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Community of Practice

For knowledge to be consumed by an organization, then social learning, and organizational learning, depend greatly on communities of practice to be in place for the learners. Wenger (1998) defined a community of practice as an integrated interpersonal relationship, supporting opportunities to have shared practice, fostering sustained mutual engagements, developing mutually defined identities, and enabling ways of ensuring shared learning. In informing any community of practice, organizations will have to ensure that they accommodate considerations such as the need to: (a) foster social practice, (b) develop social communities, (c) facilitate active participation, and (d) build a sense of identity. Organizational learning is directly linked to knowledge management, knowledge sharing, and by extension, communities of practice.

 

Undoubtedly, a community of practice can provide relevant interaction and engagement within institutions. It will provide the provision for you to work collectively together within the boundaries of your study. The following is a list of some of the interactions that can lead to implementing a community of practice:

 

  • Foster social practice

  • Develop social communities

  • Facilitate active participation

  • Build a sense of identity

  • A fundamental element of learning

  • Capability for sustaining learning

Image by Brooke Cagle
Image by Brooke Cagle

Connecting Together

Anytime, Anywhere

The collaborative research by John-Steiner & Mahn (1996) has interesting promise and application within any environment as it relates to implementing a community of practice. Learning is a collaborative effort, and having a framework and model to leverage will prevent any research practitioner from attempting to explain or create something from scratch. The frameworks appear to be durable enough to be brought into any ecosystem as a way of examining the type of collaboration that would be needed as part of the community of practice and other related innovative learning activities. What is more, culture is an important characteristic that would need to be brought into consideration given the distribution and composition of our team. 

 

The real gem here is knowing that as research practitioners, we need to understand the cognitive boundaries and behaviors of our learners as we think about how they would be working in a community of practice. The personality, dispositions, and learning styles of individuals can certainly determine the success or failure of our efforts. Thus, we must be mindful of our participants and adjust our interaction levels with them to accommodate the learning and development process.

Image by kylie De Guia

Particularly in communities of practice, which opened the door for the author to address some of the perceived barriers being faced in their environment. While reading the dissertation, I was drawn to the reference of Dr. Morgan using the collaborative apprenticeship model as a relevant apprenticeship framework to blend into the community of practice, thus providing a more robust experience and explanation for the intended intervention. Moreover, the study could tap into the collaborative model, which allowed for innovation around BYOT in dealing with the perceived barriers.

 

Integrating the foundational principles from Wenger's (1998) communities of practice will make a difference in any scholarly practice or environment. There is certainly value in thinking about learning architecture and its different components from it. One quote that resonates is, "a learning architecture combines infrastructures of engagement, imagination, and alignment in support of learning communities" (Wenger, 1998, p. 250). This provides the gateway to conceptualizing ways in which to better integrate the communities of practices into the frameworks that can bring about changes in organizations. While starting up a community of practice might add some value, there are some levels of concern. For example, one might have concerns about running and managing such a community within a global team with 90%+ of the team members living outside the US and in a different time zone. Balancing the expectations and engagement will certainly be challenging.

Community of Practice can benefit any size and type of organization. It is not about what the community will be doing but also how it will execute against the specific mandates of the different community members. It is important for communities to stay focused on what matters and dismiss anything that becomes a quick distraction. (a) Community of practice (CoP) knowledge evolved. (b) Projection of their identifies, having shared common views (c) Problem-solving together, being more relevant to people's context. (d) Sometimes you are being forced within a group, and one person sometimes takes the lead. However, CoP is more of a collaborative approach for developing a connection. (e) Shared vocabulary, and having a shared language CoP evolves, and different members will contribute from a knowledge perspective. Communities of practice will continue to evolve. (f) Intentionally creating opportunities for students to build stronger relationships. People are connected through social media platforms which is a form of community of practice. (g) As social beings, we need the connection and interact with each other. (h) Communities have to be authentic to allow that shared identity. (i) A coP is a collective identity instead of an individual identity. For example, grouping leaders together to have a higher level of engagement. Furthermore, a community of practice also can foster internal accountability. (j) The differences between whether someone drops out or stays in a program. It is about engagement and the ability to make a change. People will not invest their time if the outcome is not clear. Develop different perspectives, scopes, or lenses as doctoral students. Negotiate meanings and construct our identities. Developing our best practices and engaging in lessons learned through collaboration. Our community of practice should entail team members that will both support, and whenever necessary challenge our assumptions and presuppositions of the situation. We are constantly reminded of "the notion of legitimate peripheral participation, in which the primary motivation for learning involves participating in authentic activities that move one towards becoming more central to a community of practice" (Wenger, 1998, p.173). Most importantly, Lemke (2000) remarks that “It takes a village to study a village" (p. 288), which resonates well with the community of practice framework. What is more, this mindset should be something that I think about from a collaboration standpoint around the integration of the end-user experiences into the intervention to address the problem of practice. Additionally, as it relates to the intervention, this must be embedded within the structure of timescales. There is an understanding that in order to support the various changes, they have to be properly scoped and planned within the scale of time. It should be noted that part of engaging with the constituencies is knowing about their shared experiences over time. At the end of the day, we are bound by time, and the experience assessment might not be perfect due to limitations. In fact, "it is not easy to study lives over the timescale of decades and lifetimes" (Lemke, 2000, p. 286), and many of us only have months or years to complete a given job. Indeed, experiences are built from previous ones. Thus, as I think about the application to my workplace setting, there is a desire to ensure that everyone is on the same page in relation to engaging in incremental improvements that are built on the existing ones rather than ripping out and replacing them. In sum, developing the skills to influence change, along with tapping into the community of practice. Hence why, Wenger (1998) states that “Because a community of practice is a system of interrelated forms of participation, discontinuities propagate through it. When newcomers join a community of practice, generational discontinuities spread through multiple levels; relations shift in a cascading process. Relative newcomers become relative old-timers” (p. 90). References Barab, S. A. & Plucker, J. A. (2002). Smart people or smart contexts? Cognition, ability, and talent development in an age of situated approaches to knowing and learning, Educational Psychologist, 37:3, 165-182, DOI: 10.1207/ S15326985EP3703_3 John-Steiner, V., & Mahn, H. (1996). Sociocultural approaches to learning and development: A Vygotskian framework. Educational Psychologist, 31, 191-206. Lemke, J. L. (2000). Across the scales of time: Artifacts, activities, and meaning in eco-social systems. Mind, Culture, and Activity, 7(4), 273-290. Morgan. (2019). iEngage, iEducate, and iEmpower. In Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling (Vol. 53, Issue 9). https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107415324.004 Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice: Learning, meaning, and identity. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

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