Community of Practice as a Form of Voluntary Academic Cooperation

Journal of Workplace …, 2008

Purpose – The notion of communities of practice (CoP) has received great attention in educational and organisational practice and research. Although the concept originally refers to collaborative practices that emerge naturally, educational and HRD practitioners are increasingly searching for ways to create these practices intentionally in order to stimulate learning and professional development in specific fields. This paper aims to gain insight into ways in which communities of practice can be deliberately organised. Design/methodology/approach – The study concerns a multiple case study of the deliberate initiation of 15 communities of practice of small and medium-sized companies in the tourist sector, located in seven European countries. The analysis focuses on how meaningful, shared and coordinative activity is organised in each of the 15 cases. A multiple case study allowed for comparison between the various cases in order to target fruitful conditions and actions in organisation processes. Findings – In the initiation of a CoP it is important that before an outsider starts to organise and coordinate activities questions such as “How are we relevant to one another?” and “Who are we and where are we going?” are answered first, and by the group itself. These questions relate to the development of meaningful activity (domain) and of shared activity (community). Following this, any coordinative system, any practice, should be subordinated to the motives of the group. Originality/value – Besides identifying various actions for human resource developers who aim to apply the concept of CoP in professional work, the study contributes to the scientific formulation of pedagogical notions around communities of practice.

Collected Essays on Learning and Teaching, 2012

Computer Science and Information Systems, 2012

According to some literature, communities of practice should normally stem from a voluntary initiative within an organization, whose members share some knowledge or expertise they wish to improve. However, over time, we have seen that communities tend to be created within organizations, in order to attain objectives of learning and knowledge development. This represents a challenge in the context of a community of practice taking the form of a research network in partnership that brings together members with common interests certainly, but spread out in different organizations and even several countries in which they perform different types of work. Also, the community does not exist in a vacuum and the explanation for what happens within it does not lie solely within the way the group interacts; indeed the individuals are part of different organizations and thus have different priorities, in relation with these affiliations. In this context, our research objective was to determine the factors that facilitate or hinder cooperation within a community of practice composed by two groups of actors, community and university actors. We thus found that individuals' different work affiliations might not facilitate the work within the CoP and that ICT/web 2.0 tools are not always a solution to increase participation in a CoP. Although participants are somewhat familiar with the tools, they mostly seem content with receiving and accessing information, not searching for a more active participation. Some explications and solutions will be proposed.

Revista Folios, 2017

Este artículo tiene por objeto explicar cómo se puede construir una comunidad académica a partir de laenseñanza y la investigación. Para dicho fin, se explica, en primera instancia, qué se entiende por comunidadacadémica; posteriormente, se describe cómo –con base en el trabajo cooperativo– la enseñanza reflexivay el fomento de la autonomía del docente, los profesores pueden contribuir a la construcción de comunidadacadémica. Asimismo, se explica cómo los estudiantes pueden tomar un papel más activo en la formación deesta comunidad mediante el fomento del pensamiento crítico, la autonomía del aprendiz y la implementacióndel currículo como investigación (curriculum as inquiry). Por último, se explica cuáles serían algunas de lastareas de esta comunidad y su impacto en las instituciones y en el campo de la enseñanza de idiomas.

2010

Institutions of higher education (HE), public and private, are moving through a crisis period of tapped‐out states, funding cuts, tuition increases and layoffs. It makes good sense to rise to meet these new realities with new ways of doing things, and the places that succeed will be the ones that do. A holistic approach is necessary whereby excellence in teaching and learning as well as research should be the ultimate aim. Among the various ways to achieve this, is the promotion of communities of practices (CoPs) among the academics.

Proceedings of the …, 2008

Proceedings of the HERDSA 2008 …, 2008

ICERI2023 Proceedings, 2023

The University of Trento Teaching and Learning Centre (called FormID) promotes educational leadership and strategic initiatives that consolidate the processes of teaching, learning and assessment continuous enhancement [1] by supporting the professional development of academics, with the ultimate goal of promoting student success [2]. FormID offers both formal and non-formal initiatives [3] tailored to individual needs, such as consultancies with an academic developer or Communities of Practice-CoPs [4], as formative environments useful for disseminating innovative teaching, learning and assessment practices and collective reflection on the continuous improvement [5, 6]. This contribution aims to present the results of a research study carried out to assess the impact of CoPs and eventually improve their role for academics. For this purpose, one of the Community Assessment Toolkit (CAT) was used, in particular, the questionnaire addressed to members [7]. Furthermore, the data collected were triangulated with observation conducted by an external member in each community and an interview with the CoP facilitators.

The concept of "communities of practice" is of relatively recent date. The concept gained momentum with Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger's book from 1991, Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. Since then, the notion of ‘communities of practice’ has been a focus of attention, not least in debates about learning, teaching and education, but also in debates about organizational theory, knowledge management and work-life studies. The latter development accelerated with Wenger's later book Communities of Practice (Wenger, 1998), but also picked up fuel from neighboring texts by – amongst others - Paul Duguid & John Seely Brown (Brown & Duguid 1991) and Julian Orr (Orr, 1996). The concept of communities of practice offers a dynamic and non-individualistic framing of learning as a social and situated activity oriented towards participation in social practice. From this also springs a number of interesting observations about human agency, cooperation, organization and communities.

International Journal of Advanced Research

Clarifying one"s own development as a teacher within educational institutions can be a complicated journey of self-discovery, but the good news is that this does not need to be a solitary pursuit. Within higher educational institutions, communities of practice have consistently formed to allow for the transition of novice instructors toward more enlightened ones. How this process occurs, how it is defined, and the implications of such practice are the focus of this paper. By examining these aspects, one can perhaps find a more solid footing upon which to continue upon the path of professional development within such institutions. The author will show his own journey of discovery via early graduate school events, culminating in a pathway toward yearly academic publishing requirements. The author ends with some helpful suggestions for improving one"s development in this area.

2017

Communities of practice (CoP) are rich learning spaces that support knowledge creation, social engagement and practice improvement. In some university settings, there is a buoyant interest in creating and supporting interdisciplinary knowledge and practice. The purpose of the study was to apply an action research approach to explore the emergence of interdisciplinary communities of practice in a university context and to reflect on the practice of convening a CoP. How do communities of practice emerge and what approaches and practices nourish these groups? The authors of this study share a reflection on their role as convenors of CoP and on their work facilitating the emergence of these interdisciplinary groups.

Journal of Research and Innovation for Sustainable Society

A community of practice is a group of people who share a concern, a set of problems or a passion about a common topic, a passion for a professional or personal activity. Universities may be regarded as professional communities in which joint activities are carried out, with well-defined structures. Using networks at university level increases joint assembly of ideas held by each individual, while the exchange of ideas and practices inevitably may lead to the system enrichment, producing effectively loops of innovation and development.

Fiabilitate şi Durabilitate, 2017

A communities of practice is a group of people who share a concern, a set of problems or a passion about a common topic, a passion for a professional or personal activity. Universities may be regarded as professional communities in which joint activities are carried out, with well-defined structures. Using networks at university level increases joint assembly of ideas held by each individual, while the exchange of ideas and practices inevitably may lead to the system enrichment, producing effectively loops of innovation and development.

2019

Communities of Practice have existed for as long as people have been learning and sharing their experiences. However, it was not until the early 1990's before the study of these communities gained attention from the research community. Since then, these communities have been studied in many research domains, yet, the core structural elements, which are critical to these communities remain constant-Domain, Community and Practice. In this paper we reexamine the structural elements of Communities of Practice and argue for the extension of these to include aspects on Participation, Learning and Knowledge. We also take a first step in validating these new structural elements by presenting a study that explores how they appear in a known Communities of Practice (the CoderDojo movement). Our research informs the future study of COP from both a theoretical and organizational perspective.

After a short historical review of the development of the concept of "Communities of Practice" (CoP) we present examples of organisational Knowledge Management (KM) in which Etienne Wenger's CoP model has been applied. In the main part we focus on the business orientated CoP framework that Wenger, Snyder and McDermott proposed in 2002 for KM by extending the original approach of 1998. Finally we conclude with a critical reflection over the necessity - within KM frameworks - to explicitly emphasize participation in stewarding knowledge as a condition for bridging the gap between knowledge and its management.