Curriculum, Pedagogy, Teacher, Students and Communities of Practice

“Student voice empowers the learner”

Since commencing this subject I have had a change in my thinking regarding excursions. The potential for students to have a ‘shared competence experience’ within a CoP could develop student thinking and transform their learning. I put this thought into practice recently.

I currently teach a Content Language and Integrated Learning Class (CLIL) to a select cohort of level 5/6 students. The content being Post World War11 Immigration and the Language is Italian. This CLIL class is a unique project funded by the CEVN. It runs for ten weeks. Mid way into the project I organized for our cohort to go off site to the Immigration Museum, the purpose of which was to take the CLIL students out of the classroom and situate them into a Community of Practice common to our content area, that would develop their thinking and language skills and result in their becoming ‘practioners’ of the Community., as Wagner puts it ‘not to learn from talk as a substitute for legitimate peripheral participation; it is to learn to talk as a key to legitimate peripheral participation’ (Lave´ & Wenger, 1991)

The tasks I set up for the students were directed but also opened. Some students chose to express their learnings in poetry, others drew pictures, some students, interviewed the education consultant. Once back at school the learning became the know vocabulary used for our CLIL class. The response was powerful and shared across the students. It became apparent that student voice had resulted in a valued learning experience for all.