论文总字数：36676字

摘 要

本文从生态课堂的三个组成部分入手提出了在建构生态课堂过程中出现的三类失衡现象，并在学习共同体理论的指导下针对这三类现象提出了相应的对策。本篇文章首先介绍了学习共同体理论和生态课堂的内容以及含义。其次，本文讨论了共同体理论和生态课堂的联系并论述了可以从共同体理论出发解决生态课堂失衡现象的理由。接着，本文描述了在建构生态课堂过程中出现的三类失衡现象，并分别分析了出现这些失衡现象的原因。然后，本文从学习共同体理论出发分别针对这三类失衡现象提出了相应的解决措施。最后，本篇文章提出了对在我国建构生态课堂的未来的希冀。

关键词：学习共同体理论；生态课堂；失衡现象与应对策略

Contents

1. Introduction 1

1.1 Introduction of theory of learning community 1

1.2 Introduction of construction of ecological classroom 3

2. Literature Review 4

2.1 Current development of classroom teaching in China 4

2.2 Necessities of constructing ecological classroom based on theory of learning community 4

3. Three Imbalances in Progress of Constructing Ecological Classroom 5

3.1 Teacher’s discourse hegemony 5

3.2 Invalid interaction of students in class 7

3.3 Vicious competition among students 8

4. Corresponding Countermeasures Based on Community Theory 10

4.1 Countermeasures to teacher’s discourse hegemony 10

4.2 Countermeasures to invalid interaction of students in class 11

4.3 Countermeasures to vicious competition among students 12

5. Conclusion 13

Works Cited 15

1. Introduction

1.1 Introduction of theory of learning community

In recent years, with more and more emphasis on social constructive learning theory, the essence of learning, such as social construction, negotiation and participation, has been gradually highlighted. In 1881, the German sociologist Ferdinand Tonnies used the term “community” to describe a kind of close relationship between people, a kind of common spiritual consciousness and a unique sense of belonging and identity (Tonnies 3). In 1995, American educator Ernest L. Boyer introduced the concept of “community” into the field of education and clearly proposed the concept of “learning community.” In his book, The Basic School: A Community for Learning, Boyer proposed that “The most important thing in school education is to establish a learning community in the true sense. The classroom — and by extension, the school -- is positioned as a little community focused on learning. Teachers are empowered with real leadership; parents are partners; resources are rich; and the curriculum is coherent and centralized.” (Boyer 22) In 2005, the Japanese education scholar Mr. Sato Manabu also proposed the ideal of transforming the school, that is “The school is a place where people learn and grow together. We must rebuild the ideal school from this simple concept.” (Manabu 4)

The so-called “learning community” refers to an organization includes learners and their partners and facilitators, such as classmates, teachers and assistants. They share common goals, learn together in a supportive environment, share various learning resources, share their emotions, experiences and concepts through collaborative dialogues. In the joint activities, they form interpersonal relationships of mutual-influence and mutual-promotion, and they have a strong sense of identity and sense of belonging to this group, so as to promote the comprehensive growth of learners. The “learning community” includes classroom learning community, curriculum learning community, school learning community, network learning community and so on. The knowledge construction, meaning negotiation and identity formation constitute the operational mechanism of the learning community.

To truly understand the learning community, it is necessary to clarify that the learning community is different from group teaching and group cooperative learning. In group teaching, teacher’s focus is on the completion of teaching tasks, the realization of teaching objectives, and the level of students’ academic performance. As long as students do not violate the discipline of the classroom, their living conditions will not be given much attention. Learning community is not the same as group learning as well. As a learning method, group cooperative learning focuses more on individual’s mastery of knowledge and development of abilities. The learning community is essentially the transcendence of group cooperative learning. In addition to focusing on students’ knowledge and abilities, learning community also emphasizes the agreement and linkage of members at the spiritual levels. Moreover, every student in learning community is an expert in one area and exists in dignity. Therefore, learning community also helps students gain an identity, a respect and even a glory.

Nowadays, under the environment of the Internet , with the developments of Flipped Class and Cooperative Learning, and under the guidance of Constructivism, Learning Community has also made great breakthroughs in theory and practice.

In the past several years, the trend of exam-oriented education has formed the test-oriented school culture. In traditional classrooms, teachers only regard teaching books to cope with exams as their teaching objectives. Nowadays, the reform of basic education curriculum calls for a new type of culture, namely development-oriented school culture. This is a “dialogue culture” based on “dialogue relationship”. Its curriculum philosophy is cooperation, unity, organization and cultural synthesis.

The theory of learning community meets the requirements of the reform of basic education curriculum greatly. If we build our schools and classrooms as learning communities, they will be full of care, concern, mutual unity, mutual trust and respect between educators and children. Building our classrooms as learning communities means we and our students regard our classrooms which based on common learning aspirations and development goals as the main venue for learning activities. Through cooperation and exchange, communication and negotiation, role inter-embedding, sharing of various learning resources, sharing of wisdom and achievements in our class, teachers and students will achieve value recognition and common development finally.

1.2 Introduction of construction of ecological classroom

Educational ecology is a new discipline. It links education to the ecological environment and studies the interrelationships and mechanisms between them. The term, ecological classroom, was first proposed by Cremin Lawrence, Dean of the Columbia College of Teachers in 1976, in the book Public Education (Lawrence 24).

The ecosystem in our nature is composed of biotic and abiotic components. It has the following three characteristics. First, the ecosystem consists of communities and environments and they interact functionally. Second, the ecosystem has three functions: energy flow, information transmission and material circulation. Third, the ecosystem has a self-regulating function. The classroom also has these three characteristics. The teaching system itself is a complete ecosystem. The basic structure and function of the natural ecosystem are also owned in the teaching system. The ecological classroom consists of biological components (teachers and students) and abiotic environment (teaching environment). The classroom also has the characteristics of energy flow. Teachers and students are the sources of energy and energy flows through the teaching interaction. In the classroom ecology, the energy can flow between the teacher and the students and the teaching environment. When teachers and students draw energy from the classroom ecology to self-digest, they act as decomposers as well.

In short, the ecological classroom is using the entire classroom as an ecosystem. It emphasizes the positive interaction between the three components. The new round of basic education reform puts forward that “All is for the development of students and for the lifelong and comprehensive development of students” fully embodies the characteristics of the ecological classroom. The ecological classroom has the characteristics of integrity, diversity, openness and symbiosis. Compared with the traditional classroom, the ecological classroom emphasizes the integration of the three ecological components of teachers, students and teaching environment to achieve the relative balance of the teaching ecology, and ultimately achieve the purpose of improving the teaching effect. Therefore, the ecological classroom advocates the optimization of various factors that constitute the teaching ecology, and studies the relationship between them.

1. Literature Review

2.1 Current development of classroom teaching in China

However, the current classroom teaching situation is not harmonious. The leading role of teachers has not been highlighted; the subjective status of the students has not been consolidated; the teaching content did not fully reflect humanistic care, and the potential of teachers and students was not fully exerted. There is a phenomenon of ecological imbalance in the classroom (Manabu 7).

From the perspective of education and teaching reform, education and teaching reform is in a state of continuous development. However, basic consensuses are the emphasis on the subjective status of students, the emphasis on the harmonious relationship between teachers and students, and the attention paid to the importance of cultivating students personality. Then, the ecological classroom can achieve these goals through the improvement of the teaching ecological environment.

From the perspective of educating students, our teaching is not to cultivate people who are unconventional and lacking in creativity. We want to cultivate people who have individuality and can develop in an all-round way. So how can we train these people? The answer lies in the fact that the teaching process must be creative and flexible, and it must not be hard-pressed and forcibly instilled. As a result, the advantages of the ecological classroom are highlighted.

2.2. Necessities of constructing ecological classroom based on theory of learning community

There are some intrinsic links between the learning community theory and the ecological classroom. So the construction of ecological classroom can be guided under the theory of learning community.

Firstly, in the teaching practice, the learning community theory and the ecological classroom both advocate the concept of “student-oriented”. Both the community and the ecological concept emphasize that in the classroom teaching, students are the main body and self-learning is the principle, so as to construct an open, interactive and collaborative ecological teaching mode.

Secondly, the phenomena of symbiosis and competition are similar between the learning community and the ecosystem. Symbiosis refers to the positive interrelationship between different individuals. The learning community model reflects the mutually beneficial relationships among members. At the same time, under the learning community model, the interactions between various students as the main components of the ecological classroom also reflect competitive activities. In addition to mutual cooperation and mutual absorption, students also create a competitive relationship because of the use of the same resource. These are similar to the phenomena of symbiosis and competition among species in natural ecosystem.

Thirdly, in essence, the learning community theory is highly compatible with the ecological classroom. The ecological classroom stands at the overall height of the system, with the concept of ecological education and life education as the core, so that teachers and students can effectively use various carriers to carry out teaching activities in a natural and harmonious ecological environment. Learning community theory also requires that learners in the community have a shared vision and a harmonious learning atmosphere. Therefore, the essence of learning community theory is highly similar to the ecological classroom. They both can create a safer psychological environment and more suitable ecological space.

In the context of today’s information technology, community theory presents new modes of practice, such as flipped classrooms, cooperative learning, etc. The ecological classroom is built on this basis, otherwise the empty talk can never construct a real ecological classroom.

1. Three Imbalances in Progress of Constructing Ecological Classroom

3.1 Teacher’s discourse hegemony

We know that building an ecological classroom requires optimizing its three components that are the teacher, students and the classroom environment. After a long period of literature analysis and the author’s experience in a middle school internship, this article will propose three representative imbalance phenomena from these three aspects, and correspondingly propose countermeasures in the perspective of leaning community theory.

The first imbalance we still encounter in the process of constructing the ecological classroom is the phenomenon of teacher’s discourse hegemony.

From the perspective of discourse time in the classroom, the disparity of discourse time between teacher and students in the classroom is one of the representations of the phenomenon of teacher’s discourse hegemony. With their authoritative power, teachers often occupy the commanding heights of discourse and control the time of every student’s discourse in the classroom. When students with poor grades are asked in the classroom, and then the students are silent, for the consideration of the progress of the teaching, the time of the class and the students themselves, teacher may directly ask the next classmate to answer, or criticize students and say the answer directly (Zhao 1-14).

From the perspective of different types of questions that teachers ask different students in the classroom, it reflects teacher’s imbalanced distribution of students’ discourse. Most teachers tend to leave high-level questions to top students, while low-level problems such as simple factual and judgmental questions are left to poor students. This practice invisibly deprives poor students of classroom discourse power, which not only inhibits the development of these students’ thinking ability, but also makes the poor students always at the lower level of discourse power.

From the perspective of the authority of discourse content, with the absolute authority of the total amount of knowledge, teacher occupies the commanding heights of classroom discourse and control the entire classroom. Due to blind worship or blind obedience to the authority of teachers, students unconsciously give up their basic classroom discourse rights, and are in the dilemma of being guided and supervised.

This phenomenon of teacher’s discourse hegemony greatly hinders the normal energy flow in the ecological classroom system, and thus hinders the construction of the ecological classroom. Some reasons are analyzed for this phenomenon. Firstly, although the curriculum reform has been going on for a long time, in the actual teaching activities, most teachers still position themselves as high authorities, still adhere to the original teaching behavior pattern, tend to maintain their authority status, and believe that only authority is beneficial to classroom management. Secondly, in the traditional ethics, the teacher was placed in the supremacy with heaven, earth, monarch and parents and possesses an unassailable authority in propagating the doctrine, imparting professional knowledge and resolving doubts. This historical concept of thousands years has greatly influenced the current education. Thirdly, students do not have a clear understanding of the right they have in their speech in the classroom. Or in other words, most students think that the right to speak in the classroom is given by the teacher and it is appropriate that teacher does not let them speak for their poor grades. So this has created difficulties for us to construct an ecological classroom.

3.2 Invalid interaction of students during class

The second problem is the invalid interaction between teacher and students in the construction of ecological classroom.

At present, the emphasis and attention of school teaching is still the student’s academic scores. Although teachers know that good interaction is good at the development of teaching activities and the construction of ecological classroom, in order to complete the teaching tasks, teachers will adopt more narrative teaching methods in the classroom, which mainly based on knowledge transfer. As a result, students passively accept knowledge and their learn initiative is poor. And in the actual classroom interaction, most teachers tend to choose students with active thinking and excellent score. Therefore, this is not an effective interactive class, because the teacher did not mobilize the interest of interaction of most students. Here are some of the reasons for the ineffective interaction between teachers and students.

Teachers are key elements in the classroom ecosystem. So from teacher’s aspect, teacher’s teaching rhythm in the class is not consistent with students’ physical and mental rhythms. Here we have to figure out a matter, that is not only poor students have ineffective interaction with their teachers, good students also have this problem. Sometimes teachers may slow down the pace of teaching in order to take care of poor students, or sometimes good students may think that they have already understood the knowledge in this lesson, then good students will also have invalid interactions. On the other hand, in the traditional class teaching system, teachers focus on teaching, pay attention to one-way knowledge infusion, and the teaching organization is rigid due to the pursuing of unified standardization (Zhou 3). Consequently, the teacher will ignore the zone of proximal development of different students and lack the diagnosis of students of different backgrounds, and it is difficult to meet the differentiated needs of students. This is contrary to the basic principles of the ecological classroom, and leads to the lack of initiative of some students and make them gradually detach to the margin of the classroom.

Students are the main body of the classroom ecosystem. In face of the trend of the learning society in the 21st century, students need to have a good self-learning ability and self-regulation ability. However, when some students encounter problems after class, they currently lack the initiative to solve problems and the way to effectively deal with problems and they have insufficient self-regulation ability. These lead to insufficient motivation for students’ internal learning and will always be in a passive learning state. Ultimately, it is difficult for them to keep up with the teaching rhythm in the class and leads to the invalid interaction between the teacher and students.

From the aspect of classroom teaching environment, poor peer relationship is an important reason for the ineffectiveness of teachers and students. If students are rejected by their peers or lack effective interaction with their peers, it is not conducive to students’ deep participation in class, and it is not conducive to the formation of care atmosphere in the classroom. As a result, students’ sense of accomplishment is reduced and their sense of belonging is lacking, and these students are gradually going on the margin of class.

3.3 Vicious competition among students

The third problem is the vicious competition among students in the process of building ecological classroom.

Competition runs through the entire school life of the students. At the beginning of the curriculum reform, we advocate the introduction of competition mechanisms in the classroom. We believe that competition can arouse students’ motivation to learn, and thus gain greater gains in learning. Because in the competition, the students’ ambition and motivation are kept at a higher level than before, which can help students maximize their potential and improve their learning. In the construction of the ecological classroom, competition usually acts as an incentive element, but at the same time it may also bring some negative influences. In researcher Vansteenkiste and researcher Deci’s research conclusion, excessive attention to outcomes may have a counterproductive effect on the inner learning motivations of the learning process(Vansteenkisteamp;Deci 273-299). In actual teaching practice, we will also find that under the current situation of crazy pursuit of scores, students will always regard the victory as the primary goal in the process of competition, rather than do their best to promote themselves and learn something. At present, most of the classroom teaching emphasizes the competitive reward mechanism excessively, which makes the liberal education develop into a malformed development. The original objective that is acquisition of intelligence and ability has finally turned into examination and competition. So in today’s class, students are under great pressure, heavy burdens, and anxious feelings, which damages their physical and mental health and they are prone to generate a distorted and self-interested sense of competition.

The first reason for this phenomenon is that being in the upper echelons of society is the pursuit of Chinese since ancient times and in modern times, academic achievement is an important condition for becoming a superior. In the hierarchical society of ancient China for thousands of years, the older generation in the bottom of Chinese society educated the younger generation from an early age that only those who endure the most become the highest. In contemporary China, parents value their children’s education because they think their children’s academic achievement is an important factor in determining their future social class. In order to achieve better results, in order not to lose on the starting line, teachers and parents have to work overtime with their children, using time and sweat to improve their children’s scores, and ultimately bring a heavy workload to the students. In this social context, students only can learn harder and harder, strive for higher honors, and achieve better scores. Therefore, it is not surprising that there is vicious competition in schools.

The second reason is that most students’ mentality has not yet matured. For one thing, many students believe that failure is a manifestation of their lack of ability because of the exam-oriented education they have been receiving and failure will make them feel ashamed. Therefore, competition always puts them under pressure and make them feel nervous. They usually show helplessness after failure and even want to escape the bad results. For another, some students have strong desires for victory and perfectionism, try their best to succeed, and do whatever they can to succeed. They don’t want to see people around them who are stronger than themselves and they always want to be the best. Such students are not willing to cooperate with others, and often look down on their classmates who are not as good as their own.

4. Corresponding Countermeasures Based on Community Theory

4.1 Countermeasures to teacher’s discourse hegemony

The return of students’ speaking right is an inevitable choice for ecological classroom’s construction. However, to improve students’ power of discourse is not to suppress the teacher’s discourse power, but to find an ideal path for return under the premise of common development. We should follow two basic principles to deal with this imbalance. On the one hand, teacher should build an ecologically equal classroom environment and make the environment become students’ discourse support. On the other hand, teacher should first have the awareness of the entire class as a learning community and build a true equal relationship between members of the community.

First of all, in terms of space, teachers should innovate students’ seating arrangements. The traditional Chinese classroom seating arrangement is basically the same pattern, that is, all students face the podium and they sit in lines and rows. However, under the guidance of learning community theory, we advocate the U-shaped desk arrangement. The U-shaped desk arrangement completely eliminates the distance between the first table and the last table. What students see is no longer the back of their companions but their faces and gaze, which makes their exchange more and more. The middle channel in the U-shaped desk arrangement is convenient for teachers to quickly reach every corner of the classroom and makes teacher pay attention to the learning situation of every student easier. In the whole community, the U-shaped arrangement presents a face-to-face love that reflects an equal attitude of tolerance and individuality.

Secondly, in the learning community theory, teacher should abandon the idea of pursuing self-perfect performance in traditional teaching, and promote the common development of students in warmth, mutual strength and mutual assistance. So in the construction of ecological classroom, teacher can divide students into little communities so as to help students develop good habits of active communication and collaboration and improve their discourse power gradually. In this way, students have companions in the form of mutual help and it is conducive to the promotion and mutual assistance among students at different levels of competence. Sometimes, teacher can hold debates in the class and encourage little communities to participate actively. Students can debate with their classmates and also can debate with their teachers freely. Both parties to the debate have equal rights and status and can refute so as to eliminate all repressive behaviors and achieve rationalization of communication in the ecological classroom (Cheng 2).

Next, when it comes to the abiotic environments in ecological classroom, teacher must know that safety is one of the most basic requirements of human beings and it is also the foundation and guarantee for the learning community to be truly in-depth. Teacher’s discourse hegemony may break the sense of security and makes students be afraid of expressing mistakes. Thus, it is necessary to reach a consensus that even if the students are silent for a short time, they should be tolerated and be given a modest wait or enlightenment.

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