Coalition for Self-Learning

Catalog Number 4171, $21.95

In recent years alternative educators and homeschooling families have looked beyond the routines and structures of the conventional school classroom and developed more open-ended, community-based, collaborative programs for lifelong learning. This book features homeschool resource centers, democratic schools, Internet-linked distance learning programs and other pioneering efforts to redesign education for the twenty-first century. More than thirty leading activists and writers in the alternative education and homeschooling movements have contributed original chapters to this visionary gathering of ideas, including Linda Dobson, Mary Leue, Jerry Mintz, Pat Farenga, Don Glines, Wayne Jennings, Sandy Hurst, Wendy Priesnitz, Katharine Houk and Dayle Bethel.

Creating Learning Communities tells the stories of successful programs for lifelong learning and describes how they work. A section on "philosophical roots" explores the differences between the industrial-age model of mass schooling and emerging models of community-based learning. The authors challenge common assumptions about curriculum, testing, grading and management, and portray a way of learning that arises naturally and organically through experience and active involvement in the world around the learner.

Parents, educators, policymakers and teacher educators will be inspired and informed by this book's straightforward prose and delightful photos. Contact names and addresses are given for most of the models presented, and a resource directory describes organizations and publications that can help readers grow their own learning communities.

Dr. Kelly Patrick Gerling, an organization consultant who works with schools, writes in the book's afterword,

Significant accomplishments happen in relationships with like minded people. A great advantage of this book is that it represents an invitation to a relationship—a relationship with a community of educators, thinkers and most of all innovators. The authors in Creating Learning Communities are available to you.... Each person may be able to offer you help with your particular goals for improved learning for young people.... One or more may be able to assist you in doing what you can do in your quest to improve education.