Reclaiming Community

Abstract

The call for community can be heard throughout public and educational discourses; parallel calls for respecting difference are part of the discursive landscape as well. The terms have now become simplified and dichotomized. The author argues that a feminist-pragmatist conception of learning communities can be used to reclaim the idea of community 'from' both essentializing discourses of sameness, and to reclaim community 'for' those critical theorists who have abandoned the term as hopelessly exclusionary and oppressive. Feminist-pragmatism, a philosophical lens utilizing the strengths of feminism and pragmatism in dialogical union, is a promising tool for reconstructing visions of learning communities.