(Educational) Community (of Care)
Rosanna Cima
University of Verona

The term community originates from the Latin communitas; munus originally meant gift, obligation, and engagement. Gift in this case is to be understood in its dual meaning of an act generating life, matrix, maternal womb and a gift to give, that is, offering/giving up what is most intimate for the cum, being together. This meaning of communitas shows the value of bond and debt, gratitude and reciprocity.
The concept of community is employed in many disciplinary areas with different meanings: in sociology, to describe social organizations, and in anthropology to define, for example, linguistic, kin and religious communities. In general, the concept indicates a world view that is the expression of sharing in a broad sense.
Community may be understood as a continuous way of relating in which its members share spaces, times, affection, and purposes. It educates its members to a specific cultural environment, to adhere to this environment through different degrees of awareness and intentionality in well-defined places or, more widely, in daily informal experience (Tramma, 2014).
According to Simone Weil (1990/1949), community meets the “essential needs” of every human being and offers security and protection through mutual respect and compliance with the laws. Each individual participates in a community and in the life of the whole similar to every single part of the human body. Cooperative relationships are based on responsibility towards the community, equal dignity and all members engaging with the others in the common search for truth. Weil evokes the image of rootedness and uprooting to convey the terms of the human pursuit for an ideal community and the risks of losing it.
Social, environmental and economic transformations call for a rethinking of how we understand and live community: the multiple forms of belonging to groups and communities that characterize people and societies calls for a culture of encounter. The exercise of ‘mutual maieutics’, gratitude and interdependence (Dolci, 1972) makes it possible to process the conflicts and energies borne by differences as a measure connecting each individual community to the others.
The notion of community care refers to a community’s ability to take care of itself, in general, and of its members, more specifically. In particular, the school is the place par excellence in which educational practices can be used to constitute a community of care that embracing the risk of encountering the other and engages in dialogue with the different forms of education found in society. A school, understood as an educational care community, builds equity by giving voice to the different communities it encompasses, collective memories, and situated and gendered forms of knowledge. Caring is a vital ordering principle in that it nourishes the relational fabric through caring for oneself, others, living beings and the spiritual sphere (Mortari, 2002).
The school-community nexus of educational care contributes to developing civic and social engagement by focusing attention on the systems of relationships both within the school space and between it and the different external communities that constitute students and teachers’ living environment. Educational work with small groups of girls and boys may activate civic and social commitment and foster the building of relationships among communities (Cook et al., 2020). When the school welcomes and learns from the community experiences of its youngest members, it becomes an educating community that is capable of being educated in turn by its students.
It is this multifaceted meaning of the term community that runs throughout the different research activities of the RE-SERVES project.

Selected references

Cook, A. L., & Brodsky, L. M., Walker, W., Ruiz, B. (2020). Building Community Group Intervention: Exploring Outcomes on Multicultural and Civic Engagement Skills with Upper Elementary Students, Contemporary School Psychology, 1-17.
https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s40688-020-00273-1.pdf

Dolci, D. (1972). Inventare il futuro. Laterza.

Mortari, L. (2002). Aver cura della vita della mente. La Nuova Italia.

Weil, S. (1990). La prima radice. (Fortini, F., Trad. it.) SE SRL. (Originariamente pubblicato nel 1949)

Tramma, S. (2014). Comunità. In W. Brandani & S. Tramma (Cur.), Dizionario del lavoro educativo (pp.79-81). Carocci editore.