“The village that learns”: a learning journey across intraventions and domains over two decades in a rural Thai community

ABSTRACT

What does it mean to become a village that learns? In this paper we document the transformative learning journey of a small Thai village over 24 years, becoming a community that identified, tackled, and iterated on problems, altering their everyday practices and lives. In that process the village shifted from a subsistence agricultural community staggeringly in debt to one known for its sustainable environmental, agricultural, and financial initiatives. To understand the village’s learning journey, we consider the village itself as the primary unit of analysis, applying an iterative case study approach, with chronological sequencing, thematic, and biographical narrative analysis across 37 hours of interviews and over 350 pages of scanned project documentation (mostly from village records and writings) collected across four visits. Throughout the paper we elaborate on the role of learner interest and agency, the necessity of infrastructural (often policy) changes, the prioritized role of children in leadership, and the method of “Thai Constructionism” that the village iteratively applied to support their learning. In the discussion we argue that to understand the village’s learning journey, we must study it across multiple scales of time, multiple series of village-initiated formative intraventions across domains, and within larger ecological systems.

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by a gift from the Suksapattana Foundation to Paulo Blikstein as part of the Candlelight Project. The work would have been impossible without the participation of the village leaders and members who spent many hours of their time and provided inimitable hospitality on our visits. To the members of Ban Samkha, whose dedication to the village is unquestionable, given the thousands upon thousands of hours they dedicated to serving each other. Special thanks go to Khun Paron Israsena na Ayuthaya for his passionate and enduring support of the constructionist work in Thailand, and for spearheading the funding of this independent research. Any conclusions or recommendations are the authors’ and do not reflect the views of Utah State University, the University of Pennsylvania, Teachers College, Columbia University, or the Suksapattana Foundation. Our profuse thanks to Nalin Tutiyaphuengprasert, Arnan Sipitakiat, Colby Tofel-Grehl, and Alicja Żenczykowska for feedback on earlier versions of this paper and to the reviewers for their insights on revisions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Throughout the paper we list years by the Thai solar calendar followed by the Gregorian calendar (i.e., 2540/1997).

2. Amounts were converted for inflation (accordingly to each period) and then for Purchase Power Parity, using data from: https://knoema.com/atlas/Thailand/topics/Economy/Inflation-and-Prices/Purchasing-power-parity

3. All interview quotes unless otherwise noted are English translations of Thai.

4. Some interviews were in English and are noted. All English interview quotes were edited a little for readability (similar to editing translations from Thai).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Suksapattana Foundation.