Creating a transformative learning community: Generating collective knowledge in an early childhood graduate course

Abstract

This collaborative paper explores the process of creating a learning community as a complex learning system in an early childhood graduate course. Reflected here are the course instructor's experiences and those of various students who took the course at different times. This exploration was inspired by the students’ (re)created and repeated experiences of transformation as a result of taking the course. As a group, the authors asked; is there a particular ingredient in that course that facilitated the repeatable nature of this transformation? Complexity science/theory as applied to notions of learning and teaching (Capra, 2002; Davis & Simmt, 2003; Waldrop, 1992) provided the framework for this exploration. Five conditions that must be present in order for individuals to come together into collectives that might supersede the possibilities of the individual—internal diversity, redundancy, decentralized control, organized randomness, and neighbor interactions (Davis & Simmt, 2003)—were used to examine the collective learning experiences in that course. Reflective journal entries and the instructor's personal reflections on the process of planning, conducting, and evaluating the course were used to illustrate how these conditions were created and how they were used to occasion the type of learning students experienced as transformative.

Notes

Corresponding author. Tel.: [phone]; fax:[phone]. E‐mail address: [email protected] (A. Kirova).