Community-Building Forces for Community-Classroom by James and Nahl

(b) the basic concepts which make up the topical content, must be concretized; that is, each learned concept, starting as an abstract idea, is then changed or evolved into an applied concept, in the form of a directly visible exercise to be performed by the students.

To summarize and underscore the preceding remarks concerning the content matter of this course:

We are presenting for this course a Synopsis of Lecture Topics in the form of study charts, so as to identify the ideas that are involved in each topic. As discussed above, the selection orients towards basic concepts which the instructional staff felt qualified to choose, following their experience with prior generations of Psych 222 (2) students. Class organization has been set up so as to provide direct, observational laboratory work; this is done so that students can practice the applied concepts that follow from the theoretical principles and ideas.

With this begins the collective challenge for the class-community. Students are to digest and assimilate; therefore, students participate in a different way. Collective understanding is the student's self-imposed objective in relation to this Glossary Chart (see p.22-37). The class as-a-whole acts as if with one mind; that is, organically. Through cooperation comes collective understanding. This cooperation is not merely a mental attitude; it must be concretized through your actions. Your actions must be "synchronous"; that is, like a chorus or orchestra we must attain collective action through much cooperative practice. And there must also be a personal stake in the collective success.

Students of the Fall 1979 Generation can count on the willing guidance and experience of an instructional staff whose entire energies have been committed to the preparation of this. May we have collective success!

In classrooms of this size (150-350), the individual students tend to see themselves in a competitive relation towards the acquisition of knowledge. In other words, each learns according to their own effort and ability. Even if effort is shared, as in a team project, the isolation of the individuals remains, in that each member of the team is expected to acquire the knowledge and skill for themselves. You learn by yourself, and you learn for yourself. You also flunk by yourself while the others go on without you. This is known as the "zero-sum" system in "game theory."

This may be true of the usual small classroom as well. There is a notable difference in that subjective feelings of loyalty and empathy are easier to be had in small size classes. Nevertheless the learning itself--the new knowledge and know-how--remains individual, solitary, competitive. You're the winner if you succeed; you're the loser if you fail.

Now it is possible to imagine a different social environment in which the "ethno-dynamics" is contrastive with the competitive learning setting. Instead of a solitary/competitive learning environment, this would be a collective learning environment. This environment would be neither solitary nor competitive.

How is it possible to create a collective learning environment? Is it realistic to think one could overcome the ordinary, day to day realities of the world--in the economic sphere, in the socio-political sphere, etc.?

Yes, it is. Because the fact is that collective learning environments already exist, and have always existed. ONLY, THEY DO NOT EXIST NOW IN INSTITUTIONAL FORM. Rather, collective learning can be found nowadays outside institutional settings: you can witness collective learning in the community itself. You can see it in the growth of a neighborhood and how it functions by growing or disintegrating or maintaining itself in a particular way. You can see this in the physical appearance of the neighborhood, its colors, sounds, smells, its ethnic life, in other words. You can see the cultural traits of a neighborhood in its people, pace of life, and talk. The talk of the people is a crucial area for the social psychologist. Above all we are impressed by the fact that human communities are speech communities.

Speech organizes the life of the community. The psyche, or soul-and-spirit of the neighborhood, is to be found in the speech life of the community. This speech life takes several familiar forms: in conversation. in readings, in lectures, in writing, in thinking, in problem solving, in rehearsing things in one's mind, in imagining and in projecting thoughts, and as well, in building derivative speech systems such as symbolism, arithmetic, music, drawing, patterned movements, and so on. Thus, speech forms assume these various modalities in words, symbols, numbers, graphs, and whatever other modality of expression it is possible for creative communities to invent ("artificial" languages).

Speech life thus refers to life governed by "speech-governors," and the derivatives of the speech-governors, the so-called "artificial languages." Collective learning is responsible for speech life.

(Student may use other side for message to the instructor.) -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

This course uses the contemporary scientific paradigm of SOCIAL BEHAVIORISM, which is the idea that human behavior can be shaped through managing the sociocultural environment. This paradigm helps students focus on, and identify, the precise circumstances that occasion their own behavior. This is essentially an empirical task. A useful analogy is to think of social behavior as a plant: by systematically managing its environment, the plant's behavior and appearance can be controlled: e.g., pruning to create shape, size, and rate of displacement, water and chemicals to create healthy development, etc. The contrast between pruning and watering helps focus on the need, in the case of human behavior, for humanistic control agents. This course combines a humanistic ideology with a scientific paradigm by creating an educational experience for self-objectivity. You learn scientific techniques for keeping track of the social forces that animate your interactions with others. This is called group dynamics.

Consistent with community-classroom approach, the topical context is made to be the local content. The Reading Sources are of your own creation, the several textbooks were written for this particular class, and their contents reflect the academic content of the ideas and work atmosphere of the UHM campus. As well, you'll be studying supplementary readings to widen the intellectual contact and to deepen your understanding of the world of science. This includes review and discussion of the writings of other psychology instructors on campus, some of whose courses you might be taking.

"Community-Classroom" is the expression we use to identify the approach used in this course. "Community" may be defined as the sharing of one's daily round with others ("community members"). This implies that all members are exposed to a common set of social influences. The sharing of one's daily round includes a common schedule (e.g., "community calendar" and "logging activities"--when you do what). As well, people who share their daily round existence are connected to each other by lines of relationship (e.g., friends, acquaintances of the family, co-workers, etc.). In other words, people living in community have a legal identity, are recognized by other people with whom they have a relationship of some sort, and they keep track of each other over time ("reputation"; "biography"). Finally, people who live in community have to adapt to a common set of rules and procedures (e.g., public order and government institutional procedures, management of one's money and credit, etc.).

THE RULES, PROCEDURES, AND RITUALS THAT YOU'LL ENCOUNTER AS A MEMBER OF THIS COURSE ARE PEDAGOCICALLY DESIGNED TO CREATE THE NATURAL CONDITIONS OF BEING-IN-COMMUNITY. The grade you achieve and the skills you acquire will depend on how well you learn to manage your behavior. There are many types of activities that earn you "points." Points are exchanged for grades according to a schedule. Your membership in classroom-community is structured, just as it is in any natural group situation (e.g., work, family, club, etc.).

The course structure consists of lectures, lab, quizzes, assignments, and field work. The data you collect are to be expressed in a common, scientific language that all class members learn to use. For this, written instructions called "DRA Forms" are used. All student work must be typed and must follow the format specified by each DRA Form. Each Form consists of social psychological data based on your own observations of social occasions in which you participate on your daily round (including the classroom). With each completed Form, you earn a pre-determined amount of points.

THE SOCIAL DATA YOU REPORT ON THE FORMS ARE TREATED AS COMMUNITY INFORMATION. THEY ARE DEPOSITED IN THE DAILY ROUND ARCHIVES for Psychology 222 (located partly in Gartley 213 and partly in Sinclair Library). The "DRA" contains the generational work of students in prior semesters, so that the accumulating information becomes the community knowledge and tradition for this course. In this way you communicate with prior generations of Psychology 222 students through the miracle of literacy, and as well, with future generations since your own work will be read and studied by them! Students may continue to use the DRA after the semester is over and are encouraged to continue to add their social observations as the semesters and years go by. What a challenging opportunity!

This idea requires some adjustment since your usual course experience in large classes tends to be impersonal and anonymous. However, the community-classroom structure is an unusual experience since it arranges an environment which is more like a regular work-team. As well, the educational activities are arranged to be inter-personal, interactional, participatory, and collective, in order to afford students with practicing the direct observational recording techniques of social occasions. This means that the topic is often you: your perceptions, your evaluations, your habits, your knowledge. These make up the social data, and the data is to be the focus of study ("empiricism").

What about privacy and individual rights? All rules in this classroom-community must conform to the larger community order: campus regulations, public laws, and proper standards of conduct. Because of the unusual community features of this course, we've availed ourselves over the years, of the advice of colleagues and the counseling of university officials. As well, we send these Lecture Notes to colleagues and ask for their comments. The intent of every rule is to facilitate and guide your progress towards the course objectives (see below). No rule has been made which, in our considered judgment, violates students' rights, privacy, sense of propriety, and instructional expectations. A student should not engage in any activity or data keeping which in his own judgment is inappropriate within the context of a college course. Naturally, no penalty is provided for the exercise of this judgment. Therefore, students use this judgment as ordinary citizens, just as they would in any social group they belong to, housing or work-place. There are among free human beings, the inescapable expectation and desire to be personal and to share information, but you are your own manager regarding what information about yourself you want to share in community.

To summarize the details of the approach used in this course, we list below the main features that are intended to create the community-classroom for the study of social psychology:

(iii) student-work is reported on DRA Forms, where each completed Form meeting the 80 percent standard of competence receives a certain number of points;

(iv) team activity involves meeting in random groups of 6 students present in class and carrying out task specified by instructor;

(vi) all points are for demonstration of skills and are earned only when 80 percent attainment line is reached;

(vii) classroom atmosphere is sociable and collective since most activities involve cooperative student-interaction and joint execution;

(viii) cross-generational contact is made possible through a field laboratory which holds a cumulative library of student-work; this is called Daily Round Archives (DRA) and is located partly at the Reserve Desk of Sinclair Library, and partly at the DRA Center in Gartley 213; students use this facility for studying data on the community-at-large, i.e., the local social context(campus and Islands);

(ix) all work by class members are treated as shared community information; students use their own judgment regarding what information they wish to share;

(x) management of pedagogic contingencies to create an institutional community which permits "witnessing," i.e., the objective reporting of one's experiences

(xi) a cyclical presentation of the topics to be mastered by students so as to permit several runs on the topics ("recasting insights")

(xii) an integrated conceptual system that is suitable for systematizing the students' own daily round management of ordinary social occasions ("glossary charts," see p.22-37);

(xiii) a cumulative base for enhancing individual learning through collective generational activity; each semester, students start ahead of the combined total of all previous students ("standing on the shoulders of predecessors"); this is possible TO THE EXTENT that EACH semester's total work is integrated into the content of the next semester!!

This last feature of community-classroom is one that we (Jakobovits and Nahl) find most challenging and demanding of our total work concentration. We may add a personal note here by saying that we are inspiration and to long cooperative efforts with students-in-training and volunteers which made possible the development of the Glossary Charts (see p.22-37). These incorporate in a systematic classification all the important features of prior semesters since 1971. This achievement is particularly remarkable to us because it contains topics and classroom management findings, and changes, over the semesters. The Glossary Chart of 1979, or as we call it among ourselves--GLOSSOLID Three--is thus an empirically evolved taxonomy for teaching social psychology in community-classroom. Because of this, it is also an integrated theory in social psychology. Not a "synthesis" of the literature, but a natural history taxonomy of community life expressed in field theory terminology. As such, we predict that students who study these charts and carry out the peer activities specified will be able to topicalize scientifically on these aspects of social psychology:

(I) formative issues in the history of science, social philosophy, and social psychology;

(ii) methodological issues in the logic of discovery and objective investigation and research;

(iii) theoretical issues in explaining social behavior and behavior in social settings;

(iv) applied issues in self-determination, community awakening, collective management and evolution.

1. LEARNING= GROWING INTELLECTUALLY
= THINKING FOR ONESELF
= CREATIVE INDIVIDUALITY
= ACQUISITION OF SKILLS
= BEING IN COLLECTIVE HARMONY
= COMMUNITY-BUILDING

2. GROWING INTELLECTUALLY = OPTIMIZING THE LEARNING ENVIRONMENT FOR PROMOTING DEVELOPMENTAL STAGES OF EVOLUTION

3. TECHNIQUES FOR OPTIMIZING CLASSROOM ENVIRONMENT = A. COMMUNITY CLASSROOM; B. GENERATIONAL DRA

4. COMMUNITY-CLASSROOM = FIELD LABORATORY FOR COLLECTIVE LEARNING ACTIVITIES AND OBSERVATIONS

5. GENERATIONAL DRA = FIELD LABORATORY FOR GENERATIONAL ANNOTATIONS AND OBSERVATIONS

6. FIELD LABORATORY = LEARNING ENVIRONMENT CREATED INSTRUCTIONALLY THROUGH INTERACTIONAL ACTIVITIES

7. COLLECTIVE LEARNING ENVIRONMENT = AN INSTRUCTIONAL ENVIRONMENT IN WHICH ACTIVITIES REQUIRE INDIVIDUAL CREATIVE SOLUTIONS FOR COLLECTIVE GOALS

8. GENERATIONAL ANNOTATIONS = AN INSTRUCTIONAL ACTIVITY IN WHICH STUDENTS PROCESS AND RE-PROCESS SOCIAL DATA ABOUT THEMSELVES AS A POPULATION

9. PROCESS AND RE-PROCESS SOCIAL DATA = THE USE OF LITERACY TECHNIQUES STUDENTS ALREADY KNOW (A) TO SYSTEMATIZE ONE'S OBSERVATIONS IN SOCIAL SETTINGS, and (B) TO THEORIZE CONCERNING THEM

10. SYSTEMATIZE AND THEORIZE = NATURAL HISTORY TECHNIQUES SUITABLE FOR THE SCIENTIFIC STUDY OF BEHAVIOR IN SOCIAL SETTINGS (e.g.: NOTATION SYSTEMS, CATALOGUING PRACTICES, INDEXING, GRAPHING, DIAGRAMMING, TAXONOMIZING, and CONSTRUCTING SOLID MODEL ANALOGS OF ETHNOSEMANTIC STRUCTURES CALLED "GLOSSOLID" OR "SCIENTIFIC ART")

The motto we've been using for the past few years is that students learn social psychology best by doing social psychology. We want students to get real practical experience in the doing of science. We want them to feel the real-time characteristics and demands encountered in objective views on behavior in natural social settings. We want them to be responsible for generating and processing real scientific data; cataloguing these data, theorize about them and seeing them cumulate into a community resource. In other words, they are learning science by doing science. In these teaching objectives, we see ourselves as echoing the wave of the future where every person is a scientist.

The Daily Round Archives (or "DRA") is housed in the Psychology Department's crowded Gartley Hall where most of the 32 faculty members have their offices and laboratory space. The DRA provides important support services for the course. It is made up of the cumulative collection of field projects, maps, and taxonomic glossaries prepared and annotated by each semester's generation of students. It is, as far as we know, the first and most extensive educational research facility maintained entirely by undergraduates. To date, the bound collection contains over 100 thick volumes!! The DRA Volumes for Psychology 222 are deposited into the UH's Sinclair Undergraduate Library and may be read at the Reserve Desk.

Our departmental office space at Gartley Hall was converted into a working center where the hub of activity surrounding the DRA goes on (spilling unto the corridors). It is the scene of informal get-togethers between students of a large course and a large university, where getting to know one another is the exception rather than the rule. Discussions and debates, consultation and sharing, cooperation and involvement all provide an enlarged foundation for acquiring academic skills and triggering objective self-discovery. Learning social psychology by doing it focuses the students' attention on their own behaviors during social exchanges. The activities reported in DRA Reports are self-reflective, which means that the self is the object of observation. This self-objectivity is fostered by practicing systematic methods of annotating the behavior of the self and the behavior of others. Note that one student's objective self overlaps with the objective self of other students; it follows that studying the self objectively is very closely

intertwined with studying others objectively. In fact, the well known American social philosopher and pragmatist George Herbert Mead developed an entire social philosophy based on the view that the internal self is the external self driven in. Mead and his student, Charles Morris, referred to this thesis as social behaviorism and it is a view later espoused by the full spectrum of contemporary approaches in psychology, both "pure," as in B.F. Skinner, and "cognitivized" as in C.E. Osgood and A. Staats. In this introductory course in social psychology the students learn by performing. This means that their experience in a social interaction constitutes the field of observation; and that requires natural history tools of observation. These tools consist of a variety of methods of annotating observations about behavior in social settings; observations made by self or by others, as social witnesses to what's going on.

Community-Classroom challenges the whole individual in the person of the student. The academic aspect is "the curriculum," the "Glossary Charts," i.e., the content of lectures and assignments in relation to a scientific discipline. The social psychological aspect lies in "the interpersonal climate," i.e., the instructional procedures involving team activities, collective activities, and field laboratory projects. There is an attempt to deal explicitly with the socio-dynamics of anonymity and relationship so as to transform the ordinary daily round into a laboratory. The psycho-spiritual aspect is the attempt to foster on the part of every student the development of a "personal pedagogic model." That means that every individual student relates himself or herself to that which is common, shared, standard, and universal, as well as to that which is unique and particular; in other words, a concern for relating "personal identity" to "collective destiny." In this threefold emphasis--academic, social psychological, and psycho-spiritual--community-classroom attempts to create an organic generational speech community.

The word "community" is in current use in three areas. One use is in the areas of community services: e.g., "community-based education" (referring to adult community-colleges that relate their programs and teaching techniques to local community needs); "community psychology" (referring to the attempt of the clinical fields to treat community "problems" and development from the point of view of "correction" and "modification towards more adaptive patterns"); and "community services" itself, referring to places where people in need can go for "official help." A second use of the term "community" is in the areas of community settlements: e.g., "communal farms" and other "living cooperatives" in the United States, Israel, China; "community schools" such as Antioch College and Arthur Morgan school in Celo, North Carolina, which practice the philosophy that education for children should go hand in hand with life-support work (farming, etc.). The third use of the term "community" is in the sense it is used by Jakobovits and Nahl to refer to community-classroom. In this sense, the term refers to the idea that social learning is a collective teaching affair--which means that the learners teach each other under instructional supervision and planning.

Jakobovits and Nahl introduce a distinction between solitary learning and collective learning. Solitary learning, as the term implies, is learning by oneself. This can take place either when alone, or when in company of others (face-to-face or through a recording or book). For example, in the usual large-audience classroom, or when watching television, or in a correspondence course, the individual is working through the various learning steps by himself or herself ("individual mastery criteria"). Contrast this with community-classroom in which the various learning steps are worked through in interaction with others. This by necessity creates a different learning environment for the students involved.

Two questions confront us at this point in the further development of the idea of Community-Classroom:

(A) How can we specify the characteristics of the social psychological environment that is optimal for "collective learning"? and,

For collective learning to take place, the topical cycle of lectures must be objectively interactive, not merely subjectively selected in advance by the instructor. Pre-selection of topics and their presentation according to a Syllabus is used in instructional settings where solitary and competitive achievement is deemed desirable. In community classroom, the instructional intention is to create a collective learning atmosphere. In this atmosphere, social psychological forces of ordinary social settings become visible to the student of social psychology.

"Ingathering" refers to the transition zone that separates solitary social settings from collective ones. The term ingathering is used by James and Nahl to refer to a form of collective behavior. The ingathering behavior marks the group's official transition from solitary to group "set." For example, the first few lectures of every semester(generation), and the first few minutes of every class, are transition periods, and therefore well-suited for studying the community-building forces involved in ingathering activities.

The function of ingathering is to engage in a form of exchange which transforms the semi-anonymous interpersonal atmosphere of a group into Community-Classroom or organic learning collectivity. Thus, ingathering is a social psychological concept since it is viewed as a group dynamic technique. The ingathering activity is an expression of intentionality; that is, the students perform their declared intentions to each other through the ingathering activity.

No such explicitly recognized mutulality exists in the regular group environment or classroom. Consider the social-psychological forces acting upon the students from a social setting that maintains rules of anonymity, competition, and uncertainty. It is clear that such forces act altogether in a different direction in Community-Classroom where students know each other's family background and build up a collective ideal out of the diverse demographic and ethnic origin of each individual student.

James and Nahl use field theory in social psychology to represent the "dynamic properties of social settings" (Kurt Lewin). In this notation system, Community-Classroom may be represented by a circle (or other closed geometric shape). The area within the circle stands for the social setting--in this case the classroom and its occupants. The area outside the circle stands for the societal setting that surrounds the classroom (i.e., the university, the nation, the world). The circumference itself is a boundary or boundary zone that separates the classroom setting from the societal setting. This boundary zone is a transitional area. It is the place where dynanic controls are exercised. For example, walls, doors, registration procedures, and scheduled times for convening, are all dynamic controls exercised by the instructional and administrative staff. Each dynamic control has an intended purpose; these intended purposes are called instructional techniques because it is through these dynamic controls that the instructional staff attempts to create dynamic learning consequences in the classroom.

For example, Psychology 222 has a prerequisite of Psychology 100. This dynamic control acts to produce certain intended effects in the classroom. In this case, the Department of Psychology has an official policy that Psychology 100 is to be a prerequisite for all other Psychology courses. The purpose given for this dynamic control is that the Department course offerings are keyed to levels of a curriculum in psychology such that 200-level courses should build on the knowledge already acquired in 100-level courses. In this manner, the Department argues, students can be assured of a cumulative curriculum: when you take a 400-level course, you know in advance that you'll increase your knowledge beyond what you already have from your 300-level courses.

This is the argument that justifies prerequisites. The application of the principle requires joint consensus planning in the Department and consensus on what should be taught at each level. However, such planning or consensus exists more in theory than in fact; therefore the justification for prerequisites, given above and constituting official policy, is obviously not complete. The functions of prerequisites still require identification!

Other dynamic controls exist which are not as explicitly recognized as "prerequisites" but are nevertheless equally or more important in terms of their actual consequences in the classroom. James and Nahl have studied and identified some of the major dynamic controls in college classrooms today. We shall present this list below along with the dynamic controls we've proposed with which to counter-act the usual, anti-social forces in large-audience classrooms.

Anonymity: you have to guess, wonder, and imagine.	Identity: you acquire knowledge of one another's family background and daily round living.
Hidden Work: fellow students are not allowed to see your work; you wonder and imagine about theirs.	Open Work: generational annotation insures that you see and process peer work, and that you leave your work behind for your peers.
3. Throw Away Work: your work is destroyed in paper recycling, clean up jobs, or returned to you for disposal.	Valuable Resource: preserved in the "DRA" your work generates the continuing activities of the standing projects so that an evolving, living cumulative, and processed curriculum is maintained in community-classroom with ensuing semester-generations of students. (Students also keep copies of their own work.)
4. Hierarchical Monitoring: you go to the TA or group leader for some problems, to the instructor for other problems; they keep in touch and presumably tell each other; you fill out anonymous, end-of-semester criticisms you have about the course.	Organic Self-Determinative Monitoring class feedback forms, progress reports and project annotations are processed by the entire classroom-community throughout the semester; being for the students and by the students, this creates a collective monitoring system as part of regular operations.

Community-Building Forces For Community Classroom part 4

Community-Building Forces
For Community Classroom
part 4