Activity 1; Week 25

Activity 1; Week 25

Critically Define Practice;

Over the course of my lifetime I have belonged to many communities of practice with various family and community members eg. learning to cook, book club, yoga, university, teacher training, work etc. When learning about a community of practice and what it essentially is, I am humbled to realise that mindlab itself is a really great example of Wenger’s (2000) three distinct elements of; joint enterprise, mutual engagement and shared repertoire. These can also be referred to as the domain, the community and the practice (Wenger & Wenger-Trayner, 2015).

Mindlab has naturally permitted these three pathways and it has been interesting reflecting on how it has achieved this. Cambridge, Kaplan, and Suter (2005) suggest that communities of practice provide an environment for people to connect, interact, build and extend the shared resources within shared learning goals. Mindlab has been a platform for this to occur and on reflection, it has done this rather successfully.

They believe that to ultimately facilitate change and to activate progress it requires teachers and students to learn the tools, gain the knowledge and to be given the power to be bold, innovative, curious and flexible. Essentially, this is the shared domain of interest people who signed up for the course share. This can be referred to as the domain; A community of practice is not merely a club of friends or a network of connections between people, it has an identity defined by a shared domain of interest (Wenger & Wenger-Trayner, 2015). Groups such as these value their collective competence and learn from each other, even though few people outside the group may value or even recognize their expertise. This rings particularly true for myself and I believe for my colleagues also engaging in this course. In sharing our thoughts, ideas and assignments, we have both taught and learnt from each other, unbeknownst to most of the rest of the staff.

The Mindlab course has also encouraged Wenger’s (2000) element of mutual engagement, also known as the community: In pursuing their interest in their domain, members engage in joint activities and discussions, help each other, and share information (Wenger & Wenger-Trayner, 2015). They build relationships that enable them to learn from each other, they care about their standing with each other, but members of a community of practice do not necessarily work together daily. For example, our mindlab team at school often seek each other out at morning teas, during duty and before and after school to discuss (or moan) about the various elements of mindlab, debate relevant readings or just support each other through the pressures brought about by the monthly assignments. This has not been limited to just our staff alone, but has opened up pathways between schools, chatting informally during professional development sessions or the supermarket. In fact, one staff member from another school asked me to come and take a ‘seesaw’ session for her team.

Finally, Mindlab allows the opportunity to engage in ‘the practice’ or the ‘shared repertoire.’ Members of a community of practice are practitioners. They develop a shared repertoire of resources: experiences, stories, tools, ways of addressing recurring problems—in short a shared practice (Wenger & Wenger-Trayner, 2015). This has been achieved by mindlab by initiating the google+ community and introducing us to other various platforms for knowledge sharing. These assignments alone are an example of this element in the fact that we are asked to summarise our own thoughts and ideas about our practice and be brave enough to share these with others.

To summarise, being an active member of mindlab has engaged me in a community of practice that I am proud to be a part of, whether I realised that or not.

References;

Jurasaite-Harbison, E., & Rex, L. (2010). School Cultures as Contexts for Informal Teacher Learning. Teaching and Teacher Education, 26(2), 267-277.

Wenger, E.(2000). Communities of practice and social learning systems. Organization,7(2), 225-246.

Wenger, E., McDermott, R., & Snyder, W. (2002). Cultivating Communities of Practice: A Guide to Managing Knowledge. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School Press.

Wenger, E., & Wenger-Trayner, B. (2015). Introduction to Communities of Practice. A Brief Overview of the Concept and its Uses. Online: http://wenger-trayner. com/introduction-to-communitiesof-practice.