CCS Glossary: “Learning in Community”
Every organization or movement uses language in its own unique way, and the Centre for Christian Studies is no different.
Today’s CCS Glossary word is LEARNING IN COMMUNITY.
“But,” you say, “that’s three words!” Well, yes; good counting. In and around CCS, however, those three words get said in close succession so often they might as well be one word – learningincommunity.
In CCS-speak, “Learning-in-community” can refer to two things, each with their own corresponding beliefs and assertions about learning.
Learning in community can refer to the fact that, though CCS students might come to Winnipeg for intensive learning circles a few times a year, they spend the majority of their time living and working at home in their own communities. Often they have a field placement or a student ministry position in a local congregation or community organization where they can apply the skills and ideas they pick up through their studies in real time in the real world with the real people around them. (And likewise, those community experiences and connections impact what they learn and want to learn from their studies). They are in their community, and they are learning.
The other (and maybe slightly more common around CCS) meaning of the term has to do with learning circles and the relationship of students to each other. Students come to CCS as individuals committed to learning but soon find themselves part of a community of learners, expected to learn from one another and to support one another in learning together. For most that involves learning how to be with one another – how to ask for and receive help, how to be honest and vulnerable, how to exercise appropriate boundaries, how to collaborate, how to listen, how to find one’s voice, how to share space, how to navigate difference, how to celebrate together. This is not stuff on the way to learning, this is the learning.
The language of “learning in community” has been a key part of CCS lingo since at least the 1970s when the educational theories of Paulo Freire (Pedagogy of the Oppressed, etc.) started to have a huge influence on the Centre’s approach to diaconal formation. Over time the understanding of who the learning community is has evolved and changed. CCS students used to live together in residence in Toronto and now they can connect by Zoom from all over Canada. Students used to journey together as a consistent cohort through four years of study, now they have the flexibility to move at different paces, stepping in and stepping out as needed. The circle gets drawn and redrawn, wide and wider still, but the desire to hold each other in relationship and shared learning continues.
In a society committed to individualism, learning in community can be a radical act. In his doctoral thesis on transformative education, former CCS staff member Ted Dodd describes it as counter cultural, “in that we try to establish a non-competitive, non-hierarchical, non-violent, non-domineering environment. We endeavour to model a climate of safety and trust where participants can take risks. We attempt to make learning approachable and accessible for those who have been too scared to learn. We recognize each person in the circle not in an exercise of therapeutic restoration, but because it is right to do so; each person does have something to offer to others’ learning. This is not some version of liberal relativism; in my mind, this is a radical commitment to justice in a small circle of people preparing for ministry.”
