Roth, W.-M. (1998). Designing communities. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic
Publishers.
(ISBN: 0-7923-4703-X [hard], 0-7923-4703-8 [soft])
This book is
centrally concerned with knowing and learning in communities,
including the roles of setting, tools, artifacts, materials, and
community members (who engage in activities with varying degrees of
competence across a variety of practices). My ultimate goal, to which
the current book contributes, is to construct learning environments
in which students have significant opportunities to take charge of
their own learning; to construct learning environments that are
fundamentally oriented toward democratic ideals--independent of the
age of the learner--rather than the preparation of "obedient bodies"
(Foucault, 1975) who become fodder for factories and
exploitation.
The research
presented in this book falls into a category of research labeled
"design experiments" (Brown, 1992). As a design scientist, I
construct innovative learning environments and simultaneously conduct
research on teaching and learning therein. My emerging understandings
are fed back into the same classrooms to bring about, and amplify
positive conditions of learning. Because of the closeness to the
classroom, design experiments constitute research efforts that are
not only suitable to generate theory from practice, but--because of
the thick descriptions they can provide--inform practice and
practitioners in meaningful ways. That is, because design experiments
construct theory in practice, they can lead to interventions that
work by recognizable standards and are reliable and repeatable in the
same and different settings .
