CLI: Overview |
Community
Learning is founded on the principal that all knowledge is fundamentally
community knowledge. Knowledge is
communal at its creation, in the collaborations of scholars, and it is communal
in its use, informing and improving life in communities.
Sharing the processes of creating and using knowledge never diminishes
it, neither in quantity nor value; in
fact, the scope, depth, accuracy, and clarity of knowledge increase as the range
of sharing increases.
Education is thus enlarged
when the process of learning is
collaborative. Community Learning at Trinity fosters collaborations between college
students and many kinds of partners outside of the College.
These collaborations deepen our students’ abilities to retain,
comprehend, apply, synthesize, and evaluate their course learning, while at the
same time sharing learning and knowledge with others. It also deepens our student’s commitments to values
celebrated in the college’s Mission Statement, to “foster critical thinking,
free the mind of parochialism and prejudice, and prepare students to lead
examined lives that are personally satisfying, civically responsible, and
socially useful.” Indeed,
Community Learning powerfully and directly fosters all of these goals.
Community Learning collaborations moreover contribute directly to
society, fostering the larger goals of justice, equality, and opportunity.
For all these reasons we regard Community Learning as an ideal for education in the Liberal Arts. It is not limited to a specific area of the curriculum nor to a particular theme, but could be integrated into every course, from first year seminars to the senior thesis.