Different Communities Of Practice Research Articles

Teacher leadership within a districtwide STEM teacher professional network

ABSTRACT This research sought to investigate teacher leadership in a districtwide STEM professional network using a previously developed community of practice teacher leadership identity model (CoPTLM). A qualitative research design with semi-structured interviews was used for the identified teacher leaders, teacher collaborators, and network staff members. Collected interview data were analyzed with the CoPTLM in four stages (i.e. identifying and clustering ‘units of meaning’, reviewing profiles, and synthesizing across cases). The research revealed that leadership identity authoring for this professional network occurred as teachers engaged in four pursuits: (a) proposing, planning, and facilitating professional development, (b) collaborating with peers, (c) mentoring other teachers, and (d) communicating in a large group or to the public. Further, the research revealed the multiple identities teacher leaders take up as they engage in different communities of practice and how teacher leaders’ roles and identities are dynamically shaped by and help shape the professional learning of other teachers. The outcomes of this research provide insights into the complex and dynamic roles of teacher leadership in the districtwide STEM teacher professional network, while also providing insights into how other contexts (e.g. schools, community settings) can more thoughtfully create conditions under which TL can emerge and flourish.

Cultural attraction in pottery practice: Group-specific shape transformations by potters from three communities.

Pottery is a quintessential indicator of human cultural dynamics. Cultural alignment of behavioral repertoires and artifacts has been considered to rest upon two distinct dynamics: selective transmission of information and culture-specific biased transformation. In a cross-cultural field experiment, we tested whether community-specific morphological features of ceramic vessels would arise when the same unfamiliar shapes were reproduced by professional potters from three different communities who threw vessels using wheels. We analyzed the details of the underlying morphogenesis development of vessels in wheel throwing. When expert potters from three different communities of practice were instructed to faithfully reproduce common unfamiliar model shapes that were not parts of the daily repertoires, the morphometric variation in the final shape was not random; rather, different potters produced vessels with more morphometric variation among than within communities, indicating the presence of community-specific deviations of morphological features of vessels. Furthermore, this was found both in the final shape and in the underlying process of morphogenesis; there was more variation in the morphogenetic path among than within communities. These results suggest that the morphological features of ceramic vessels produced by potters reliably and nonrandomly diverge among different communities. The present study provides empirical evidence that collective alignment of morphological features of ceramic vessels can arise from the community-specific habits of fashioning clay.

Inca Mitmaqkuna, Chaînes Opératoires, and Pottery Production in the Northern Andes

Abstract This article investigates the utility of a chaîne opératoire approach centered on technologies of ceramic production for identifying Inca mitmaqkuna archaeologically. Although early documents suggest that the Inca program of resettlement (mitmaq) was massive in scale, archaeologists have had minimal success in identifying such relocated populations. Here we test a novel approach that focuses on technologies of production and associated tool assemblages used within different communities of practice. Previous studies indicate that the ethnic Cañari of southern Ecuador used a distinctive method of pottery manufacture involving a specific chaîne opératoire and a unique set of production-related tools. According to early sources, the Inca deported Cañari peoples to various sectors of Tawantinsuyu. In this article, we investigate the contemporary manufacturing style of ceramics from the Ancash region of north-central Peru—an area where Cañari mitmaqkuna were purportedly resettled—to determine whether distinctive communities of practice potentially representing relocated communities might be visible. The results of this study suggest that it is possible to identify connections among distant communities of practice via a focus on craft production technologies that, in certain historical contexts, may be construed as evidence for the presence of resettled populations.

Are the stars aligned? Healthcare students’ conditions for negotiating tasks and competencies during interprofessional clinical placement

BackgroundHealthcare students must learn to collaborate across professional boundaries so they can make use of each other’s knowledge and competencies in a way that benefits the patient. One aspect of interprofessional collaboration implies negotiating what needs to be done and by whom. Research, focused on the conditions under which students perform this negotiation when they are working together during interprofessional clinical placement, needs to be further developed. The study therefore aimed to explore students’ negotiation of tasks and competencies when students are working together as an interprofessional team during clinical placement.MethodsThe study was designed as a focused ethnographic observational study. Two Nordic sites where final-year healthcare students perform clinical interprofessional education were included. Data consists of fieldnotes, together with informal conversations, group, and focus group interviews. In total, 160 h of participating observations and 3 h of interviews are included in the study. The analysis was informed by the theory on communities of practice.ResultsStudents relate to intersecting communities of practice when they negotiate what they should do to help a patient and who should do it. When the different communities of practice align, they support students in coming to an agreement. However, these communities of practice sometimes pulled the students in different directions, and negotiations were sometimes interrupted or stranded. On those occasions, observations show how the interprofessional learning practice conflicted with either clinical practice or one of the student’s profession-specific practices. Conditions that had an impact on whether or not communities of practice aligned when students negotiated these situations proved to be ‘having time to negotiate or not’, as well as ‘feeling safe or not’.ConclusionsFinal-year healthcare students can negotiate who in the team has the competence suited for a specific task. However, they must adapt their negotiations to different communities of practice being enacted at the same time. Educators need to be attentive to this and make an effort to ensure that students benefit from these intersecting communities of practice, both when they align and when they are in conflict.

Preconditions for the development of organizational knowledge ecosystem inside an audit firm

The paper aims to present key preconditions for the development of organizational knowledge ecosystem inside an audit firm. The audit activities represent a specific context for knowledge management, especially what concerns knowledge sharing and generation of new knowledge in organizational environment of formal rules and standards. We present the survey of audit firm employees (68) and their management by discussing the key challenges related to the dynamic knowledge sharing and new knowledge creation inside an audit firm. The paper investigates the nature of knowledge within an audit firm and analyses the cultural and structural aspects of KM practices that may lead to the emergence of ecosystem for sharing the existing and generating new knowledge. The paper adopts the intra-organizational perspective to knowledge ecosystem. The audit firm operates as knowledge organization that, despite its strong formal side, is a complex dynamic system of knowledge professionals, who form the different communities of practice inside the firm. Research presented in this paper helped identify the key challenges and opportunities for the emergent knowledge partnerships inside the professional audit firm. The key cultural preconditions behind the effective knowledge ecosystem - trust-based relations, organizational culture, positive horizontal and vertical relations, and strong intrinsic motivation to share knowledge - are in place. Research findings also reveal a good fit between the employee expectations and organizational practices. However, certain challenges need to be addressed, such as bringing out and embodying the tacit knowledge of employees, and the need for continuous upgrading of the processes of knowledge creation and integration. To establish an effective and sustainable knowledge ecosystem inside the professional services firm, the paper argues for striking a delicate balance between the formal and informal parts of organization, as well as its KM system.

From local to long-distance: Neolithic and Bronze Age ceramic networks in north-western China

During the Neolithic and Bronze Age, goods and ideas moved between Central Asia and the Chinese Central Plain via north-western China. While the crops, animals and technologies exchanged are well documented, the local and social bases of these interactions are poorly known. Here, the authors use petrographic analysis of ceramic sherds from Gansu Province, China, to document the local production of pottery vessels and their circulation between sites. Individual vessel forms are associated with multiple paste recipes indicating the production of similar products by different communities of practice. It is argued the circulation of these vessels forged inter-community relationships. In aggregate, these local networks underpinned longer-distance exchange between Central and East Asia.

Læreprocesser i et landskab af praksisfællesskaber

The article explores how nurses form their professional identity through orientations in and out of different communities of practice that they encounter during their basic education and first encounters with the labour market. Inspired by Wenger-Trayner and Wenger-Trayner (2015), professional identity is understood as subjective orientations in the landscape of communities of practice that constitute the nursing profession. The analysis is empirically grounded in qualitative, longitudinal studies of a group of nurses who have been ethnographically followed for seven years so far. The analysis shows how nurses' professional identity in 2023 develops as movements through a landscape of communities of practice. The analysis shows how professional identity is shaped by participation within the individual community of practice, and that this participation involves both engaging and disengaging learning processes.

Revisionary Texts: Examining the Editors' Proofs of OED1

ABSTRACT: In 2021, the final Editors' Proofs of the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary were a surprise discovery in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. Signed, dated, and liberally annotated by all four editors, as well as by the press-room workers at Oxford University Press, these proofs document a liminal stage immediately before publication, detailing the editors' final cuts and the challenges (and compromises) that latestage editing can reveal. As this article explores, the Proofs represent a substantial contribution to the material history of the OED and of the constraints of lexicography in the age of hot metal. Shedding new light on the ways in which, under pressures of space, key questions about expendability and inclusion were negotiated between different communities of practice, the Proofs present a visible testimony of change, substitution, and loss.

Beyond Linguistic Documentation: Between the National Language and Local Languages in Indonesia

This paper discusses the politics of national language policy, especially in Indonesia and the effects of the policy toward the continuity of language diversity in Indonesia. Firstly, a short review of studies in endangered languages is presented in order to fit this discussion in appropriate place in the literature. To get more specific, the Indonesian language policy and its influence toward the country’s linguistic diversity is reviewed which is followed by the description of the media’s influence upon the threat posed to the marginal local languages. After this point, Indonesian linguists’ work will be reviewed in relation to their own status as members of different communities of practice. At the end, recommendations for improving the future linguistic works are suggested in light of language documentation, preservation, and maintenance.

Expert organizations as a space for early-career development: Engaging in service while balancing expectations on research and teaching

ABSTRACT By studying the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) as a community of practice and learning space for academic identity development, this paper studies the creation of environmental expertise within expert organizations. The study focuses its analysis on how IPBES through its fellowship programme contributes to academic identity development among early-career researchers, including providing new contextual references to understand what it means to engage in and balance biodiversity research, teaching, and service. The study is based on interviews with early-career researchers who participated in the production of the IPBES’s Global Assessment Report. The study shows how the IPBES fellowship programme, by introducing its fellows into the organization’s community of practice simultaneously, contributes to their academic identity development and the creation and maintenance of the boundaries of environmental expertise. The analysis further shows how the fellows develop an academic identity that unites two different communities of practice of equal importance for their understanding of what they are supposed to do as academics and widens their understanding of what it means to be a successful academic.

A malleable workflow for identifying the issues and indicators that define and measure sustainability in food systems

A variety of stakeholders are concerned with many issues regarding the sustainability of our complex global food system. Yet navigating and comparing the plethora of issues and indicators across scales, commodities, and regions can be daunting, particularly for different communities of practice with diverse goals, perspectives, and decision-making workflows. This study presents a malleable workflow to help different stakeholder groups identify the issues and indicators that define food system sustainability for their particular use case. By making information used in such workflows semantically-consistent, the output from each unique case can be easily compared and contrasted across domains, contributing to both a deeper and broader understanding of what issues and indicators define a resilient global food system.

Rationalising pedagogy: what counts as skill across musical communities of practice in contemporary Istanbul

Over the last two decades, the skilled practice of learning the ney (Sufi reed flute) has gone through a massive revival in Turkey, as part of a broader interest in the revitalised ‘Sufi music’ genre and in Islamic arts learning. One key step in this process has been the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) government’s incorporation of ney teaching into mass public education through its council-run adult education programme (İSMEK). While this development has been pivotal in broadening access to skill attainment in the metropolitan area of Istanbul in significant ways, it has also led to a rationalisation of pedagogical practices, bringing with it transformed understandings of musical skill. To show what this process of rationalisation involves, this article examines skill training encouraged at government-sponsored lesson sites in tandem with a second mode of learning the ney grounded in apprenticeship pedagogy. The divergences emerging from this comparison reveal two very different paths to becoming an expert ney player, demonstrating, in turn, how pedagogical particularities foster different communities of practice.

Workarounds in the Shadow System: An Ethnographic Study of Requirements for Documentation and Cooperation in a Clinical Advisory Center.

Hospital information systems (HIS) are meant to manage complex work processes across healthcare organizations. We describe limitations of HIS to address local information requirements and how they are circumvented at different organizational levels. Results can be used to better support collaboration in socio-technical systems. Workarounds describe a mismatch between a technology's purpose and its actual use, whereas shadow systems are unofficial IT systems circumventing limitations of official systems to support workflows. Boundary infrastructures are conceptualized as the entirety of all (in)formal digital and analog systems connecting different communities of practice in a socio-technical system. An ethnographic study with observations and semi-structured interviews was conducted and analyzed through categorization and iterative coding. Several digital-analog workarounds are employed for documentation and a shared server functions as a shadow system to support workflows in ways the HIS cannot. For collaborative documentation, all (official and informal) information sources were used simultaneously as part of an interconnected boundary infrastructure. Formal and informal IT systems are interconnected across different organizational levels and provide insights into unmet information requirements, effective and problematic work practices, and how to address them to improve system functioning. An integrated perspective on boundary infrastructures, workarounds, and shadow systems may advance system analysis, providing a more comprehensive picture of IT requirements than any concept alone. Workarounds and shadow systems highlight that HIS should support systemic and local needs. Customized interfaces in HIS to support search, access, and exchange of relevant data might help to mitigate current shortcomings.

Becoming a Psychotherapist: Learning Practices and Identity Construction Across Communities of Practice.

Within a perspective that views groups as communities of practice and sites of construction of knowledge, learning, and identity, this article aims to explore the contribution that participation in different groups over the course of one’s life provides to the development of the professional practices of psychotherapist trainees enrolled in the C.O.I.R.A.G. school, an Italian graduate program in group psychotherapy. Through qualitative analyses of 10 semi-structured interviews, our study empirically shows that by participating in groups, the trainees not only learn the practices of that group but also develop a sort of meta-learning which takes place across groups. The results highlight that: (1) Transversality, duration, and informality are found to be the group properties with the highest formative value; and (2) Learning practices across different groups have common characteristics: are organized around complex topics of group life (e.g., how to manage conflicts, how to join and leave groups, etc.), began in early group experiences, are in continuous evolution, are associated with a critical event, and a negative affect. At the same time, it seems that these critical events are exactly what triggered and sustained the learning practices. Data from the interviews also showed how professional identities are constructed as the outcome of learning in different communities of practice. The study outlines how the experience made in different groups is elaborated in and through meaningful self-narratives, highlighting them as a fundamentally collective and culturally shaped sense-making process. Overall, these results contribute to a better understanding of learning processes as situated and jointly constructed through multiple group participations over time. Furthermore, they contribute to highlighting the role of self-narratives as a primary way through which trainees shape their identity as self-reflexive professionals who are competent in reading group dynamics. Directions for future research and suggestions for psychotherapist training paths are outlined in the conclusions.

Gendered Vocational Identities – Female Students' Strategies for Identity Formation During Workplace-Based Learning in Male-Dominated Work

Purpose: This article investigates female vocational students' strategies for becoming part of a workplace community, what these strategies are and how they are tied to the formation of vocational identities within male-dominated industrial work. Of particular interest is how female students enrolled on Swedish upper secondary industrial programmes experience workplace-based learning at industrial workplaces as part of their vocational education. The theoretical framework derives from Wenger's concept of community of practice, but his theoretical concept does not explicitly include gender dimensions. Therefore, the concept of community of practice is also combined with Paechter's assumption of gender, whereby femininity and masculinity can be considered as different communities of practice. Methods: The article draws on evidence from a Swedish study based on interviews with 20 female students enrolled on the industrial programme at six upper secondary schools. In this vocational programme, there is a distinct gender distribution and only a small minority of the students on the programme are girls. In the analysis, the focus is on the female students' strategies used during workplace-based learning to become part of the work community which consists almost exclusively of male workers.Findings: The female students deliberately negotiated vocational identities as female industrial workers to become accepted in the male-dominated work community. The findings highlight three specific strategies that the female students used: Acting like gender does not matter, acting like boys (not like drama queens), and acting tough and joking around. The female students' strategies were part of – and tied to – a complex vocational identity formation process that featured contradictory requirements. By taking individual responsibility, they identified relevant information for becoming industrial workers and chose to act like boys. The female students saw no problem with being a girl, yet they struggled with implicit, diffuse and hidden gender structures and prejudices in the male-dominated industrial companies. Nevertheless, they strived for what they perceived to be an attractive vocational identity as industrial workers; it was an alternative, atypically feminine way of being that attracted the female students. Conclusions: The study concludes that female students mostly rely on their individual agency when interacting with others in the male-dominated workplace community. A "gendered vocational identity" is formed which shows that the identity formation of female students is a complex double process, in which vocational and gender identities are formed simultaneously and in parallel within the male-dominated workplace.

Re‐naming and re‐framing: Evolving the “Higher Education Research Group” to the “Geography & Education Research Group”

AbstractAt the Higher Education Research Group (HERG) Annual General Meeting on the 29 August 2018, it was proposed that the Research Group might consider broadening its remit to consider a wider context of geography education and formally include the geographies of education. In this editorial, we outline the background to this proposal and the process which was undertaken to evolve from HERG to the Geography and Education Research Group (GeogEd) over the following two years. We take the opportunity to introduce this special section of five papers, each offering a different perspective on the background to and future of the newly re‐framed Research Group. In this way they: (1) explore the history of the Research Group since its inception; (2) provide a critical overview of the geographies of education; (3) explore the reciprocal relationship between geography education and the geographies of education, and the process of (re)forming GeogEd; (4) offer reflections from senior members of the Royal Geographical Society and Geographical Association on the new Research Group; and (5) reflect on the opportunities the bringing together of different communities of practice under GeogEd might offer in the future.

Boundary Crossing by a Community of Practice: Tibetan Buddhist Monasteries Engage Science Education

As a globalized world struggles with division and disinformation, engaging across difference has emerged as a major challenge to communication and collaborative action needed to address growing global challenges. As such, the initiative by Tibetan Buddhist leaders to incorporate western science in curricula for monastic education may serve as an important case study that illuminates the conditions and processes at work in genuine cultural outreach and exchange. That project, spearheaded in the Emory-Tibet Science Initiative (ETSI), involves reaching out across two quite different communities of practice, Tibetan Buddhism and science, and the willingness and ability of individuals to cross the boundaries between them. In the study reported here, we apply existing understandings of communities of practice and of learning mechanisms that mediate boundary crossing to probe for presence of conditions and processes that promote effective outreach among Tibetan Buddhist monastic students. We deploy analysis of qualitative survey, interview, and self-report data from monastic students shortly after ETSI began (2009) and after science education had been rolled out in the monasteries (2019) to, first, identify initial cultural conditions related to outreach and engagement with science, and, second, probe for post-rollout presence of boundary crossing learning mechanisms among monastic students which facilitate communication from one community of practice to another. We found a range of robust initial cultural conditions (e.g., perceived overlap in subjects and methods of inquiry), along with strong presence of mechanisms that facilitate boundary crossing (e.g., reflection, transformation) and operate through time. We observed cascading effects of these conditions and mechanisms on student engagement with science. Furthermore, interactions of these conditions and mechanisms allow monastic students to engage with science on their own Buddhist terms and to regard learning science as potentially beneficial rather than threatening to their personal or collective Buddhist goals.

Academic Identity and Communities of Practice: Narratives of Social Science Academics Career Decisions in Taiwan

Academic identity is an important aspect of organizing an academic career. An academic identity is distinct and unique and can be defined as the core attitudes that determine how individuals approach the concept of work. In the current era of neoliberalism, changes to university governance in Taiwan have transformed working conditions and hiring practices in academia. Inevitably, role conflicts have emerged, and work stress within higher education institutions has increased. The current study summarizes the narratives of nine academics from the social sciences. The study is anchored in the concept that academic identity formation is rooted in the doctoral education stage. Using a qualitative narrative inquiry lens, interactions between different communities of practice during the doctoral education stage are analyzed, along with later career decisions and the role communities of practice play in those decisions. The findings show that doctoral mentors and fellows all contributed to the formation of a core academic identity, while later career decisions were equally affected by neoliberal policies. It is hoped that by recognizing the role of academic identity, administrators may be able to influence how academics adapt amidst the competing pressures within the academe.

Taking a critical stance towards mixed methods research: A cross-disciplinary qualitative secondary analysis of researchers' views.

Recent growth and institutionalization in the field of mixed methods research has provided fertile ground for a wide range of thoughtful criticism of how this research approach has been developed and conceptualized by some members of the mixed methods community. This criticism reflects the increasing maturity of the field as well as the different theoretical perspectives and methodological practices of researchers in different disciplines. While debates addressing these criticisms are likely to lead to valuable insights, no empirical studies have been carried out to date that have investigated researchers' critical views on the development and conceptualization of mixed methods research. This study examines the criticisms of the mixed methods field raised by a cross-national sample of researchers in education, nursing, psychology, and sociology. We carried out a secondary analysis of semi-structured interviews with 42 researchers and identified 11 different criticisms, which we classified in four domains: essence of mixed methods, philosophy, procedures, and politics. The criticisms related to the procedures domain were equally distributed among the four disciplines, while those related to the essence, philosophy and politics domains were more common among sociologists. Based on our findings, we argue that the divergence of views on foundational issues in this field reflects researchers' affiliation to different communities of practice, each having its own principles, values, and interests. We suggest that a greater awareness of this divergence of perspectives could help researchers establish effective collaboration and anticipate potential challenges when working with researchers having different methodological approaches.

Navigating landscapes of practice: A longitudinal qualitative study of physicians in medical education.

Despite its widespread application in medical education, belonging to a single community of practice does not reflect the overall experience of physician-educators. Knowing how physician-educators find their way among different communities of practice (ie their landscape of practice) has implications for professional development but the limited description in the literature. In this longitudinal qualitative research, we explored how physicians who pursue graduate degrees in medical education navigate their landscape of practice. 11/29 physicians in one cohort of a masters in medical education programme were interviewed annually from 2016 (programme start) to 2020 (2years post-graduation). We iteratively collected and analysed data, creating inductive codes and categorising coded data by mode of identification (engagement, imagination, alignment) and time. We organised narratives into time-ordered data matrices so that final analysis wove together mode, time and participant. All participants consistently spoke of navigating their landscape of practice, which included the community created in the graduate programme; but that single community 'doesn't define the journey itself'. They shifted engagement from teaching individual learners to translating what they learned in the graduate programme to develop educational projects and produce scholarship. They shifted the imagination from relying on internal and external assessments to experience-inspired versions of their future self. And they shifted alignment from belonging to the graduate programme's community of practice, then belonging to different communities in their landscape of practice and ultimately focussing on communities that mattered most to them. Physicians in a graduate programme in medical education navigated their dynamic landscape of practice by shifting how they engaged in medical education, as well as what they imagined and who they aligned with as physician-educators. Our work offers novel insights into how knowledgeability emerges through time as overlapping modes of identification.