We are “Communities of Practice”

Kirsten Browne
Jul 24, 2017 · 4 min read

Educational theorist and practitioner Etienne Wenger is top dog in the study of “communities of practice” (CoPs).

With many publications in this area, Etienne has distilled its definition: “Communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly” (Wenger-Trayner 2015). CoPs exist (and have always existed) everywhere, both by happenstance and by intention. Today’s global digital connectivity has massively exploded the creation of CoPs comprised of individuals physically separated, but with a shared domain of interest.

It’s Week 25 of this Mind Lab course (allowing for my extension!). A lot of personal transformations have occurred in that time. And now, I discover those beginnings of collaboration between Wairarapa schools has a language — we’ve formed a local community of practice amongst our 24-teacher Masterton cohort. Beyond this, a significant online CoP has formed among our 506-teacher national cohort, via Google+. Even further, new CoPs have sparked as special-interest subsets of our national cohort.

“Constellations of interrelated communities of practice”
Wenger 2000, p229

Communities of Practice: Using systems thinking to co-create a better world, Scott Fransisco 2016

How did all these treasure chests open?

Through the course we’ve become accustomed to several cooperative and collaborative modes: The first 16 weeks of face-to-face interaction and intensely paced tasks acted as a kind of boot camp. Thrown in at the deep end, we formed a camaraderie—our mixed knowledge of digital tools made us draw on those with experience in whatever realm or app we were in… Stop Motion for animation, Scratch for coding and robotics, Aurasma for virtual reality, etc. Encouraged to collaborate on formal assessments, we formed teams around common lines of inquiry. Like my teenage children I grew up with individual assessment — submitting assignments in a collaborative team has been enlightening — I’ve grown a new arm.

The second 16 weeks has been online collaborative learning without facilitated face-to-face sessions. My lifeline has been the national cohort of 506 teachers posting messages in our G+ community—a CoP instigated and administered by Mind Lab at the start of the course. Through these posts we share and access knowledge and resources unearthed by each other. This is powerful—a national CoP of currently practising teachers with a common goal to transform the way they teach.

“Learning is a process of social participation”
Lave and Wenger 1991

How do we sustain this?

The techniques used to trigger the formation of these communities is of great interest to me as an open-access makerspace co-founder. (I’m constantly extolling the virtues of local and global connectivity for innovation.) The NZ of today rewards competitive and individualistic success (eg: our current education culture). Propagating collaboration across schools, businesses, the nation and the globe is an exercise in undoing accepted norms. On reflection, our Mind Lab CoPs were triggered by deliberate administrative setup, went on to win hearts and minds through our shared endeavour, but will remain sustainable only by continued facilitation, or by purposeful interaction by we the members to keep them ‘living’. Yikes!—teachers are busy. Will our newly discovered CoPs live on once the course work is complete, and we’re left to our own devices?

Speaking to several in our Masterton cohort, we want to maintain our rich new digital and collaborative CoPs, but distributed responsibility for this among busy teachers is probably not enough to keep it together. We’ve formed a Masterton Mind Labbers Facebook group, and reached out to the following cohort to join, but Facebook isn’t for everyone—only one fifth of our cohort is actively posting. I suggest regular posts to our G+ community of new ideas or updated resources from Mind Lab’s ‘mother ship’ may be the stimulation we need to keep it alive.

A Masterton CoL fed by Mind Lab-initiated CoPs?

Forming a Masterton Community of Learning (CoL) is firmly on the agenda for local education leaders. We haven’t managed it in our district yet — clearly it’s not easy. Can our Mind Lab-initiated cross-school community of practice provide a foundation for this? Can the professional (and frank) new relationships our local teachers have with like-minded teachers in successful CoLs nationwide help us navigate our own CoL? If our local education leaders encourage further Mind Lab cohorts, will a sustainable and meaningful CoL grow naturally?

Ministry of Education Annual Report 2016 — Part one

“Because communities of practice are not confined by institutional affiliation, their potential value extends beyond the boundaries of any single organization.” (Wenger, McDermott, Snyder 2002).

Kirsten Browne

Written by

Co-founder and Project Director of Fab Lab Masterton

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