Learning, Unlearning, and Relearning: Lessons from One School's Approach to Creating and Sustaining Learning Communities.

Abstract

Introduction A friend recently attended an intensive, two-week marathon painting course in New York City. The course, taught by a well-known artist and teacher, required her to learn about painting in a completely new way, not only in terms of technique but even in how she sat and moved while painting. My friend is an experienced and accomplished painter, and though the class, which ran from 9:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m., was exhausting and all encompassing, she found the experience truly valuable. asked her if she believed she would adopt the teacher's approach. Her response intrigued me: No, she said, I will go back to my work but it will never be the same again; some of what have absorbed in the last few weeks will now permeate everything paint. While the extreme immersion experience in relearning how to paint did not alter her entire approach to painting, she acknowledged that meshing these new ideas with her original concepts of painting would make her a different painter. In the marathon course she had unlearned her deeply-held ideas about how to see and paint, relearned these concepts as understood by her teacher, and in doing so learned new strategies for painting. What found particularly striking in my friend's tale was the ability of extreme situations to transform and instruct practice, a process suggest involves learning, unlearning, and relearning. A similar transformative opportunity exists from the study of schools that radically rethink aspects of education; close examination of these non-traditional schools, such as The Big Picture [BP] schools described in this article, can help us see our practice as educators in a different light and can challenge our notions of teacher learning. In an era of prolific funding for varied small-school models, there is a growing emphasis on schools that alter the landscape of educational design. Some of these models attempt to redesign schools to place students at the center of and provide powerful examples of very different ways of thinking about teaching and (some examples include: Ed Visions and Expeditionary Learning Schools). Key to the success of these designs is the ability to build teacher capacity, or the to produce and learning (Ball & Cohen, 1999, p. 2-3), where the school defines what worthwhile and substantial looks like. Professional development to build capacity becomes central to the mission of the school and can highlight challenges for those attempting to improve capacity in a variety of other contexts. My two-year research study of BP's professional development in such a group of alternative small schools began with the following research questions: 1. What are the implications of BP's concept of content knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge for building teacher capacity? 2. How does BP design its professional development program for this purpose? 3. How do teachers experience these designs and strategies? In analyzing emerging data from the study, noticed each question involved teachers in the process of learning, unlearning, and relearning. By refer to building new content and pedagogical content knowledge relevant to the school's philosophy and design. By unlearning mean letting go of deeply held assumptions about what it means to be a teacher, what classrooms look like, what the essence of teaching and is. Finally, relearning is the process of creating new understandings and behaviors around the same concepts--what it means to be a teacher, what teaching and looks like, etc. The purpose of this article is to: (a) describe BP's philosophy around teaching and learning, particularly as it relates to professional development; (b) examine data on teacher experiences of what it means to be a teacher at this unusual school and of learning, unlearning, and relearning in BP's professional development program; (c) explore the role of professional communities of practice in the process of learning, unlearning, and relearning; and (d) discuss the implications of this data for others engaged in school reform, teacher professional development, and building communities of practice. …