Cultivating community & shifting practice: experiences from five communities of practice

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 five different CoPs, delving into approaches to community building and participation leveraged over the last few years of implementation. The communities included span geographies, working with education and early childhood development professionals in countries from Bhutan to Kenya to Brazil to Rwanda. Each community has grappled with distinct challenges and highlights specific successes around hosting and managing CoPs, and ultimately creating the value so crucial to an effective CoP.

While all the communities in the panel offer common experiences around what it takes to foster community, differences in the CoP design influence the ways in which members can be engaged and the knowledge produced. The CoPs included in this panel range in size from small communities working with a targeted group of organizations (30+ participants) to large open-access communities (1500+ actively engaged participants). Each community has also tested a range of modalities, from regular virtual meetings (e.g.: monthly) to more infrequent in-person meetings (e.g.: annually) to participation in online discussion boards to leveraging existing social media platforms, such as WhatsApp, to reach members.

These diverse forms of participation have facilitated avenues for active engagement by community members, prompting additional resource sharing and discussions and increased motivation to continue participating. However, they come associated with challenges, such as engaging members across time zones, as well as encouraging continued use of community platforms. For some of the CoPs in this panel, in-person meetings were limited due to the pandemic, affecting the sense of belonging and connectedness members reported. Modality thus represents an important theme across presentations.
Connecting CoP members to existing or emerging evidence in the sector also represents a throughline across the presentations. Each community in the panel offers members opportunities to learn from each other, but also from leading experts in topics such as educational technology, artificial intelligence (AI), responsive stimulation, and learning through play. In this way community members are equipped with the tools and knowledge to infuse their practice with “what works”. This has manifested through specific programmatic adaptations in response to evidence, such as changes to workforce training, as well as community development of external resources, such as a framework of best practices for tech-enabled skilling.

The first presentation will look at how participation and learning in an implementation research-driven CoP evolved across five years, and how that learning will continue following the project closeout. The second presentation will explore how the community was iterated across the life of project (since 2021) based on shifting member needs and evaluation results. The third will discuss how a more recently established community, established in 2022, has rapidly expanded to connect 840+ education-focused NGOs to one another and to evidence-based practices that foster employability skills. The fourth presentation shares experiences around mobilizing EdTech ecosystem actors in East Africa to collaborate more effectively and produce joint resources. Finally, the fifth presentation will discuss a diffused CoP model supporting teachers to grow their skills in implementing tech-enabled learning through play in the classroom. The panel will begin with presentations, which offer insights into each CoP design, as well as major successes and challenges, before transitioning into a discussion during which each panelist will contribute reflections on what worked and what did not for community participation and learning in their respective community of practice.

Sub Unit

• General Pool

Chair

• Jennifer Cotter Otieno, Education Design Unlimited

Individual Presentations

• Iterating a CoP to adapt to program and member needs - Wendy Martin, EDC

• Getting Past Isolation: A Global Community of Practice - Jody Britten, JodyBritten.com

• Mobilizing CoPs to Improve EdTech Interventions through Collective Action - Jennifer Cotter Otieno, Education Design Unlimited