About Learning Communities
The growth of any craft depends on shared practice and honest dialogue among the people who do it. We grow by trial and error, to be sure—but our willingness to try, and fail, as individuals is severely limited when we are not supported by a community that encourages such risks.
—Parker Palmer, The Courage to Teach, 1998
A learning community is a cross-disciplinary group that engages in an active, collaborative program structured to provide learning opportunities, community building, and reflection.
The broad goals of the learning community program at Dartmouth are to:
- Build a college-wide community through teaching and learning
- Increase interest in teaching and learning
- Investigate ways that diverse viewpoints can enhance teaching and learning
- Nourish the scholarship of teaching and learning and its application to student learning
- Increase collaboration across disciplines
Through their participation, members can expect to:
- Increase their awareness of the range of evidence-based teaching and learning practices
- Identify factors that influence pedagogical choices
- Feel an increased sense of belonging to a community of scholar-educators
- Increase their awareness of the range of resources and services to support teaching