Teaching and Learning for Social Justice and Equity in Higher Education by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030449391
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Communities of Practice as Spaces for SoTL

Though not explicitly taken up in the SoTL literature, we find value in the theorizing around communities of practice as a way to capture what our collaborative work looked like. Communities of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998) are 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, p. 1). This theorizing situates learning as a collective and sustained endeavor that happens beyond formalized structures and organizations. Although applied interdisciplinarily, communities of practice are formed vis-à-vis education when practitioners work to problem solve and to connect lived experiences to classroom learning. Importantly, an assumption of communities of practice in education is that “the class is not the primary learning event. It is life itself that is the main learning event. Schools, classrooms, and training sessions still have a role to play in this vision, but they have to be in the service of the learning that happens in the world” (Wenger, 2011, p. 5).

As white cis-women, all of us former public school teachers, we work to be critically conscious about the ways that public education functions to simultaneously oppress and privilege, and we position ourselves and our work to resist these systems, albeit with the knowledge that we are complicit in them. We held sadness, outrage, and fear during the campaign and at the outcome of the 2016 election, and we felt drawn to exploring teachers’ work during this time, especially because we are all former public school teachers and current scholars of K-12 education. As we examined data collected from practicing K-12 teachers, many of our conversations were about not just what the data said, but what they meant to us—as scholars and teachers ourselves. Analytical conversations often also included discussions of our relationships to the data, and with one another, in ways that moved beyond the requisite writing of positionality statements. We came to realize that this process was building our understanding of the data and of ourselves, which we conceptualized as a community of practice.

While scholars on research teams may not think of themselves as a community of practice, our collaboration did, in fact, align with Wenger’s (2011) conceptions and we felt that, as we worked through our data to write other manuscripts, we were doing “more” than merely analyzing data. In our community of practice, our learning was happening in the world as it was happening in our collaborative dialogue about our teaching practices in higher education. We also see our community of practice as one rooted in an inquiry stance. Cochran-Smith and Lytle (1999) discuss teaching from a stance of inquiry, but, too often, researchers dichotomize teaching and research, or see them as a continuum in which our teaching informs our research and not the other way around. That is, instead of “doing” research about teaching, we are also using our research to shape our understanding of our critical responsibility

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