Unique Community-learning Model: "Town Square Academia

This paper examines whether there is grounds to a new learning model– a community-based shared model designed to create and spread knowledge on ADD and learning disorders in the educational system. Our proposed learning model "The adult community that is meaningful to the child" involves the school community (administration, councilors and teachers), parents to children with ADD and learning disabilities (instead of the parents' council) and lecturers and students from the academia who specialize in this field. All participants volunteer to attend school once a week for a free academic course that provides access to general theoretical knowledge and generates new local hands-on and theoretical knowledge on ADD and learning disabilities. The project developed at the Galilee panhandle under a one-of-a-kind and innovative social project entitled "Town Square Academia." To enable us to reply to the introductory question, we will review a number of acceptable models in the literature of a learning community, make a distinction between these models and the "adult community that is meaningful to the child", and see whether the model should be applied based on two years of implementation under the "Town Square Academia" program. The authors conclude that there is theoretical and practical basis for the model's proposal, which should therefore introduce a recommendation to broaden the examination, in terms of time and space. The conclusions that was reached for the learning process is that one should not only rely on the conventional model, which we recognize as members of a learning community that is mainly inclined to receive information from a lecturer or share information with our peers (mainly comprised of a homogenous group), but rather also base the shared community-based learning activities on knowledge generation, its distribution and retention by means of various tools. Put differently, actions taken by teachers, administrative staff, parents from the entire region, lecturers and students in learning communities, should establish and be founded on the knowledge of all those engaged in an initiated and proactive manner, by researching authentic cases by way of an educated analysis of individual events, and achieve all that through a dialogue between colleagues at the community in a diversified learning community. Attaining and embedding information in such an active manner is one of the objectives of the "Town Square Academia" project, aimed at benefiting the academia and its environment as a whole.