Communities of Play: Learning Together to Improve and Scale Playful Learning

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

Communities of practice (CoPs) serve as a powerful avenue for knowledge exchange, peer-to-peer learning, and collective action. Coined in 1991 by learning scientists, Etienne Wenger and Jean Lave, the concept of CoPs takes its origin in situated learning theory, in which learning is considered a product of the culture and context in which it was produced. Importantly, learning is shaped through the experience of participation in a community, including its members, its facilitation and structure, and its mission. Defined as “groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly” (Wenger, 2011), CoPs rely on a member base bridged by a joint sense of purpose whose regular interactions result in knowledge production rooted in experience.
To this end, Lave & Wenger (1998) name three essential ingredients for CoPs: mutual engagement, shared repertoire, and joint enterprise. Mutual engagement refers to the interaction between individuals that leads to the creation of meaning, shared repertoire to jargons or language used by members to negotiate that meaning, and joint enterprise to how members collaborate to work towards a common goal. Pursuing these ingredients through varying participation models and facilitation styles is crucial to cultivating the community necessary for meaningful learning.

While CoPs are an age-old concept, there is limited understanding of how we evaluate the influence and effectiveness of these communities. Reflecting on value creation via CoPs, Wenger et al. (1999) propose a conceptual framework helpful for creating and assessing value, which ranges from immediate value (activities/interactions) to potential value (knowledge capital) to applied value (changes in practice), and finally realized value (performance improvement). These cycles of value creation offer a roadmap to practitioners both participating and facilitating CoPs.

This panel will feature the experiences of four different cross-organizational CoPs, delving into the successes, challenges, and lessons learned during several years of implementation. Each presentation covers a community that spans geographies with participants joining from Bhutan, Rwanda, Vietnam, Kenya, and more. Participants of each community are bound together through common programmatic objectives, implementing programs in sectors ranging from pre-primary education, early childhood education (ECE), and responsive stimulation. Scale up of learning through play (LtP) represents a throughline across the communities presented on this panel, with presenters offering reflections on serving as a learning partner to organizations supporting integration of programming grounded in LtP in education, health, and social protection systems.

Presentations will discuss the evolution of a particular learning community, with attention to the insights informing community adaptations. With data from ongoing feedback loops with community members via surveys, interviews, and meetings, as well as structured reflections with participating organizations, each community offers a nuanced examination of how CoPs mature as time goes on and participant needs and interests develop.

The pandemic played a considerable role in the development of some of the communities included in this panel, with in-person meetings put off well into implementation and virtual modalities of engagement providing the only means of participation for community members. COVID-19 also impacted the programming supported by organizations participating in these communities, introducing delays to work plans and realignment of national priorities, influencing the nature of learning discussions held during meetings. Thus, presentations will offer reflections on the constraints of the pandemic in building community and driving technical discussions. The panel will also touch on broader applications of these lessons for CoPs held across diverse geographies and time zones. From exploring different online platforms for asynchronous engagement to promoting equitable participation across community members to identifying common approaches to challenges across vastly different country contexts, the four CoPs presented in this panel cover a range of approaches to building effective CoPs.

The first presentation will explore how perceptions of participation in a playful parenting CoP differs between virtual and in-person modalities. The second presentation will discuss refinements to synchronous and asynchronous collaboration across four years of implementing a primary education CoP. The third presentation will explore the extent of knowledge building and collaboration taking place following the first year of implementation of a primary education CoP. And the fourth and final presentation will examine the use of a coordinated learning agenda in an early childhood education (ECE) CoP to drive learning within the community and share that learning more widely.

The presentations will converge in a discussion on best practices on launching and fostering CoPs to create value for individual and organizational members through specific activities, increasing knowledge capital, changes in practice, and more. The creation of this value at the community level is discussed in relation to the broader education and ECD fields as presenters reflect on the potential of cross-organizational and cross-country CoPs to propel learning and evidence utilization across multiple levels of the system.

Sub Unit

• General Pool

Chair

• Tanya Smith-Sreen, FHI 360

Individual Presentations

• Dimensions of Participation in a Playful Parenting Community of Practice - Tanya Smith-Sreen, FHI 360; Carina Omoeva, FHI 360

• What does (and doesn’t) work for engaging multi-country partners in virtual, collaborative workspaces: Lessons learned from the Play Accelerator CoP - Jonathan Stern, RTI International; Rachel G Jordan, RTI International

• Supporting Voice in Diverse Playful Learning Communities of Practice - Megan Silander, Center for Children and Technology, Education Development Center; Daniel Light, DRL Research Consulting

• More than the sum of its parts (and beyond its parts): Consolidating lessons to influence the ECE community via a COP - Lucy Rimmington, Innovations for Poverty Action

Discussant

• jill popp, LEGO Foundation