Abstract
Communities of practice (CoPs) can be platforms for teacher learning. CoPs enable teachers to collaborate with others, share experiences, and form new understandings. Wenger (Communities of practice: Learning, meaning, and identity. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998) identifies four dualities for designing learning in CoPs: (1) participation–reification, (2) designed–emergent, (3) local–global, and (4) identification–negotiability. This paper postulates a teacher learning framework which adopts the participation-reification duality and unpacks the learning processes from a social constructivist stance. We conjecture learning as the interplay between individuals and social-others and describe the learning processes in six duality pairs: (1) first person–third person experiences, (2) interpretation–dialogue, (3) personal–established theories, (4) identity–fellowship, (5) confidence–mutual trust, and (6) individual–social regulation. These duality pairs focus on the experience, cognition, and embodiment aspects of learning. Using this framework, we describe a school district’s learning journey to level up teacher professionalism. Interviews were conducted and data that supports the learning dualities are discussed. Findings show that the learning dualities enable adaptivities through teacher learning when supported by principal and district structures. Designs for teacher learning can be created with top–down and bottom–up structures by infusing informal learning designs with existing formalisations.
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Hung, D., Lee, SS., Vishnumahanti, S. (2014). Adaptivities in Teacher Learning Within the Context of Communities of Practice: A School District’s Learning Journey. In: Hung, D., Lim, K., Lee, SS. (eds) Adaptivity as a Transformative Disposition. Education Innovation Series. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-4560-17-7_10
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