0.6 What is a Community of Practice

0.6 What is a Community of Practice?

Wenger (1998) describes the concept of a community of practice as how people "engage in a process of collective learning in a shared domain of human endeavor." Therefore, a community of practice emphasizes the goal-oriented nature of a community but may or may not manifest as the type of community where a sense of belonging is felt. Ideally, this is the academically focused part of the community where members learn together and collaborate in knowledge co-creation. For Wenger, the learning that takes place in a community of practice comes from connections among individuals joining in the pursuit of a shared goal and the process of negotiating its meaningfulness. Gauthier (2016) asserts that the primary objective of forging a community of practice online is to bring about "the community's own internal direction, character, and energy. To try to predetermine too many learning outcomes or how learning will emerge and evolve would be contradictory to this approach".

Sobko et al. (2012) find that online collaboration is technologically ubiquitous in today's society to the degree that we must recognize that the idea that using collaborative tools and spaces is beneficial is particularly prevalent. "This is the reason that variants of the term "collaborative learning" or "collaboration" occur so frequently in discussions of digital media, and also, we might add, at times unreflectively and interchangeably...the affordances of collaboration are now often taken as a given rather than delineated, explored, or questioned". As Kreijns et al. (2003) point out in their excellent review of pitfalls in computer-mediated learning, it is also evident that "Placing learners together does not guarantee productive CL".

In order to foster a community of practice, instructors and course designers need to model an andragogic shift. Major (2015) finds that this includes calling for and modeling critical reflection, valuing the learning histories of both instructors and students, empowering students to question beliefs, assumptions, and values, inviting student input into course design, and understanding group dynamics, among other qualities. "Ultimately, setting the stage for transformation requires an openness to the possibility that learning will likely emerge from a variety of interactions - student to student, student to instructor, and student to curriculum content" (Major, 2015). Cronin et al. (2016) observe that "in a networked CoP, it is possible for students and lecturers to have more equal roles in creating content, sharing resources, participating in conversations [and] starting conversations" (Cronin et al., 2016). Gauthier finds that “In a classroom community of practice, students and instructors reflect on, negotiate, and redesign aspects of the class according to the needs and interests that emerge from their personal and shared histories” (Gauthier, 2016).

What is the difference between a Community of Practice and a network? If the Community of Practice is more the seat of constructivism, a network - more flexible and ad hoc - embodies the interactive theories of connectivism. In the connectivism theory, knowledge resides across a network of interpersonal connections. Learning is considered the ability to create and navigate through these connections to create and acquire this knowledge. Networked learning theory treats learning as a primarily social process, where it is the connections among learners, resources, and teachers that facilitate knowledge construction. In what ways do our platforms and tools best support the actions of a more formal community of practice, and in what way can we see activities manifesting as a more informal network? To what degree is our ability to measure these communities' actions limited by their complexity and scale? Both can alter and make equal the relationship between different members in a learning community - teachers, instructors, etc. - but for both, it is essential “for teachers to create a supporting social infrastructure for inquiry culture” (Major et. al, 2018).

Citations

Cronin, C., Cochrane, T., & Gordon, A. (2016). Nurturing global collaboration and networked learning in higher education. Research in Learning Technology, 24. doi.org/10.3402/rlt.v24.26497

Gauthier, L. (2016). Redesigning for student success: Cultivating communities of practice in a higher education classroom. Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 16(2), 1-13. doi:10.14434/josotl.v16i2.19196

Kreijns, K., Kirschner, P.A., & Jochems, W. (2003). Identifying the pitfalls for social interaction in computer-supported collaborative learning environments: a review of the research. Computers in Human Behavior. 19(3): 335-353, doi.org/10.1016/S0747-5632(02)00057-2

Major, C. H. (2015). Teaching Online: A Guide to Theory, Research, and Practice. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press., doi:10.1353/book.38784.

Major, L., Warwick, P., Rasmussen, I., Ludvigsen, S. & Cook, V. (2018). Classroom dialogue and digital technologies: A scoping review. Education and Information Technologies 23, 1995–2028. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10639-018-9701-y

Sobko S., Unadkat D., Adams J., & Hull G. (2020). Learning through collaboration: A networked approach to online pedagogy. E-Learning and Digital Media17(1): 36-55. doi:10.1177/2042753019882562

Wenger, E., (1998). Communities of Practice: Learning as a Social System. Systems Thinker. 10 pp.