"The Village That Learns": A Learning Journey Across Intraventions and Domains Over Two Decades in a Rural Thai Community

Authors

Deborah A. Fields, Utah State UniversityFollow
Luis Morales-Navarro, University of PennsylvaniaFollow
Paulo Blikstein, Columbia UniversityFollow

Document Type

Article

Journal/Book Title/Conference

Mind, Culture, and Activity

Publisher

Routledge

Publication Date

11-11-2022

First Page

1

Last Page

23

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License

Abstract

What does it mean to become a village that learns? In this paper we document the transformative learning journey of a small Thai village over 24 years, becoming a community that identified, tackled, and iterated on problems, altering their everyday practices and lives. In that process the village shifted from a subsistence agricultural community staggeringly in debt to one known for its sustainable environmental, agricultural, and financial initiatives. To understand the village’s learning journey, we consider the village itself as the primary unit of analysis, applying an iterative case study approach, with chronological sequencing, thematic, and biographical narrative analysis across 37 hours of interviews and over 350 pages of scanned project documentation (mostly from village records and writings) collected across four visits. Throughout the paper we elaborate on the role of learner interest and agency, the necessity of infrastructural (often policy) changes, the prioritized role of children in leadership, and the method of “Thai Constructionism” that the village iteratively applied to support their learning. In the discussion we argue that to understand the village’s learning journey, we must study it across multiple scales of time, multiple series of village-initiated formative intraventions across domains, and within larger ecological systems.

Comments

This is an Accepted Manuscript version of the following article, accepted for publication in Mind, Culture, and Activity. Fields, Deborah A.; Morales-Navarro, Luis; and Blikstein, Paulo, ""The Village That Learns": A Learning Journey Across Intraventions and Domains Over Two Decades in a Rural Thai Community" (2022). Mind, Culture, and Activity. It is deposited under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Recommended Citation

Fields, Deborah A.; Morales-Navarro, Luis; and Blikstein, Paulo, ""The Village That Learns": A Learning Journey Across Intraventions and Domains Over Two Decades in a Rural Thai Community" (2022). Mind, Culture, and Activity.