Complicated Communities: Faculty's Fraught Participation in Learning Communities

While learning communities (LCs) are in theory fully inclusive interdisciplinary communities, when theory meets practice they reveal a challenge common to many attempts to create such large communities: drawing faculty from smaller communities (departments/disciplines) with different practices and values, they can subtly and perhaps unintentionally push to erase difference, placing instructors, especially untenured faculty, in tense and uncomfortable positions. Such tensions illustrate, therefore, the need for fewer top-down LC initiatives and more radical transformations of these programs that value polyphony over consensus and that embrace a multiplicity of communities within the larger community.

A review of the scholarship on learning communities shows both their potential and the concerns that have crept into critical conversations. Teaching in LCs reveals the pressures faced by faculty (especially new faculty), pressures rooted in the competing values of their many academic communities. Such pressures are exacerbated in teaching FYC. Ultimately, any learning community venture will remain problematic for teachers unless they can somehow balance the demands of these communities, something that cannot happen without an acknowledgment of these tensions in LCs and a redefinition of what it means to be a member of the larger university community.