Transforming Classes in Communities – Introduction Concepts

The chapter deals with the pedagogical and didactic implications involved in transforming a class in a community. It develops initially the differences between the class as a group and as a community and then underlines the specificities of cooperative and collaborative processes needed to promote this transformation. A specific part is dedicated to cooperative learning as an educational methodology, to work on the class cooperatively, deepening the method with some examples of techniques. Collaborative processes are faced with reasoning on the entacommunity that involves the creation of a class as a community of learners, a community of practices, a community of discourse, a community of inquiry, a community of improvisation. Every community is developed by a theoretical point of view, expressing the main features of the processes involved, and a specific didactic technique is also associated. In the end, the role of the teacher is considered in the cooperative processes as a designer of the activities promoted, in the collaborative processes as a facilitator and improviser within all the activities encouraged. These roles are not in contrast between them but they focus the attention on different characteristics of the teacher because are oriented to develop different processes.