Desired Characteristics of CSUSB as a Learning Community

Engaged
Explores and makes use of effective and innovative forms of truly engaged learning.

Reciprocal
All participants have the opportunity to be both learners and teachers.

Holistic
Learners view themselves and others as whole persons.

Dynamic
A learning community as a whole should consistently explore and use processes that will facilitate it own collective learning. What the community learns can then be used to make the learning community stronger and more effective.

Expansive and multi-faceted
Learning does not and should not take place only in classrooms. Therefore, communities outside the university can and should play an important role in learning communities.

Thoughtful about diversity and inequality
There are contexts in which it is useful for learning communities to be homogeneous in terms of one or more social categories (race, class, gender, age, sexual orientation, age, etc.) There are also contexts in which it is useful for learning communities to be very diverse along all of these categories and many others. Whatever the approach, it is important that learning communities not reproduce existing social inequalities in their structures and processes.

Open to questioning and change
Learning communities should be places where it is acceptable (and perhaps even encouraged) to ask "why" and where dialogue around this question will lead to change if/when members learn that change would be useful.

Effective
Learning communities are contexts in which people learn (to state the obvious). Thus, it would be important to attend to and routinely assess what and how participants are learning as part of the open-ness to change.