to decision making.’ This centralized control makes it difficult for the staff to feel safe in expressing divergent views on issues surrounding school change. Carmichael suggests that the perception of the principals’ omnicompetence be replaced with teachers’ ownership of and participation in their own learning. Kleine-Kracht (1993) agrees and expands on this to suggest that it is vital that school administrators be learners also, "questioning, investigating, and seeking solutions’ (p. 393) for school improvement. The established pattern that "teachers teach, students learn, and administrators manage is completely altered . . . [There is] no longer a hierarchy of who knows more than someone else, but rather the need for everyone to contribute" (p. 393). This new relationship between administrators and teachers leads to shared and collegial leadership in the school, where all grow professionally and learn to view themselves (to use an athletic metaphor) as "all playing on the same team and working toward the same goal

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Reimagining Design with Nature: ecological urbanism in Moscow

Reflective Essay
Published: 10 September 2019
Volume 1 , pages 233–247, ( 2019 )

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The twenty-first century is the era when populations of cities will exceed rural communities for the first time in human history. The population growth of cities in many countries, including those in transition from planned to market economies, is putting considerable strain on ecological and natural resources. This paper examines four central issues: (a) the challenges and opportunities presented through working in jurisdictions where there are no official or established methods in place to guide regional, ecological and landscape planning and design; (b) the experience of the author’s practice—Gillespies LLP—in addressing these challenges using techniques and methods inspired by McHarg in Design with Nature in the Russian Federation in the first decade of the twenty-first century; (c) the augmentation of methods derived from Design with Nature in reference to innovations in technology since its publication and the contribution that the art of landscape painters can make to landscape analysis and interpretation; and (d) the application of this experience to the international competition and colloquium for the expansion of Moscow. The text concludes with a comment on how the application of this learning and methodological development to landscape and ecological planning and design was judged to be a central tenant of the winning design. Finally, a concluding section reflects on lessons learned and conclusions drawn.

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Principles for public space design, planning to do better

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The landscape team from Gillespies Glasgow Studio (Steve Nelson, Graeme Pert, Joanne Walker, Rory Wilson and Chris Swan) led by the author and all our collaborators in the Capital Cities Planning Group.

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Evans, B.M. Reimagining Design with Nature: ecological urbanism in Moscow. Socio Ecol Pract Res 1 , 233–247 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42532-019-00031-5

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Published : 10 September 2019

Issue Date : October 2019

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s42532-019-00031-5

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The End of Foreign-Language Education

Thanks to AI, people may no longer feel the need to learn a second language.

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Produced by ElevenLabs and News Over Audio (NOA) using AI narration.

A few days ago, I watched a video of myself talking in perfect Chinese. I’ve been studying the language on and off for only a few years, and I’m far from fluent. But there I was, pronouncing each character flawlessly in the correct tone, just as a native speaker would. Gone were my grammar mistakes and awkward pauses, replaced by a smooth and slightly alien-sounding voice. “My favorite food is sushi,” I said— wo zui xihuan de shiwu shi shousi —with no hint of excitement or joy.

I’d created the video using software from a Los Angeles–based artificial-intelligence start-up called HeyGen. It allows users to generate deepfake videos of real people “saying” almost anything based on a single picture of their face and a script, which is paired with a synthetic voice and can be translated into more than 40 languages. By merely uploading a selfie taken on my iPhone, I was able to glimpse a level of Mandarin fluency that may elude me for the rest of my life.

HeyGen’s visuals are flawed—the way it animates selfies almost reminded me of the animatronics in Disney’s It’s a Small World ride—but its language technology is good enough to make me question whether learning Mandarin is a wasted effort. Neural networks, the machine-learning systems that power generative-AI programs such as ChatGPT, have rapidly improved the quality of automatic translation over the past several years, making even older tools like Google Translate far more accurate.

At the same time, the number of students studying foreign languages in the U.S. and other countries is shrinking. Total enrollment in language courses other than English at American colleges decreased 29.3 percent from 2009 to 2021, according to the latest data from the Modern Language Association, better known as the MLA. In Australia, only 8.6 percent of high-school seniors were studying a foreign language in 2021—a historic low. In South Korea and New Zealand , universities are closing their French, German, and Italian departments. One recent study from the education company EF Education First found that English proficiency is decreasing among young people in some places.

Many factors could help explain the downward trend, including pandemic-related school disruptions, growing isolationism, and funding cuts to humanities programs. But whether the cause of the shift is political, cultural, or some mix of things, it’s clear that people are turning away from language learning just as automatic translation becomes ubiquitous across the internet.

Read: High-school English needed a makeover before ChatGPT

Within a few years, AI translation may become so commonplace and frictionless that billions of people take for granted the fact that the emails they receive, videos they watch, and albums they listen to were originally produced in a language other than their native one. Something enormous will be lost in exchange for that convenience. Studies have suggested that language shapes the way people interpret reality. Learning a different way to speak, read, and write helps people discover new ways to see the world—experts I spoke with likened it to discovering a new way to think. No machine can replace such a profoundly human experience. Yet tech companies are weaving automatic translation into more and more products. As the technology becomes normalized, we may find that we’ve allowed deep human connections to be replaced by communication that’s technically proficient but ultimately hollow.

AI language tools are now in social-media apps, messaging platforms, and streaming sites. Spotify is experimenting with using a voice-generation tool from the ChatGPT maker OpenAI to translate podcasts in the host’s own voice, while Samsung is touting that its new Galaxy S24 smartphone can translate phone calls as they’re occurring . Roblox, meanwhile, claimed last month that its AI translation tool is so fast and accurate , its English-speaking users might not realize that their conversation partner “is actually in Korea.” The technology—which works especially well for “ high-resource languages ” such as English and Chinese, and less so for languages such as Swahili and Urdu—is being used in much more high-stakes situations as well, such as translating the testimony of asylum seekers and firsthand accounts from conflict zones. Musicians are already using it to translate songs , and at least one couple credited it with helping them to fall in love.

One of the most telling use cases comes from a start-up called Jumpspeak, which makes a language-learning app similar to Duolingo and Babbel. Instead of hiring actual bilingual actors, Jumpspeak appears to have used AI-generated “people” reading AI-translated scripts in at least four ads on Instagram and Facebook. At least some of the personas shown in the ads appear to be default characters available on HeyGen’s platform. “I struggled to learn languages my whole life. Then I learned Spanish in six months, I got a job opportunity in France, and I learned French. I learned Mandarin before visiting China,” a synthetic avatar says in one of the ads, while switching between all three languages. Even a language-learning app is surrendering to the allure of AI, at least in its marketing.

Alexandru Voica, a communications professional who works for another video-generating AI service, told me he came across Jumpspeak’s ads while looking for a program to teach his children Romanian, the language spoken by their grandparents. He argued that the ads demonstrated how deepfakes and automated-translation software could be used to mislead or deceive people. “I'm worried that some in the industry are currently in a race to the bottom on AI safety,” he told me in an email. (The ads were taken down after I started reporting this story, but it’s not clear if Meta or Jumpspeak removed them; neither company returned requests for comment. HeyGen also did not immediately respond to a request for comment about its product being used in Jumpspeak’s marketing.)

The world is already seeing how all of this can go wrong. Earlier this month, a far-right conspiracy theorist shared several AI-generated clips on X of Adolf Hitler giving a 1939 speech in English instead of the original German. The videos, which were purportedly produced using software from a company called ElevenLabs, featured a re-creation of Hitler’s own voice. It was a strange experience, hearing Hitler speak in English, and some people left comments suggesting that they found him easy to empathize with: “It sounds like these people cared about their country above all else,” one X user reportedly wrote in response to the videos. ElevenLabs did not immediately respond to a request for comment. ( The Atlantic uses ElevenLabs’ AI voice generator to narrate some articles.)

Read: The last frontier of machine translation

Gabriel Nicholas, a research fellow at the nonprofit Center for Democracy and Technology, told me that part of the problem with machine-translation programs is that they’re often falsely perceived as being neutral, rather than “bringing their own perspective upon how to move text from one language to another.” The truth is that there is no single right or correct way to transpose a sentence from French to Russian or any other language—it’s an art rather than a science. “Students will ask, ‘How do you say this in Spanish?’ and I’ll say, ‘You just don’t say it the same way in Spanish; the way you would approach it is different,’” Deborah Cohn, a Spanish- and Portuguese-language professor at Indiana University Bloomington who has written about the importance of language learning for bolstering U.S. national security , told me.

I recently came across a beautiful and particularly illustrative example of this fact in an article written by a translator in China named Anne. “Building a ladder between widely different languages, such as Chinese and English, is sometimes as difficult as a doctor building a bridge in a patient's heart,” she wrote. The metaphor initially struck me as slightly odd, but thankfully I wasn’t relying on ChatGPT to translate Anne’s words from their original Mandarin. I was reading a human translation by a professor named Jeffrey Ding, who helpfully noted that Anne may have been referring to a type of heart surgery that has recently become common in China. It's a small detail, but understanding that context brought me much closer to the true meaning of what Anne was trying to say.

Read: The college essay is dead

But most students will likely never achieve anything close to the fluency required to tell whether a translation rings close enough to the original or not. If professors accept that automated technology will far outpace the technical skills of the average Russian or Arabic major, their focus would ideally shift from grammar drills to developing cultural competency , or understanding the beliefs and practices of people from different backgrounds. Instead of cutting language courses in response to AI, schools should “stress more than ever the intercultural components of language learning that tremendously benefit the students taking these classes,” Jen William, the head of the School of Languages and Cultures at Purdue University and a member of the executive committee of the Association of Language Departments, told me.

Paula Krebs, the executive director of the MLA, referenced a beloved 1991 episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation to make a similar point. In “Darmok,” the crew aboard the starship Enterprise struggles to communicate with aliens living on a planet called El-Adrel IV. They have access to a “universal translator” that allows them to understand the basic syntax and semantics of what the Tamarians are saying, but the greater meaning of their utterances remains a mystery.

It later becomes clear that their language revolves around allegories rooted in the Tamarians’ unique history and practices. Even though Captain Picard was translating all the words they were saying, he “couldn’t understand the metaphors of their culture,” Krebs told me. More than 30 years later, something like a universal translator is now being developed on Earth. But it similarly doesn’t have the power to bridge cultural divides the way that humans can.

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DOE's Clean Energy to Communities (C2C) program helps local governments, electric utilities, community-based groups, and other decisionmakers realize their clean energy goals with innovative modeling and testing tools developed at DOE's world-class national laboratories.

Today, DOE's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) released the first C2C annual report , which highlights more than 200 communities across the United States that have benefited from this groundbreaking program. C2C has supported these communities across the clean energy transition—from foundational guidance to specific project support.

To build on this success, DOE also announced new funding, technical assistance, and peer learning opportunities across all three program offerings.

C2C In-Depth Partnerships Accepting New Proposals

Learn more about C2C opportunities at the following webinars:

Peer-Learning Cohorts and Expert Match : April 10, 1 p.m. ET; register via Zoom
In-Depth Partnership Proposals : April 18, 1 p.m. ET; register via Zoom

NREL today released a Request for Proposals to support 2-4 communities in developing tailored, actionable decarbonization strategies as part of C2C in-depth partnerships offering. Teams comprising a local government, electric utility, and community-based organizations can apply for a multi-year partnership with experts from DOE's national laboratories. Lab experts will help these teams better understand, model, and validate potential clean energy deployment strategies so the communities they represent can make more informed decisions. In-depth partnerships focus on key challenges that address multiple sectors, including the renewable energy, mobility, grid, and buildings sectors.

Awards include up to $500,000 in subcontract funding and up to $3,500,000 in the form of in-depth technical assistance from one or more national laboratories. Funding can be used to support staff, community engagement activities, and the purchase of clean energy infrastructure or technology.

Join a webinar on April 18 at 1 p.m. ET to learn more and apply by June 14 .

Past and ongoing in-depth partnership highlights include:

Pilot project supporting an Alaska utility's transition from coal to clean energy
Active In-Depth Partnerships in Chicago, Illinois; Colorado Springs, Colorado; Delaware Valley, Pennsylvania and New Jersey; Moloka‘i, Hawaii; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; and Sitka, Alaska.

Applications Now Open for Peer-Learning Cohorts

This week, NREL announced a new round of C2C peer-learning cohorts . Ten to fifteen communities will convene regularly from July-December 2024 to exchange strategies and best practices and learn from national laboratory experts on the following topics:

Designing and Enhancing Energy Efficiency Programs for Residential Buildings
Charting a Path to Municipal Fleet Electrification
Implementing an Agrivoltaics Project

Join a webinar on April 10 at 1 p.m. ET to learn more and apply by April 30 .

Past peer-learning cohorts, as well as the three ongoing cohorts , have achieved several notable successes:

Cook County, Illinois, developed an EV-charging strategy.
Little Rock, Arkansas, established a plan to achieve 100% clean energy for its municipal operations by 2030.
The San Diego Association of Governments found new ways to enhance community participation in clean energy planning.
Clean Cities and Communities offered ongoing support to participants during and between cohort sessions.

Applications Remain Open for Short Term Technical Assistance

C2C's expert match program provides between 40 and 60 hours of tailored technical assistance to help local governments, electric utilities, community-based groups, and others address short-term energy challenges. Applications are accepted on a rolling basis. Apply today!

Past Expert Match highlights include:

Partnering with the Black Farmers Collaborative to explore agrivoltaics on farms in Florida and across the Southeast
Exploring the potential of floating solar on a municipal reservoir with Cohoes, New York
Identifying opportunities for commercial building efficiency in Unincorporated Norcross, Georgia
Identifying the costs and benefits of various strategies for achieving net-zero operations in Washtenaw County, Michigan.

Read the full C2C annual report

C2C is funded by DOE's Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy and managed by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory  delivered in collaboration with Argonne National Laboratory , Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory , Oak Ridge National Laboratory , and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory . The World Resources Institute also assists with C2C Peer-Learning Cohorts.

Learn more about each opportunity at www.nrel.gov/c2c .

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Regions Riding Forward® Scholarship Contest

Their Story. Your Voice.

Your voice is your own. But it's also been impacted by others. Who, we wonder, has inspired you? Let us know by entering the Regions Riding Forward Scholarship Contest.

You could win an $8,000 college scholarship

For the opportunity to win an $8,000 scholarship, submit a video or written essay about an individual you know personally (who lives in your community) who has inspired you and helped you build the confidence you need to achieve your goals.

The details

The 2024 Regions Riding Forward Scholarship Contest consists of four (4) separate Quarterly Contests - one for each calendar quarter of 2024. Regions is awarding four $8,000 scholarships through each Quarterly Contest.

Each Quarterly Contest has its own separate entry period, as provided in the chart below.

The entry deadline for each Quarterly Contest is 11:59:59 PM Central Time on the applicable Quarterly Contest period end date (set forth in the chart above).

No purchase or banking relationship required.

Regions believes in supporting the students whose passion and actions every day will continue to make stories worth sharing. That’s why we have awarded over $1 million in total scholarships to high school and college students.

How to enter, 1. complete an online quarterly contest application.

Enter the Regions Riding Forward Scholarship Contest by completing a Quarterly Contest application. The second Quarterly Contest runs from April 1, 2024 through June 30, 2024. Complete and save all requested information.

2. Prepare your Written Essay or Video Essay

For each Quarterly Contest, the topic of your Written Essay or Video Essay (your “Essay Topic”) must be an individual you know personally, who lives in your community. Your Written Essay or Video Essay must address how the individual you have selected as your Essay Topic has inspired you and helped you build the confidence you need to achieve your goals.

Written Essay and Video Essay submissions must meet all of the requirements described in the contest Official Rules. Your Written Essay or Video Essay must be (i) in English, (ii) your own original work, created solely by you (and without the use of any means of artificial intelligence (“AI”)), and (iii) the exclusive property of you alone.

Written Essays must be 500 words or less. You can write your Written Essay directly in the application, or you can copy and paste it into the appropriate area in the application form.

Video Essay submissions must be directly uploaded to the contest application site. Video Essays must be no more than 3 minutes in length and no larger than 1 GB. Only the following file formats are accepted: MP4, MPG, MOV, AVI, and WMV. Video Essays must not contain music of any kind nor display any illegal, explicit, or inappropriate material, and Video Essays must not be password protected or require a log-in/sign-in to view. You must upload your Video Essay to the application, and you may not submit your Video Essay in DVD or other physical form. (Video Essays submitted via mail will not be reviewed or returned.)

Tips to Record Quality Videos on a Smartphone:

Don’t shoot vertical video. Computer monitors have landscape-oriented displays, so shoot your video horizontally.
Use a tripod. Even small movements can make a big difference when editing.
Don’t use zoom. If you need to get a close shot of the subject, move closer as zooming can cause pixilation.
Use natural lighting. Smartphone lighting can wash out your video.

3. Review and submit your Quarterly Contest application

Review your information on your Quarterly Application (and check the spelling of a Written Essay) and submit your entry by 11:59:59 p.m. Central Time on the applicable Quarterly Contest period end date. The second Quarterly Contest period end date is June 30, 2024.

4. Await notification

Winning entries are selected by an independent panel of judges who are not affiliated with Regions. If your entry is selected as a Quarterly Contest winner, you will need to respond to ISTS with the required information.

Eligibility

For purposes of this contest:

The “Eligible States” are defined as the following states: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and Texas.
An “accredited college” is defined as a nonprofit, two- or four-year college or university located within one of the fifty (50) United States or the District of Columbia.

To be eligible to enter this contest and to win an award in a Quarterly Contest, at the time of entry, you must:

Be a legal U.S. resident of one of the Eligible States.
Be age 16 or older.
Have at least one (1) year (or at least 18 semester hours) remaining before college graduation.
If you are not yet in college, begin your freshman year of college no later than the start of the 2025 – 2026 college academic school year.
As of your most recent school enrollment period, have a cumulative grade point average of at least 2.0 in school (and if no GPA is provided at school, be in “good standing” or the equivalent thereof in school).

View Official Rules

NO PURCHASE OR BANKING RELATIONSHIP REQUIRED. PURCHASE OR BANKING RELATIONSHIP WILL NOT INCREASE YOUR CHANCES OF WINNING. VOID WHERE PROHIBITED. The 2024 Regions Riding Forward Scholarship Contest (the “Contest”) consists of four (4) separate quarterly contests (each a “Quarterly Contest”): (1) the “Q-1 Contest;” (2) the “Q-2 Contest;” (3) the “Q-3 Contest;” and (4) the “Q-4 Contest.” The Q-1 Contest begins on 02/01/24 and ends on 03/31/24; the Q-2 Contest begins on 04/01/24 and ends on 06/30/24; the Q-3 Contest begins on 07/01/24 and ends on 09/30/24; and the Q-4 Contest begins on 10/01/24 and ends on 12/31/24. (For each Quarterly Contest, entries must be submitted and received by 11:59:59 PM CT on the applicable Quarterly Contest period end date.) To enter and participate in a particular Quarterly Contest, at the time of entry, you must: (a) be a legal U.S. resident of one of the Eligible States; (b) be 16 years of age or older; (c) have at least one (1) year (or at least 18 semester hours) remaining before college graduation; (d) (if you are not yet in college) begin your freshman year of college no later than the start of the 2025 – 2026 college academic school year; and (e) as of your most recent school enrollment period, have a cumulative grade point average of at least 2.0 in school (and if no grade point average is provided at school, be in “good standing” or the equivalent thereof in school). (For purposes of Contest, the “Eligible States” are defined as the states of AL, AR, FL, GA, IA, IL, IN, KY, LA, MS, MO, NC, SC, TN and TX.) Visit regions.com/ridingforward for complete Contest details, including eligibility and Written Essay and Video Essay requirements and Official Rules. (Limit one (1) entry per person, per Quarterly Contest.) For each Quarterly Contest, eligible entries will be grouped according to form of entry (Written Essay or Video Essay) and judged by a panel of independent, qualified judges. A total of four (4) Quarterly Contest Prizes will be awarded in each Quarterly Contest, consisting of two (2) Quarterly Contest Prizes for the Written Essay Entry Group and two (2) Quarterly Contest Prizes for the Video Essay Entry Group. Each Quarterly Contest Prize consists of a check in the amount of $8,000 made out to winner’s designated accredited college. (Limit one (1) Quarterly Contest Prize per person; a contestant is permitted to win only one (1) Quarterly Contest Prize through the Contest.) Sponsor: Regions Bank, 1900 Fifth Ave. N., Birmingham, AL 35203.

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Computer Science > Machine Learning

Title: safe and robust reinforcement learning: principles and practice.

Abstract: Reinforcement Learning (RL) has shown remarkable success in solving relatively complex tasks, yet the deployment of RL systems in real-world scenarios poses significant challenges related to safety and robustness. This paper aims to identify and further understand those challenges thorough the exploration of the main dimensions of the safe and robust RL landscape, encompassing algorithmic, ethical, and practical considerations. We conduct a comprehensive review of methodologies and open problems that summarizes the efforts in recent years to address the inherent risks associated with RL applications. After discussing and proposing definitions for both safe and robust RL, the paper categorizes existing research works into different algorithmic approaches that enhance the safety and robustness of RL agents. We examine techniques such as uncertainty estimation, optimisation methodologies, exploration-exploitation trade-offs, and adversarial training. Environmental factors, including sim-to-real transfer and domain adaptation, are also scrutinized to understand how RL systems can adapt to diverse and dynamic surroundings. Moreover, human involvement is an integral ingredient of the analysis, acknowledging the broad set of roles that humans can take in this context. Importantly, to aid practitioners in navigating the complexities of safe and robust RL implementation, this paper introduces a practical checklist derived from the synthesized literature. The checklist encompasses critical aspects of algorithm design, training environment considerations, and ethical guidelines. It will serve as a resource for developers and policymakers alike to ensure the responsible deployment of RL systems in many application domains.

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A house in the desert with a mannequin on water skis and a small boat in the yard behind a fence in Bombay Beach, Calif.

Opinion Guest Essay

An Idyll on the Shores of a Toxic Lake

Supported by

Text by Jaime Lowe

Photographs by Nicholas Albrecht

Ms. Lowe is the author of, most recently, “Breathing Fire: Female Inmate Firefighters on the Front Lines of California’s Wildfires.” Mr. Albrecht is a photographer based in Oakland, Calif.

March 29, 2024

There are two ways to experience the town of Bombay Beach, Calif., as a visitor: gawk at the spectacle or fall into the vortex. Thousands of tourists cruise through each year, often without getting out of their cars, to see decaying art installations left over from an annual mid-March gathering of artists, photographers and documentarians known jokingly as the Bombay Beach Biennale. When I went to the town for the first time in 2021, I was looking for salvation in this weird desert town on the Salton Sea south of Palm Springs and Joshua Tree National Park. I dropped in, felt vibes and left with stories. I stared at the eccentric large-scale art, posted photos on Instagram of ruin porn and a hot pink sign on the beach that said, “If you’re stuck, call Kim.” I posed in front of a mountain of painted televisions, swung on a swing over the edge of the lake’s retreating shoreline and explored the half-buried, rusted-out cars that make up an abandoned ersatz drive-in movie theater. On that trip, it felt as if I were inside a “Mad Max” simulation, but I was only scratching the surface of the town.

I returned in December to try to understand why Bombay Beach remains so compelling, especially as extreme weather — heat, hurricanes and drought — and pollution wreak ever more intense havoc on it. Summer temperatures can reach 120 degrees Fahrenheit, tremors from the San Andreas Fault strike regularly, bomb testing from nearby military facilities can be heard and felt, and the air is so toxic from pesticide use, exhaust fumes, factory emissions and dust rising from the retreating Salton Sea that one study showed asthma rates among children in the region are three times the national average. By the end of the decade, the Salton Sea, California’s largest inland body of water, at about 325 square miles, may lose three-quarters of its volume; in the past 20 years, the sea’s surface area has shrunk about 38 square miles .

But people who live in Bombay Beach stay because the town offers a tight-knit community in the midst of catastrophe. Though its residents contend with environmental adversity on a daily basis, they’re also demonstrating how to navigate the uncertain future we all face — neglect, the fight for scarce resources, destruction of home, the feeling of having no place to go. They are an example of how people can survive wild climate frontiers together.

The 250 or so town residents live in the low desert on the east shore of the Salton Sea, which formed in 1905 when the then-flush Colorado River spilled into a depression, creating a freshwater lake that became increasingly saline. There used to be fish — mullet and carp, then tilapia. In the 1950s and ’60s, the area was marketed as a tourist destination and was advertised as Palm Springs by the Sea. More tourists visited Bombay Beach than Yosemite. There were yacht clubs, boat races and water skiing. It became a celebrity magnet: Frank Sinatra hung out there; so did the Beach Boys and Sonny and Cher.

Eventually, as agricultural runoff kept accumulating in a body of water with no drainage, it became toxic and created a lake with salinity that is now 50 percent greater than that of the ocean. In the 1980s, dead fish washed up on the sand, car ruins rusted in the sun, tires rotted on the shore. Tourism vanished. But some in the community hung on. One way to define Bombay Beach is through environmental disaster, but another way is as an example of how to live through disaster and how to live in general.

A man places his hands on a shoulder of another man on a bench as a woman looks on near the Salton Sea.

Candace Youngberg, a town council member and a bartender at the Ski Inn, remembers a very different Bombay Beach. When she was growing up in the 1980s, she’d ride bikes with neighborhood children and run from yard to yard in a pack because there were no fences. But over time, the town changed. With each passing year, she watched necessities disappear. Now there’s no gas station, no laundromat, no hardware store. Fresh produce is hard to come by. A trailer that was devoted to medical care shut down. In 2021, 60.9 percent of Bombay Beach residents lived below the poverty line, compared with the national average of 12.6 percent.

As painful as it was to witness the town of her youth disappear and as deep as the problems there go, Ms. Youngberg admits that adversity bonded those who stayed. She wanted to return Bombay Beach to the version of the town she remembered, to recreate a beautiful place to live year-round, not just in winter, not just during the art season, not just for the tourists posing in front of wreckage. She wanted people to see the homes, the town, the community that once thrived thrive again. With the art came attention and the potential for more resources. She got on the Bombay Beach Community Services District, a town council, and started to work toward improvements like fixing the roads and planting trees to improve air quality.

It might just be that Bombay Beach is a small town, but when I visited last winter, there was something that felt more collaborative, as though everybody’s lives and business and projects overlapped. I’m not sure the community that’s there now started out as intentional, but when fragmented groups of people come together as custodians of an enigmatic space, responsible for protecting it and one another, community is inevitable. Plus, there’s only one place to socialize, one place to gossip, one place to dance out anxiety and only about two-thirds of a square mile to wander. Whether you like it or not, your neighbors are your people — a town in its purest form.

When I was there, I walked the streets with Denia Nealy, an artist who goes by Czar, and my friend Brenda Ann Kenneally, a photographer and writer, who would shout names, and people would instantly emerge. A stranger offered a handful of Tater Tots to Czar and me in a gesture that felt emblematic: Of course a complete stranger on an electric unicycle would cruise by and share nourishment. I was given a butterfly on a stick, which I carried around like a magic wand because that seemed appropriate and necessary. I was told that if I saw a screaming woman walking down the street with a shiv in her hand, not to worry and not to make eye contact and she’d leave me alone; it was just Stabby. There was talk of the Alcoholics Anonymous meeting on the beach, the weekly church sermon led by Jack the preacher (who is also a plumber), a potluck lasagna gathering.

Last year Ms. Kenneally created a trash fashion show/photo series for the Biennale in which she created couture designs out of trash collected from the beach, enlisted regulars in town to model the outfits, then photographed them. (She exhibited a similar series at this year’s festival as well.) The work was a way to showcase the people and the place. Jonathan Hart, a fireworks specialist who slept on the beach, posed like a gladiator; a woman who normally rode through town with a stuffed Kermit the Frog toy strapped to her bike was wrapped in a clear tarp and crown, looking like royalty emerging from the Salton Sea. The environment was harsh, the poses striking. Each frame straddled the line between glamour and destruction but also showcased a community’s pride in survival. Residents were undaunted by the armor of refuse; in fact, it made them stronger. The detritus, what outsiders might think of as garbage, became gorgeous. The landscape that is often described as apocalyptic became ethereal and magical. And that’s because it is.

On my second day, we went down to the docks at noon, and I found myself sitting on a floral mustard couch watching half a dozen or so people taking turns riding Jet Skis into the sun. The sun was hot, even though it was the cool season. Time felt elastic. Mr. Hart told me that he and some friends had fixed up the water scooters to give everyone in town the chance to blow off some steam, to smile a little. It had been a rough couple of months in the region. In preparation for Hurricane Hilary, which hit Mexico and the southwestern United States last August, 26 volunteers made 200 sandbags and delivered them door to door. Neighbors helped secure as many structures as possible.

Most media outlets reported that the hurricane was downgraded to a tropical storm because that’s the weather system that hit Los Angeles, but it was close to a hurricane in Bombay Beach, with winds hitting 60 miles per hour, and most properties were surrounded by water. Roofs collapsed or blew away entirely. “When faced with something like that, they were like, ‘Boom, we’re on it,’” Ms. Youngberg told me. They were together in disaster and in celebrating survival.

It reminded me of the writer Rebecca Solnit’s book “A Paradise Built in Hell,” which considers the upside to catastrophe. She finds that people rise to the occasion and oftentimes do it with joy because disaster and survival leave a wake of purposefulness, consequential work and community. Disasters require radical acts of imagination and interaction. It seemed that because Bombay Beach lived hard, surviving climate catastrophes like extreme weather on top of everyday extremes, it celebrated even harder. It seemed that in Bombay Beach there’s enough to celebrate if you just get through the day, gaze at the night sky and do it all again in the morning.

A lot of the residents who live there now arrived with trauma. Living there is its own trauma. But somehow the combination creates a place of care and physical and emotional presence. People experience life intensely, as one. It’s a town that is isolated, but in spite of a loneliness epidemic, it doesn’t seem so lonely to be there. I felt unexpected joy in what, from everything I’d read from afar, was a place that might as well have been sinking into the earth. I felt so safe and so happy that if we had sunk into the earth together, it wouldn’t have felt like such a bad way to go.

On my last night in Bombay Beach, I went to the Ski Inn, a bar that serves as the center of all social activity. I’d been in town for only two days, and yet it felt as if I’d been to the Ski Inn a million times, as if I already knew everyone and they knew me. A band was playing, we danced and drank, and I forgot about the 8 p.m. kitchen cutoff. The chef apologized, but he’d been working since 11:45 a.m. and had already cleaned the grill and fryer. He’d saved one mac and cheese for the bartender, and when she heard I hadn’t eaten, she offered to split it with me, not wanting me to go hungry or leave without having tried the mac and cheese.

Bombay Beach is a weird place. And this was an especially weird feeling. I had been instantly welcomed into the fold of community and cared for, even though I was a stranger in a very strange land.

I realized I didn’t want to leave. There were lessons there — how to live with joy and purpose in the face of certain catastrophe, how to exist in the present without the ever presence of doom. Next time, I thought, I’d stay longer, maybe forever, and actually ride a Jet Ski.

Jaime Lowe is a Knight-Wallace journalism fellow at the University of Michigan and the author of, most recently, “Breathing Fire: Female Inmate Firefighters on the Front Lines of California’s Wildfires.” Nicholas Albrecht is a photographer based in Oakland, Calif. His first monograph, “One, No One and One Hundred Thousand,” was the culmination of a multiyear project made while living on the shores of the Salton Sea.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

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Learning communities can be as large as a whole school, or as small as a classroom (Busher 2005) or even a subgroup of learners from a larger cohort who work together with a common goal to provide support and collaboration (Davies et al. 2005 ). The concept of community emerges as an ambiguous term in many social science fields.
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Essay College Freshman Learning Communities. Freshman learning communities (FLC) are programs where 15 to 30 first-year students register for several general-education courses that focus on a common theme (Jaffee, 2004). Although there are several different types of learning communities, they all are designed for the same purposes. ...
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Collaborative Learning Community Evidence Hierarchy Pyramid Each of these studies had strengths that should be mentioned: (1) Jefferies, et al. (2012) -- This study contained information about safety in relation to information transfer through collaboration between nurses that was sound specifically regarding oral transfer of information and the variables that can affect effective information ...
Learning Communities
Definition. Learning communities emphasize collaborative partnerships between students, faculty, and staff, and attempt to restructure the university curriculum to address structural barriers to educational excellence.. In their 1990 publication Learning Communities: Creating Connections Among Students, Faculty, and Disciplines, Faith Gabelnick, Jean MacGregor, Roberta S. Matthews, and Barbara ...
Learning communities in education: a matter of diverse definitions
The emergence of online learning communities has, of course, expanded opportunities for teachers to communicate, reflect, and collaborate with others, which brings this commentary to the third theme focussing on the use of technologies for promoting the collaborative development of professional capital. According to Sijia Xue and her colleagues ...
Developing A Learning Community Essay
Developing A Learning Community Essay. Children learn and develop best when they are part of a community of learners this means a community in which all participants care about each other and learning is constructed in a collaborative process. Learning communities allow children to learn not just academically, but to learn about culture ...
Response: The Value of 'Small Learning Communities'
Response From ReLeah Cossett. ReLeah Cossett Lent is an educational consultant, speaker, and author of numerous articles and books, including Literacy Learning Communities, Overcoming Textbook ...
Professional Learning Communities Essay
Professional Learning Community Essay. A professional learning community (PLC) is a group collaborating together to improve teacher instruction, teacher learning, and student achievement. This improves the quality of living within the community that the members of the PLC work and live in. A PLC has 5 components:
Living-Learning Communities: What to Know
Students, particularly males, in living-learning communities are more likely than others living on campus to return to school the following year, according to a 2021 report by the Association of ...
Essay: Professional Learning Communities
Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) shift the focus of school reform from restructuring to re-culturing (DuFour, 2006). A PLC is an ongoing process used to establish a school wide culture that requires teachers to learn and develop as leaders focused on increasing student learning. Through participation in PLCs, teachers enhance their ...
Living Learning Community Essays
Living Learning Community Essays. If you would like to apply to be a Living Learning Community UGA, complete essays for up to three communities in which you are interested. This requirement applies only to the following LLC programs. For more information about the programs, contact the Living Learning staff.
Strategies for Effective Community Engagement: Critical Service
Come join us in a rich community engagement talk with Dr. Tyler Derreth, an assistant professor in the Department of Health, Behavior and Society and an associate Director of SOURCE. Dr. Derreth will share with BSPH community tools and resources on how public health professionals can engage in community by building authentic relationships, learning through service, redistributing power, and ...
[2403.20005] Large Language Model based Situational Dialogues for
In second language learning, scenario-based conversation practice is important for language learners to achieve fluency in speaking, but students often lack sufficient opportunities to practice their conversational skills with qualified instructors or native speakers. To bridge this gap, we propose situational dialogue models for students to engage in conversational practice. Our situational ...
Reimagining Design with Nature: ecological urbanism in Moscow
The twenty-first century is the era when populations of cities will exceed rural communities for the first time in human history. The population growth of cities in many countries, including those in transition from planned to market economies, is putting considerable strain on ecological and natural resources. This paper examines four central issues: (a) the challenges and opportunities ...
The End of Foreign-Language Education
Total enrollment in language courses other than English at American colleges decreased 29.3 percent from 2009 to 2021, according to the latest data from the Modern Language Association, better ...
Convolutional Prompting meets Language Models for Continual Learning
Continual Learning (CL) enables machine learning models to learn from continuously shifting new training data in absence of data from old tasks. Recently, pretrained vision transformers combined with prompt tuning have shown promise for overcoming catastrophic forgetting in CL. These approaches rely on a pool of learnable prompts which can be inefficient in sharing knowledge across tasks ...
The History of Moscow City: [Essay Example], 614 words
The History of Moscow City. Moscow is the capital and largest city of Russia as well as the. It is also the 4th largest city in the world, and is the first in size among all European cities. Moscow was founded in 1147 by Yuri Dolgoruki, a prince of the region. The town lay on important land and water trade routes, and it grew and prospered.
[4K] Walking Streets Moscow. Moscow-City
Walking tour around Moscow-City.Thanks for watching!MY GEAR THAT I USEMinimalist Handheld SetupiPhone 11 128GB https://amzn.to/3zfqbboMic for Street https://...
DOE Expands Support for Community-Led Clean Energy Transitions
DOE's Clean Energy to Communities (C2C) program helps local governments, electric utilities, community-based groups, and other decisionmakers realize their clean energy goals with innovative modeling and testing tools developed at DOE's world-class national laboratories.. Today, DOE's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) released the first C2C annual report, which highlights more than ...
Riding Forward Scholarship Contest
The 2024 Regions Riding Forward Scholarship Contest consists of four (4) separate Quarterly Contests - one for each calendar quarter of 2024. Regions is awarding four $8,000 scholarships through each Quarterly Contest. Each Quarterly Contest has its own separate entry period, as provided in the chart below. The entry deadline for each Quarterly ...
Safe and Robust Reinforcement-Learning: Principles and Practice
Reinforcement Learning (RL) has shown remarkable success in solving relatively complex tasks, yet the deployment of RL systems in real-world scenarios poses significant challenges related to safety and robustness. This paper aims to identify and further understand those challenges thorough the exploration of the main dimensions of the safe and robust RL landscape, encompassing algorithmic ...
Opinion
Jonathan Hart, a fireworks specialist who slept on the beach, posed like a gladiator; a woman who normally rode through town with a stuffed Kermit the Frog toy strapped to her bike was wrapped in ...