Communities of Practice

Abstract

My career-long interest as a researcher has been in school literacy learning of students of diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds, particularly students of Native Hawaiian ancestry. The question I have been addressing recently, which drew me to research on teacher education, is how to develop a system that nurtures successful teachers of literacy in diverse, low-income communities. I consider my work a form of participatory action research, although my thinking has been influenced more by constructivist/interpretivist perspective than critical/historical perspective. I began this work about 6 years ago, by thinking about how teacher education might fit within context of Hawaiian community on Wai'anae or Leeward Coast of island of O'ahu. A sense of place has been central to my research because my primary interest is in trying to improve schooling in a single community, not in discovering broad generalizations applicable to teacher education in general. Nevertheless, I have been surprised by range of research questions that have become salient to me within this one setting. The Leeward Coast is only a 45-minute drive from downtown Honolulu, yet it is a world away. This rural community has all problems of low-income areas throughout United States: high rates of welfare, unemployment, crime, and drug abuse. Its seven elementary schools enroll about 5,000 students, nearly 60% of them Hawaiians. Students in these schools typically score at bottom three stanines on standardized tests of reading achievement. Fewer than 10% of teachers on Leeward Coast are of Hawaiian ancestry. Many teachers live outside community, and they usually transfer to schools in more affluent areas once they have received tenure. I thought that one solution to problem of teacher turnover would be to develop a teacher education initiative to prepare residents of Leeward Coast, especially Hawaiians, to become teachers. This initiative would differ from conventional teacher education efforts in two ways. First, goal would be specifically to prepare teachers to meet challenges of diversity found on Leeward Coast. The initiative would not take generic or universal approach of preparing teachers to work effectively in a broad range of settings, because in practice this approach chiefly prepares teachers to teach in middle-class, mainstream settings. Second, given this specific focus, initiative would build on resources in community. These were ideas behind what is now known as Ka Lama Teacher Education Initiative (or Ka Lama, for short). This project involves many partner organizations, principally College of Education at University of Hawai'i, and is coordinated by a nonprofit Hawaiian educational services organization, Institute for Native Pacific Education and Culture (INPEACE). Although I had worked on Leeward Coast for more than 15 years before starting this work in teacher education, I had always focused my attention on schools and not on broader community. As a non-Hawaiian outsider, I was fortunate to receive guidance of Hawaiian colleagues who lived on Leeward Coast. TWO PERSPECTIVES ON COMMUNITY As I began to conduct research on Ka Lama, I came to understand term community from two different perspectives. The first perspective was outlined by John McKnight (1995) in his book The Careless Society: Community and Its Counterfeits. McKnight defined community as site for relationships among citizens. These relationships lead to care, which McKnight defined as the consenting commitment of citizens to one another (p. x). Society has become careless in sense that citizens now doubt their own capacity to care and have come to believe that responsibility for care is best turned over to social service institutions. …