Community Learning Process
A true community is the natural place for people to grow and mature in their life learning journeys. Jean Vanier explained in his book Community and Growth, “Community is the place where our limitations, our fears and our egoism are revealed to us. We discover our poverty and our weaknesses, our inability to get on with some people, our mental and emotional blocks, our affective or sexual disturbances, our seemingly insatiable desires, our frustrations and jealousies, our hatred and our wish to destroy. While we are alone, we could believe we loved everyone. Now that we are with others, living with them all the time, we realize how incapable we are of loving, how much we deny to others, how closed in on ourselves we are... Community is the place where the power of the ego is revealed and where it is called to die so that people become one body and give much life.”

Community Learning is a transformational process that engages not only our behavioral (hands) domain, but also our cognitive (head) and affective (hearts) domains through peer coaching, teaching and mentoring in the community. Just as an effective teacher not only has to teach but need to also mentor through role modeling and engages in some coaching, learners need to be engaged holistically in order for learning to be transformational.

Peer Coaching
Peer coaching happens when learners help one another to put what they have learned into practice in their daily lives. It applies to practical issues that Christians encounter in their workplace and at home beyond methods of Bible study. It flourishes when learners collaborate as a team in outreach projects and learners learn to coach and help each other to solve problems and share experience on how to put what they have learned into practice. The underlying basis of peer coaching is collaborative learning, where learning occurs and skills are enhanced when learners talk and coach among themselves.

Peer Teaching
The teachings that are taking place in school and in church today are often didactic as they are largely teacher-centered. Peer teaching encourages learners to interact actively with one another with reference to the content that they are learning. Through the process, they actively assimilate and integrate new knowledge with their current knowledge as well as challenge existing assumptions and misconceptions. According to Rom 12:2, renewing our mind through the Word of God often requires a radical change in mindset which cannot take place when learners are largely passive. The underlying basis for peer teaching is active learning, where learners discuss to share understanding and scaffold ideas as they engage in analysis and reflection to assimilate acquired knowledge.

Peer Mentoring
Peer mentoring occurs when learners share their life stories and struggles with one another: inspiring each other through role modeling and establish accountability through loving confrontation, exchanging insights and re-igniting passion in each others’ lives, empathizing and supporting fellow learners in their journeys of faith. The underlying basis for peer mentoring is deep learning, where the hearts can be remolded and our attitudes, beliefs and passions transformed.

Informal Curriculum
As people engage in Community Learning with good relational pragmatics and interacts with reference to the formal curriculum, an informal curriculum is generated in the form of a community discourse. While the formal curriculum may be didactic, the questions and discussions in the context of a true community has the potential to transform our lives and built our character, especially if they are led by the Holy Spirit. Without the informal curriculum generated by the interaction, the formal curriculum at best becomes head knowledge and lives will remain un-transformed.

Unfortunately, most of the time we engage our minds through listening or reading, and we try to engage our hands by jumping to applications. The heart is then left to manage its existing attitudes, beliefs and passions. Unless our hearts grow in godliness instead of self-centeredness, we may end up being knowledgeable and competent but religious, divisive, or perpetually struggling over certain sin that we feel powerless to overcome despite knowing what is right. This often happens when the heart has been by-passed and remains un-yielded and unbroken; hence the learner is not able to consistently produce the right behavior that indicates the learning has been effectively life transforming.

Spiritual Formation
Community Learning by itself is not sufficient for spiritual formation though the informal curriculum it generates can be life transforming. It is only when we go through the life transformation cycles initiated by learning moments (kairos) that arises out of a challenge or crisis we face that will enable us experience deep change resulting in spiritual maturity.

To learn more about the transformation cycle and how lives can be transformed by applying Community Learning, please download our whitepaper and refer to the section on the Mount of Olives Model for discipleship.