Without a vision the people perish : introducing collaborative learning to community service leaders in southern Appalachia

I studied my role as facilitator of collaborative learning with a group of community service leaders from a small town in southern Appalachia. I framed my study in terms of Peters' (2002) action research model and employed interviews, tape recordings of meetings, field notes and journaling as data collection techniques. I analyzed my qualitative data with procedures developed by Spradley (1980) and Hatch (2002). My interpretive analysis revealed five themes that described the group's experience with collaborative learning. These themes were communication and sharing, reflective thinking, forming collaborative relationships, participating in collaborative learning, and facilitating collaborative learning. Two additional subthemes, time and safety, appeared within the set of five themes. These results indicated that community leaders and I were able to jointly develop conditions conducive to collaborative learning, experience cycles of action and reflection, engage in multiple ways of knowing, and produce outcomes that resulted in decisions affecting the leaders' work in their community. My own approach to facilitating collaborative learning experiences was also modified in ways attributable to the group's experience. I discuss implications of these findings for research and practice in community development and collaborative learning.