The power of (online) communities of practice


I have just come across this blog post What’s next for faculty development? by Alexandra Mihai and it has strongly resonated with the journey we have gone through over the last few months: from offering webinars and training sessions on using Blackboard and other tools for remote teaching and learning, curating resources and finally creating guidelines / rubrics for lecturers to benchmark their online courses and organising good practice sharing sessions. 


Image by Tim Marshall from www.unsplash.com 

What caught my attention though is her suggestion around the importance of informal communities of practice to support academics in times of crisis. One of my roles as academic staff developer has been to create networks across the institution of colleagues with a passion for eLearning. We call these our eLearning champions and we have written before about their shared characteristics, what we called an eLearning mindset, very closely related to the design thinking mindset.

When lockdown happened this network moved online - using a WhatsApp group to keep us connected. I set this group up in early April when we all were frantically trying to understand what was happening and communication was scarce and confusing. I invited some of the eLearning champions I have been working with over the years and the exchange has been amazing. It became such a rich conversation that we actually wrote a reflective piece on our engagements, which is currently under review for IJAD, as part of a special issue on informal faculty conversations. 

The paper has been interesting to write, engaging again with the literature around (virtual) communities of practice but also exploring new concepts such as third places and third spaces. Third places are places between home and professional lives, allowing for boundary-crossing conversations that create connections to feed and support both the professional and personal lives of participants. It also creates something new, a third space, one “we inhabit when we cannot continue with our usual ways of working, living and being, neither can we move to new ways as they do not yet exist” (Bhabha, 1994, as quoted in Hulme et al, 2009). This third space is one of innovation and creativity, but also of discomfort, challenging us to re-evaluate existing practices. As eLearning champions we are used to challenging ourselves and maybe even strive in uncertainty. What this group has maybe most importantly done, is to provide a space to share strategies on how to position ourselves in our departments, how to support change and innovation in spaces that are traditionally not as open to risk-taking and experimentation. 

Finally, we looked at the relationship of communities of practice (CoPs) and academic staff development. Can CoPs, which are characterised by their authenticity and organic growth, self-organising nature, be initiated/facilitated by an academic staff developer? What is the role of the academic staff developer here? We suggest in the paper that academic staff developers could be seen as community activists and organisers. Using their ability to work across departments and faculties to identify and connect like-minded individuals and as such open up spaces of innovation and creativity across the institution. What was surprising was how quickly trust built up or was maybe even proactively assumed in our WhatsApp group. CoPs often take time to work efficiently as this trust has to build up first. The established relationship that I had with each of the members in the group might have helped in accelerating the establishment of trust demonstrated in this group. Or maybe it was the feeling of relief that these are finally people who share the ways you think, feel, do ....

This paper was a reflection on the role of one WhatsApp group established during lockdown. We are all part of a number of these groups, some that existed before and some that were created specifically during the crisis. These groups have been a lifesaver for me. They kept me connected, allowed me to vent, but also find support by listening to the shared experiences of my friends and colleagues across the world. It would be interesting to explore the role of these third places and spaces, using low-tech technology such as WhatsApp, in supporting higher education weathering COVID-19 and other crises.
References:
Hulme, R., Cracknell, D., & Owens, A. (2009). Learning in third spaces: developing trans‐professional understanding through practitioner enquiry. Educational Action Research, 17(4), 537-550.

Comments

  1. I think those supporting academics can create enabling conditions for some COPs, but I think the most powerful ones are those that academics co-create for themselves within departments to support each other, sometimes even at the same departments at different universities. I've seen that happen with lecturers at my institution which I think is really great. Often those proving support and professional development opportunities don't have the contextual and disciplinary background and you have to work at becoming familiar with these. I think sometimes more discipline specific conversations can emerge whereas support folks mostly have to do generic stuff. We started facilitating departmental sessions and sometimes this is a space to encourage people to take particular conversations further on their own. I'm thinking about Baran and Correia's framework (2014) and how it was used in this recent article by Redstone and Luo (2021) https://edtechbooks.org/jaid_10_2/exploring_faculty_pe Supporting professional development needs a community layer, I don't feel as someone supporting academics that I need to be part of all their communities - I am CoPs I am part of which is made up of people doing similar work supporting academics from different institutions. I think CoPs can happen at each of those layers in B & C's framework. For example, there is a group at my university looking at how good teaching is rewarded at the university and how this can be recognised more and improved. Maybe it's about a broader landscape of practice (Wenger-Trayner et al., 2014) which is made up of CoPs with a broader shared goal?

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    1. Sorry I meant same departments across different universities ~ Nicola

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