Communities of Learners

In the early 1990s the Fostering a Community of Learners' classrooms (FCL) research project became renowned for modeling the practical instantiation of a set of theoretically grounded “first principles” of learning and teaching. When Jerome Bruner and Courtney Cazden, among others, visited FCL classrooms, they witnessed students talking, writing, thinking, and using technology in the service of both science understanding and literacy skillsina classroom environment specifically designed to support such activity. They saw formerly disenfranchised students, who typically had little exposure to advanced science curricula or sophisticated literacy tasks, become active participants in their own learning. Cazden, reflecting on FCL's 1990s efforts, has said:

FCL … became one of the most visible school reform programs in the U.S.—well documented for the quantitative achievements of its students over successive years on both standardized literacy tests and criterion-referenced tests in both literacy and science developed within the program, and also discussed in the writings of numerous academic visitors. (Cazden, 2005, p. 1)

The origins of FCL lie with Ann Brown and her closest collaborator and husband Joe Campione. The couple had moved from the University of Illinois, Champagne Urbana, to the University of California Berkeley's Education in Mathematic Science and Technology Department in 1988. They immediately established a research team of faculty, graduate students, postdoctoral scholars, and skilled technical staff to design classroom communities of learners in the Berkeley/Oakland area. Brown (1992) described the FCL classroom design in this way: “I attempt to engineer innovative educational environments and simultaneously conduct experimental studies of those innovations” (p. 141).

Their goal was to put theory into practice in visible, equitable, and intellectually honest ways. The FCL project encompassed K-8 classrooms, in several schools, including a multigrade spiraling curriculum in John Swett Elementary School and Sequoia Middle School, both in East Oakland. The goal was to design robust classroom learning environments in which everyone (students, teachers, researchers) learned to “use their minds

Table 1ILLUSTRATION BY GGS INFORMATION SERVICES. CENGAGE LEARNING, GALE.

well.” Learning and teaching were viewed as a social process within which mutual appropriation is facilitated by talk, gesture, drawing, computers, and text (Brown & Campione, 1994). FCL promoted dialogic modes of communication in ordinary classrooms.

The underlying principles (Brown & Campione, 1994) are listed in Table 1.

Brown and Campione's first principles were influenced by branches of psychology, linguistics, anthropology, sociology and out of school learning, and by the leading scholars of the time, including Bruner (1990), Cazden (1984), Cole and the Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition (1998), Heath (1991); Latour & Wolgar (1986), Lave & Wenger (1991), Rogoff (1994), and Wertsch (1991) among others. FCL design was grounded in sociocultural views of learning and teaching, especially Vygotsky's (1978) concept of the zone of proximal development (ZPD). Disciplinary content goals were predicated on Bruner's views of learning and development. As Bruner put it, “We begin with the hypothesis that any subject can be taught effectively in some intellectually honest form to any child at any stage of development” (Bruner, 1996, p. 33).

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The life science content was chosen for its “high appeal and engaging qualities to motivate students to learn to read, write, and talk and reason about important ideas” (Rutherford & Ash, in press, p. 5). The life science content was chosen also because high-quality science teaching and learning is less commonly available to the students who most need it. Several in-depth discussions of scientific reasoning in FCL classrooms are available (Ash, 2008; Engle & Conant, 2004; Ricco & Shulman, 2004); these focus on adaptation and interdependence, core principles of FCL's life sciences disciplinary content.

Anne Marie Palincsar, a collaborator with and colleague of Brown said of FCL:

Fostering a Community of Learners … had an amazing synthetic quality, both in substance and form … a diverse array of participant structures in which students—engaged as collaborative researchers—pursued deep understanding of content knowledge and domain-specific reasoning in the biological sciences. (Palincsar, 1999, p. 33)

One key aspect of FCL's success was translating Vygot-sky's (1978) zone of proximal development to practical classroom design. The ZPD is the distance between current levels of comprehension and levels that can be accomplished in collaboration with people or powerful artifacts; such interpretations emphasize readiness to learn, “where upper boundaries are seen not as immutable but as constantly changing with the learner's increasing independent competence at each successive level” (Brown et al., 1993, p. 35). Brown designed the classroom to contain multiple and overlapping ZPDs by carefully selecting specific participant structures (involving people, computers, books, videos, TV programs, and other mediational means) encompassing various goals (content knowledge, computer tech savvy, reading comprehension) in different social configurations.

Students were expected to know different things; they shared this distributed expertise within dialogically based, ritualized participant structures (Brown et al., 1993; Rutherford & Ash, in press), such as reciprocal teaching (Palincsar & Brown, 1984), jigsaw teaching (Aronson, 1978), and whole-group discussion. Such participant structures are now commonly used in many classrooms across the United States.

Schoenfeld (2004) has argued that such classroom design is marked by:

A carefully delineated set of classroom practices, among them decomposing and recombining the topic under discussion into interlocking subtopics that can be studied by subgroups of students and then can be taught to other students. For FCL to succeed, then, the big ideas of the curriculum need to be identified and ‘jigsawed’ in ways that are suitable to the intended organization of classroom practices. (p. 243)

In actual FCL practice, “decomposing and recom-bining” was reflected in a basic research cycle of research (decompose content); jigsaw teach (recombine content); and consequential task (transfer content) (Brown et al., 1993; Brown & Campione, 1994, 1996).

In most FCL classrooms teams of five to six students researched, talked about, and wrote a collaborative research report, which they would use to teach other students in jigsaw groups. Students were socialized into these patterns of expected participation with particular participation structures such as Benchmarks, Research Rotations, Jigsaw groups, Cross-talk groups, and Dilemmas. Table 2 lists some participant structures' configuration, frequency and purpose.

Cazden (2005) has described particular FCL participant structures in this way:

• Research rotations through several activities: (a) individual research, reading, and note-taking; (b) working at the computer to find new resources, e-mailing each other and outsiders or working on their team's report and conferencing about it with the teacher; (c) participating, initially under the teacher's guidance.
• Reciprocal Teaching (RT) comprehension discussions of texts—from books, the Internet, or sections of their student reports.
• Jigsaw groups: Periodically, as research teams became more knowledgeable about their subtopics, a student from each team met in an ad hoc group with a member of each of the other teams and taught them.
• Cross-talk: When the students themselves realized that Jigsaw teaching required them to know all about their team's topic, not just their individual sub-topic, they initiated an intra-team version of Jigsaw that they named Cross-talk. (Cazden, 2005, p. 8).