Communities of Practice. Collaboration across regions will be required to create collectively a more resilient statewide economy that brings equal opportunities to every region. Awardees will be required to participate in Communities of Practice meetings. These convening’s will ensure progress, share best practices and lessons learned across the regions, and provide technical assistance by the State.
Communities of Practice. To Directly Impact Teaching/Learning in the Classroom Implementing best practices Exploring new strategies Engaging in action research To Grow Our Expertise Improving our content knowledge Exploring/trying new teaching strategies Assessing our practices Reflecting/refining our teaching skills To Continually Support Our Self-Efficacy Sharing our successes Providing opportunities for leadership Developing ourselves as critical thinkers – smarter workers Interdependence Being accountable and supportive to one another
Communities of Practice. Communities of practice provide a second framework for considering the social nature of identity, which is closely tied to that of figured worlds. As cultural models, both figured worlds and communities of practice provide dense, rich and reliable descriptions of cultural norms. Cognitive anthropologists have defined cultural norms as “knowledge, shared by people in a culture, which gives rise to patterns of behavior,” (Xxxxxxxx, 2003, pp. 518). Otherwise stated, senses of self or co-articulated identities mediate behavior (Xxxxxxx et al., 2001). In both figured worlds and communities of practice, “identifying with the community is part of adopting and identity,” (Holland et al., 2001, p.81). Individuals learn the storylines of the communities to which they belong and begin to tell similar stories. These cultural models for understanding communities are particularly useful in that they provide an additional explanatory tool to the researcher without excluding traditional terms including prestige, power, and solidarity. On the contrary, cultural models localize understandings of traditional explanatory terms, which makes them more significant to the particular participants in a study and by way of this renders these explanations richer, thicker, and more nuanced (Xxxxxxxx, 2003). Identities as an expression of membership in communities of practice. One of such cultural models, communities of practice, was first introduced by Lave and Wenger in 1991. Communities of practice research has focused chiefly on situated learning. Scholars who use this model conceive of “learning as simultaneously a form of association (situation), an act of recruitment and a (re)constitution of the basis for communities,” (Holland et al., 2001, p.57). In this model, identities are seen as important outcomes of participation in communities of practice, which Holland et al. (2001) have deemed analogous to the participatory formation of identities in activities organized by figured worlds. XxXxxxxxx-Xxxxx (2003) argues that social identities, including gender identities, chiefly arise through the expression of memberships in communities of practice. “A community of practice is an aggregate of people who come together around mutual engagement in an endeavor [an activity]. Ways of doing things, ways of talking, beliefs, values, power relations – in short practices emerge in the course of this mutual endeavor,” (Xxxxxx & XxXxxxxxx-Xxxxx, 1992, p. 464). Studying communities of practice a...
Communities of Practice. Further, as we consider the plurality of identities, we may also consider individuals as members of multiple communities. XxXxxxxxx suggests we “investigate how people manage memberships in different communities or different (perhaps hierarchical) positionalities within communities of practice, and how communities of practice are linked with other communities of practice,” (2003, p. 30). In considering these multimemberships, we begin to see that we have more clearly articulated senses of selves, more clearly articulated subjectivities, in certain communities than we do in others. We may be more or less cognizant of different fractals of our identities and have more or less clear ideas of ourselves as different types of participants in different social worlds. We may be highly aware of ourselves as types of actors in particular social worlds or we may have no clear idea of a self to avoid or to realize in a given social world. We may differ in the degree to which we explicitly attribute labels to ourselves and to others. We may avoid or circumscribe certain identity labels or we may consciously use labels as a source of prestige or pejoratively as symbols of disrespect (Holland et al., 2001).
Communities of Practice. Learning, Meaning and Identity, Cambridge University Press. Xxxx, A., Xx., (2002)
Communities of Practice. The concept of Communities of Practice (CoPs) was originally developed for business environments, but in recent years the concepts are used to analyse inter-organisational collaborations and extended peer communities in policy processes in general (Wenger, 2000). CoPs can be understood as social forms to manage and generate knowledge. The results of social learning processes are preserved in a CoP, in its shared roles and practices that constitute social capital that goes beyond individual knowledge and skills. In terms of the analytical approach, CoPs can be understood as a new focus on diverse actor networks in the way they manage and generate knowledge. The role of CoPs in knowledge generation and management in organizations and business networks has found widespread attention. PSI-connect will build on this experience to investigate in which policy contexts and how CoPs can also be used to build and sustain social networks at the science-policy interface to create, share and apply knowledge to develop and implement policies supporting sustainable development. This is of particular interest in the adaptive management of dynamic and complex river basins where different sources of knowledge and a continuous process of learning from experience and new insights are or rather should be at the core of management practices. The problem of climate change poses particular challenges for dealing with major uncertainties and very different framings of the problems to be addressed and the long-term strategies to be developed. A proper response may require a fundamental transformation on water management practices and a policy environment that supports a different way how to deal with uncertainties and new ways of sharing risks.
Communities of Practice. The importance of recognising the influence of the context of TL use and of the communities of practice in which this is embedded, was highlighted in the introduction to this chapter. The notion and definition of communities of practice have been a subject of discussion for well over two decades. The origin of communities of practice (Lave and Wenger, 1991) lie ostensibly in the desire to find ‘a language for talking about learning as a human experience, the experience of people as social beings.’ Xxxxx also asserts that learning is a historically and culturally contingent social process as opposed to solely an individual endeavour. Learning is defined as a process of belonging, participating and communicating, which all work ultimately to build a community (Sfard, 1998, p.7), ‘of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly’ (X. Xxxxxx-Xxxxxxx and X. Xxxxxx-Xxxxxxx, 2015, p.1). Three characteristics in combination are central to CoPs these being the domain, the practice and the community. Communities of practice in the form of subject departments, in particular, are highly influential in shaping teacher beliefs and practices. The identity of the domain is defined by membership to a group sharing an interest. The membership implies both commitment to the domain of interest as well as an identity – to which I will turn in the next section more explicitly. Practice concerns engaging in regular interactions with other members of the group in particular ways to solve problems and share repertoires of practice. Regularity and the building of shared repertoires requires time, and the sustained repetition of particular routines requires collaboration and commitment. Finally, there is community itself, central to which are trust and members feeling that they belong. Trust is fostered by helping other members of the CoP, working collaboratively, and with empathy to nurture positive relationships that allow for shared learning. It is worth noting that the principles of a CoP can be useful for classrooms, even though they may not offer examples of all the elements detailed above (Nagao, 2018). The overarching principles of the CoP, as characterised above, concern participation and an ongoing sense of belonging and autonomy for the process of learning. Of course, none of this happens in a vacuum. As outlined in previous sections, there are documented constraints that teachers have to negotiate a...
Communities of Practice. To Directly Impact Teaching/Learning in the Classroom Implementing best practices Exploring new strategies Engaging in action research To Grow Our Expertise Improving our content knowledge Exploring/trying new teaching strategies Assessing our practices Reflecting/refining our teaching skills To Continually Support Our Self-Efficacy Sharing our successes Providing opportunities for leadership Developing ourselves as critical thinkers – smarter workers Interdependence Being accountable and supportive to one another Creating a safe environment for working together Appendix F Performance Evaluation Cedar Springs Public Schools
Communities of Practice
