0.5 The Unique Case of HPL

0.5 The Unique Case of HPL

How does the course community of HPL relate to the overall goals of the project? First, let’s ask what the overall goals of the project are. Undertaken by the Harvard Teaching and Learning Lab, the first goal of the HPL project is “to design and build a foundational, personalized learning experience for future education professionals.” The second goal is to “fund faculty experimentation with personalizing curriculum, pedagogy, and assessments in their teaching.” As a course designed in an iterative cycling process, the Teaching and Learning Lab can regularly evaluate and improve its offerings.

What is the role of community in the foundational, personalized learning experience of HPL? Firstly, students look for and expect community in the experience - over half of students in the HPL 2020 course said they felt less than “very well connected” to the rest of their course community, and nearly half (49%) said they felt “not well connected.” (Students’ keen interest in participating in a community may be related to HPL’s location at the outset of most students’ HGSE experience.) Secondly, as a course based on constructivist principles, leveraging community and communities of practice is, in fact, central to the values and pedagogical approach of HPL. As per the second goal, we are in the process of experimenting towards the end of improving most features of the course, particularly its community.

At the outset, there appears to be a primary difficulty: limited time. HPL has only six weeks to form, develop, and cultivate a sense of community (while also achieving its academic goals). During this period, members will need to pass through all the “trajectories” that Lave and Wanger (1991) suggest for members entering a virtual community:

Trajectories for Members in a Virtual Community

1. Peripheral (i.e., Lurker). An outside, nonpublic, and unstructured participant.

2. Inbound (i.e., Novice). A newcomer is invested in the community and is heading toward full and public participation.

3. Insider (i.e., Regular). A fully committed community participant.

4. Boundary (i.e., Leader). An individual who sustains membership participation and brokers interactions.

5. Outbound (i.e., Elder). Someone in the process of leaving the community due to new relationships, new positions, or new outlooks.

This digital essay recommends a context or structure that escorts students mindfully through the first two steps, towards the increased participation in the latter steps. HPL students will likely spend most of their time in trajectory three, but, ideally, if the community is to thrive genuinely, the students will also experiment with trajectory four. When considering member experience progression through all these roles, facilitating the first steps is the most important thing we can do to progress students towards the later ones. Members on entry are very vulnerable and looking to orient themselves in the community, and this is when they will most appreciate the intervention.

The course community of HPL can directly benefit the work of its community of practice. HPL students have the opportunity to learn from other students with experiences very similar to and different from theirs. Because all communities are unique, HPL will also have a unique community each year, made up of a new and unique diverse cohort group. By leaning into this uniqueness and allowing each cohort to make the community in their vision, HGSE can leverage students’ motivations and ideas right out of the gate, as well as forge a friendly sense of inter-year competition. An inter-year dialogue would be particularly benefited by an external resource that holds the stories of members of the community.

Next, we will ask what is a “Community of Practice”, the infrastructure that paves the way for associational life between members at the academic level of the course?

Citations:

Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.