The house of the business school: A pragmatic approach to conceptualising learning community

Abstract

The need to understand learning communities has been heightened in a post-covid era of hybrid learning and programmes returning to on campus teaching. With a sectoral need for stabilisation and reaffirming the hallmarks of community, we probe the central tenets of learning community understanding. This provides a critical juncture to explore the foundational ideas of belonging and connection underpinning existing learning community conceptualisations. We first explore the perspectives of learning communities to allow us to provide a critical consolidative review and second, we consider what the benefits to business schools may be. We take a pragmatic approach to reach a more practically orientated conceptualisation focusing specifically on the concept of learning community in business schools. In this approach we purposefully explore common sector challenges to understand how ‘community’ within the context of ‘learning’ may help face these. This results in our conceptual model ‘The House of the Business School Learning Community (HBSLC)’, which is built on a core of connection and empowerment in the learning community and its outcomes may aid the challenges of learning and school management, ultimately aiding the student learning community with their educational objectives.