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The purpose of this research is two-fold. First, it provides an overview of the debates over whether technology facilitates democratic education. Second, from this emergent body of discussions in the literature, it critically examines the potential of a virtual learning community to materialise democratic education, both through its underpinning of ideal values such as autonomy, participation and mutuality and through the technological spaces which learners inhabit. Virtual learning communities (VLCs) are increasingly appearing in the field of open education and in that sense, these emerging virtual communities demand a new understanding of democratic pedagogy. With regard to this, drawing on the theoretical debates, it aims to discuss how technology can take place in re-exploring the democratic pedagogy under the scope of VLCs. In doing this, a critical in-depth literature review was undertaken in an emergent area of virtual communities by aiming to contribute to the discussions over conceptualizing the democratic VLCs.

This article examines the relationship of theater and dramatic study to models of learning communities in promoting identity, diversity, and culture. Theater is an example of how learning community can be achieved and levels of theater use in education are presented as ways in which educators can create ensemble and foster community. Strategies for developing learning communities using the performing arts are provided.

This article provides an overview of Extension's Military Families Learning Network. The network is an example of Extension's commitment to building virtual learning networks in the support of targeted professional and lay audiences. The network uses well-established and emergent pedagogical approaches focusing on adult-centered learning while employing state-of-the-art online learning technologies. We present a four-dimensional model of learning activities to illustrate how the network offers different options for and approaches to adult-centered learning and training. The Military Families Learning Network can serve as a model for broader adoption of such entities across the Extension community.

The scientific community has provided a wide range of evidence that family and community involvement in schools benefits not only students' learning but also their surrounding community. The INCLUD-ED project has conducted case studies of successful schools around Europe that have strong community participation. Some of them are engaged in the Learning Communities project, an international project of educational and social transfonnation aimed at overcoming school failure. Through these case studies, INCLUD-ED has gone beyond the state of the art in the field and has provided a classification of types of family and community participation and identified forms of involvement that improve students' academic achievement. This article presents the benefits of those fonns of participation and focuses on some forms of commooity involvement in the Learning Communities that have been found to improve students' school learning and other education-related aspects, such as living together. ; peer-reviewed

The COVID-19 pandemic radically transformed higher education, which required many educators and students to adapt their learning and teaching practices in a short space of time. The emergency transition to online teaching during the pandemic created many learning opportunities by encouraging educators to rethink pedagogical practices, but also posed challenges and widened inequalities in education and society. In this article, I use critical pedagogies to reflect on my experiences of facilitating collaborative reading activities in a fully online environment during the pandemic, using a first-year core module in English Literature as my case study. I discuss the opportunities and challenges that emerged from the emergency transition to online teaching and learning, paying attention to issues of accessibility and inclusion. I advocate for the collaborative annotation tool Talis Elevate as a method of promoting critical pedagogies that empower students to engage in 'deep reading' and critical discussions surrounding inequalities in literature and wider society. I conclude by arguing that Talis Elevate, when combined with critical pedagogies, creates democratic and critically engaged learning communities by enabling students to find their voices and co-create knowledge about the subject matter.

Recent decades teachers at Danish vocational colleges have been met with high demands in adapting their pedagogy and practice to meet the requirements of new legislation, which require implementation of new pedagogical ideas as well as new ways of teaching and cooperating with colleagues. But teachers often find themselves lacking the necessary time to reflect on how to implement the new ideas and requirements. This condition thus represents a challenge to the success of implementing the demanded changes. In this article, we address the question of what is needed to create environments to support teachers' reflection and their professional development in VET with a specific focus at the potentials of 'professional learning communities' (PLC´s).

The work and collaborative learning of teachers are recognized, as fundamental factors in the professional development of teachers and in the quality of educational organizations. This text presents some results of a case study carried out in a Group of Schools in the north of Portugal staffed by 134 teachers of various educational levels by means of a qualitative and quantitative methodology. The objectives of the investigation focused on understanding the way that the teachers described their learning opportunities, recognized the facilitating and inhibiting elements of collaborative professional learning in the workplace and analyzed the way how the teachers perceived their professional learning in the work place. Information was collected by recourse to an enquiry using a questionnaire and semi-structured interviews. Fundamentally we focused on results of a qualitative nature with particular attention to information resulting from the interviews and also from the questionnaires. The results showed the recognition on the part of the teachers of the ways and contexts of collaborative work and learning and their importance in their professional daily life and quality of work. They also reflected that, although the teachers recognized these contexts in their current professional experience, they did not associate these experiences directly to communities of practice. ; COMPETE: POCI-01-0145-FEDER-007560 and FCT [Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia] (The Portuguese Government Fund for Science and Technology) within the Project Scope: ...

This multi-case study investigates characteristics and practices in schools that expand the traditional boundaries of school leadership and transform schools into democratic learning communities based on the level of implementation of the IDEALS framework. This investigation serves as a modus to illuminate democratic processes that change schools and address the needs of the students, not the needs of the adults in the system. A sample of five purposefully selected high schools, from the Midwest USA, was utilized. The schools serve Grade 9—12 students, but vary in size, residential area and socioeconomic status of the students. This study illuminates some of the challenges and strategies that facilitate or impede the process of creating more democratic schools that expand the boundaries of inquiry and discourse to include a broader range of community stakeholders and that respect and embrace issues of equity. ; Yes ; https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/manuscript-submission-guidelines

The Fully Online Learning Community (FOLC), developed at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology (UOIT), is a social-constructivist model, addressing a paradigm shift in employment skills, and supporting key elements of transformational learning. Adopting a Problem-based Learning (PBL) approach to activity design, FOLC has served as basis for both undergraduate and graduate, fully online degree programs for almost a decade. In this time, it has demonstrated its ability to facilitate richly collaborative, socially cohesive, and constructively critical, learning communities supported by a flexible array of synchronous and asynchronous digital affordances. FOLC represents a "divergent fork" of the Community of Inquiry (CoI) design to foreground the synergistic dynamics of social and cognitive presence, the role of professional educators as co- learners, the community-oriented nature of knowledge construction, the mediating role of digital competence and open technologies in fully online learning, and the transformational potential of democratized communication and assessment practices. Having positioned FOLC conceptually, a developing research agenda, aimed at grounding the FOLC on a broader body of empirical data, is presented. The underlying argument is that rich, transformative learning communities can be established in fully online programs, and these communities can have a significant democratizing effect on participants and the broader social context.