Practice 1: “My community of practice”
After reading the Class Notes, create a blogpost where you critically define your practice with reference to Wenger’s (2000) concept of community of practice.
Our Community of Practice
Up to the end of last year I was the Head of English at a low decile inner city secondary school. The department had, because of a drop in roll numbers over five years, reduced from up to ten colleagues down to four in my last year. Wenger suggests that “communities of practice depend on internal leadership” (p231) and this became more evident to me the longer I was in a leadership role. My colleagues felt under pressure because although we had fewer students we still had the operational, everyday issues that any secondary school department has. This was a real challenge for me because I also saw part of my role was to not only keep faith in the direction the school was going but also to encourage and guide our team in that direction. Was I successful? To some extent I believe I was. I regularly asked for feedback from my colleagues around this issue as well as encouraging discussion about the school’s direction during meetings.
The school has over the years drawn from a growing Polynesian and Asian community. Many of the students on arriving at the school had low reading and writing levels. Wenger also suggests that “Communities of practice deepen their mutual commitment when they take responsibility for a learning agenda…….” The learning agenda we needed to take initial responsibility for was literacy. The mantra some years back from the Ministry and was made explicit in “The Literacy Learning Progressions report (2008) -”We feel this is a great idea and making literacy explicitly wider than the English area is to be welcomed. We are all literacy teachers and we need to acknowledge and work with this. We think this will make a lot of sense for the primary schools but are worried it could disappear into a box in the secondary schools.”
This seemed like a great learning project at first but teachers who taught other subjects did not feel comfortable with this description so we, in the English Department, found that we mentored and ran workshops for staff. Some of these workshops went well, others not so much. The ones that did were the ones in which the English Department shared practical ideas which could be put to immediate use in classrooms - these were word/vocabulary lists, words in context, sentence starters, vocabulary games etc. As much as I agree with the MInistry’s definition of who is a literacy teacher, the realities of which learning area delivers on this became obvious. However, I am still of the opinion that teachers, whatever subject they teach are literacy teachers, in their own field. On reflection, I would have encouraged all teachers to take up the challenge rather than have the department step in and do a lot of the work. Wenger talks about boundaries and suggests that it is important to have a balance between “core and boundary processes” which are also “highly linked to other parts of the system”, in this case, the rest of the school. Looking back and relating Wenger’s ideas to our practice I can see that there was a real opportunity to apply this thinking to the school’s literacy strategy.
Wenger writes about “shared repetoire” - resource sharing, teaching with IT, discussing events, producing and sharing best practices. These were practices that we implemented to varying degrees of success. I consider that the teaching with IT was a strength in the department but the sharing of resources was somethng we could do better.
Literacy Learning Progressions: Report on feedback on the draft document. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.educationcounts.govt.nz/publications/literacy/43632
Wenger, E.(2000).Communities of practice and social learning systems.Organization,7(2), 225-246 (http://org.sagepub.com.libproxy.unitec.ac.nz/content/7/2/225).
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