Neighbour Friendly
Feb
26
Written by:
2/26/2010 1:31 PM
When I get an idea or concept in my head, I seem to see it show up in all sorts of interesting places. This story takes a few turns so be patient.
The whole idea of community and creating community in our classrooms has been a very important theme in both
my current class as well as the work I do in
Prairie South. In reading
Here Comes Everybody, Clay Shirky references the book
Bowling Alone a few times so I figured I should buy it. Essentially the book deals with the decline of community in America and examines things like civic involvement, religious affiliation, and formal and informal groups. In essence, since the mid sixties, the social capital of Americans (I see Canada as having similar experiences) has declined quite dramatically. For many reasons, we are choosing to spend less time in community and more time as individuals, thus the title Bowling Alone.
I read the first part of the book as I flew to Portland for
ITSC. I had the opportunity to spend time with
Tim Lauer and his family. They live in a very nice neighborhood and Portland in general has some wonderful neighborhoods. As I spoke about our current endeavor to build a new house I discussed our challenge to avoid building a "garagehouse". In many of our neighbourhoods lots are only 50 feet and thus people wanting a two car garage end up building homes that look like this.
In contrast, Portland would not allow this type of home because it's not "neighbour friendly". I believe there is also a bylaw in place to prevent that from happening. Instead this is the type of community they envision:
From my experience and from the data in Bowling Alone, these types of gatherings are few and far between.
Fast forward to this week and I see a posting from
Kim McGill showing Rich Farmer and a little change he's making in his classroom to encourage community.
The point in Bowling Alone is that community gets eroded away slowly and before we know it we're operating in ways that make bringing community back very difficult. So, all that to say, if we believe community is valuable for our schools, what are we doing to make sure it happens? Is there something about the design, structure or regiments that would not make your school "neighbour friendly"?
4 comment(s) so far...
Neighbour Friendly
Dean-O,
I wrote about this; a long, long time ago. Get with the program...
http://edinsanity.com/2008/06/28/bowling-alone-vs-here-comes-everybody-my-how-far-weve-come/
Seriously, though, read the quote at the end (yes, I quoted myself):
"Putnam (2000), in his writing about the collapse of community, does address digital communications and argues that electronic entertainment, especially television, has severely privatized our leisure time and, therefore, has become a major contributor to the collapse of community. However, Putnam (2000) also admits that the verdict on the Internet is still out. That is, it may be that the primary effect of the Internet will be to reinforce existing social networks, as the telephone has done, or the Internet might become a virtual substitute for them."
What do you think? Since 2000, ten years later, has the Internet (and the proliferation of social networking services) served to reinforce existing social networks or has it become a virtual substitute for them? Or something else?
By Jon Becker on
3/1/2010 7:27 AM
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Neighbour Friendly
Jon,
Thanks for the link and I would share your opinion. I neglected to address the role of technology to close the gap but would certainly agree that social networking is serving to create and build community. I likely should have made this clear at the beginning of the post.
My focus in this post is to point out that our physical spaces continue to serve as barriers to community. I was thinking of classrooms and spaces where simple changes might actually help build community. The stark contrasts of these spaces to the freedom and openness of the web today, should be more evident to us as educators and parents.
I wonder if we'll start to see a shift in the way our classrooms and neighbourhoods are designed that better reflect the obvious desire and "status update" world in which many live?
By Dean Shareski on
3/2/2010 1:21 PM
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Neighbour Friendly
I was just talking with a group of teachers about this yesterday, and I quoted Dean *shutter* about his post on the book being the most disruptive technology regarding the collapse of community. I do believe looking at the trend over the past several years that the internet is largely bringing back the idea of community and social learning. Look how connected we are, and that wouldn't have happened outside of the advent of the internet. Personally, I simply can't express how much I've gained over the last three years and how much I've grown as a professional due to being a part of this space.
By Ben Grey on
3/2/2010 1:39 PM
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Neighbour Friendly
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By TammiMccall21 on
4/21/2010 8:20 AM
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