Mindlab by Unitec: My Professional Community of Practise

25 January 2016 (APC Week 26, Task 4)

My Professional Community

This blog post is intended to be around defining my own professional learning and leading context using Wenger's concept of community of practice: a group "of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly." (2015)

   Within my own community of practise, I am going to critically review the following three areas:

1. current issues within our community of practise;
2. challenges faced within my professional practise; and
3. changes that are occurring within the context of our profession, and how we might address these. 

 Within our 'Decile 1A' South Auckland kura (school), we face many issues; ranging from socio-economic challenges (i.e.: truancy, absenteeism, transience) through to the need to specifically cater for a predominantly Maori student body. [I have also discussed the wider contexts for this in my recent RCIP blog entry.]

    This also brings us to some of the contextual challenges we face as a community of practise - how do we bring value-added learning outcomes within a socio-economically 'disadvantaged' setting?

   In recent years, digital learning platforms have increasingly offered us an effective tool for overcoming these obvious geographical and physical limitations. Our leaders of learning have worked alongside our coummunity to bring greater ICT-based learning opportunities into our kura and devices onsite for our akonga.

   Whilst this support from our wider community and leadership has seen a huge shift in the resources we have available to our learners, this has been a reflection - and perhaps a response - to the huge changes occuring within our profession in recent years.

   Shifts in the tide of political agar in which we learn and teach have had huge implications for all of us. For example, while National Standards gave a standardised tool for the government to measure our student's progress over time 'longitudinally' against their peers nationally. This has led many local communities of learning once again losing their self-directed autonomy or sense of tino rangatiratanga, once implicit in the once innovative New Zealand Curriculum document.

   In the coming years, the ability to foster and grow effective, lasting (inter)relationships - within and between communities of practise and learning (locally, nationally and globally) - will be the most likley basis on which we can best share the resources and skills our young people will need to succeed and thrive in the new millenium.

References  Cited
(including additonal / suggested readings for understanding and defining your own community of practise.)
Hodkinson, P., & Hodkinson, H. (2004, May 11th). A constructive critique of communities of practice: Moving beyond Lave and Wenger. Paper presented at “Integrating Work and Learning- Contemporary Issues’ seminar series. OVAL Research.
Lave, J. (1991). Situating learning in communities of practice. In L. Resnick, J. Levine, and S. Teasley (Eds.), Perspectives on socially shared cognition.[ E-reader version](page 63-82).
OPENiPhotojournalism. (2009, Sep 15). Etienne Wenger talks about 'walking the landscape of practice'. [video file].
Team BE. (2011 Dec 28, 2011). Communities versus networks? [Web blog post].
Wenger-trayner.com. (2015). Introduction to communities of practice | Wenger-Trayner. [PDF file].