Activity 4: Community of practice

Job definition:

HOD of Technology and eLearning facilitator and Automotive and Engineering teacher advocate of apprenticeship systems for learning.

Etienne and Wenger-Trayner describes community of practice as based on three tenets: Domain, Community and Practice. For me as a HOD of technology in the first instance means our collective domain is technology, all forms of technology and we endeavour to work together as members of a department to share resources and workspaces and use policies to maximise the opportunities for our young people. Our practice is delivering the learning for students to acquire new skills in construction or engineering or home economics. Our practices differ, markedly in some cases, but our community is evolving daily encompassing like-minded students seeking out a career in areas we find stimulating. We call our community - the technology department. It comprises of a hard materials teacher, a home economics teacher, a graphics teacher, a building practitioner and a carpentry teacher. Our professional community meets regularly and has both formal and informal discussions and networks inherent in it and connected to it. Furthermore, our community is connected to the wider whanau of our families and to our professional learning communities such as Unitec for broadening the experience and understanding in the complex world of technology trades education.

However, this is not the only community for the multiple roles I hold. The other aspect of my practice is elearning. This role has led me to co-construct a community of interested professionals who are all keen to learn the next cool tool in technology. Once again motivated by a desire to share our interests with our students to help them navigate the digital world safely but also enable them to participate in a digital world they might not necessarily see at home. This immediate community I will call the ICT committee although this community evolves in many other ways.

Finally, there is our school community of students, families and teachers. The School community is a bedrock upon which the foundations of the technology department and eLearning communities are constructed. One arm of this community is the one of the classes I teach. So, the department community is used to prepare, manage and resource the community of the classroom following the wider cultural and social acceptances of the school community. Our school community is made up of interesting social and cultural groups. A school in South Auckland has many cultural identities and these all impact on the social interactions within the wider school community.

Challenges

The recent impact of refugees is one such issue affecting our school in bicultural Aotearoa. Others are the impacts of ITO reorganization and redefinition within the framework of the NZQA. New Zealand needs people who have trades occupations but the introduction of the NCEA pressed many schools to consider updating schemes and programmes to accommodate achievement standards of the Technology domain. This proved to be challenging with much training and emphasis by the ministry to upskill teacher of technology to deliver these achievement standard literacy rich programmes. It is widely accepted that literacy and numeracy are key indicators of capability in New Zealand and schools, supported by ministry contracted businesses, are challenged to drive up the capability in these areas. How as a teacher of a technology domain subject can we contribute to this aim whilst maintaining the engagement of students in practically based subjects? This is where Google Apps for Education suite can help. Literacy should not just be thought about as the written word, creating and editing video clips using youtube and blogging to tell a story and share with family and friends provides a foundation for discussion to explore understanding. Engaging students with apps and technology is just the sandwich filling. The bread is the course structure of constructing projects, learning techniques, working safely, ordering materials, assessing jobs. Using apps in a practical way is how we intend to meet the challenges of “Literacy”.

Issues

Recently, well in  ERO popped round. They came, they saw and they left a terse report full of positivity and challenge. One such area I have mentioned in previous posts is our key next steps:

• affirm New Zealand’s bicultural heritage and be responsive to students’ various cultures, languages and backgrounds
• promote high levels of interest and challenge, and encourage critical thinking and problem solving
• support students to make decisions about what and how they learn, and make seamless transitions between schools and into the world of work and further learning.

ERO (2015)

A ‘lovely’ article was placed in the Herald about the totality of the report, “Uphill battle for Sir Ed school” Herald 2015. Just an observation isn’t everyone traveling uphill because if it was all downhill wouldn’t we be coasting? Not only do we face the issue of pedagogy within our community of technology, but we also face the issue of perception in the public eye. Unpublished results for 2015 will attest to progress made from base camp, however, our community will now engage the Southeast ridge of our mountain and begin the ascent into culturally sensitive pedagogy addressed in a recent PL with Angus Macfarlane. Applying the techniques shared to all staff by Angus especially the educultural wheel. This is the community implied version for our collective community of practice, i.e. the school.

TKI, The Cultural Wheel - School Version. 2013.

Angus presented further details of the approach to focus on the classroom and thus implicit for our technology department community.

A principle referred to in developing this wheel and for teachers in our community to adopt in the classroom is head, hand and heart. Where teaching becomes a more thoughtful (head), caring (heart) and practical (hand) endeavour for teachers and students alike. Using apps, building ‘things’ in technology and caring about who we build for is the bedrock for technology, design thinking and the acquisition of trades. Learning life by apprenticeship is a real feature in technology and related subjects and interestingly is a feature of learning communities.

“Anthropological studies of apprenticeship offer possible alternative cultural points of view on social processes of learning and inspiration for counterintuitive conceptualizations of such processes. Craft apprenticeship in West Africa and apprenticeship among Yucatec Mayan midwives, for example, are practices in which mastery comes about without didactic structuring and in such a fashion that knowledgeabIe skill is part of the construction of new identities of mastery in practice” Lave, Situating Learning in Communities of Practice

For our communities, adopting an apprenticeship learning style to share approaches to collective problems, and coach one another through the issues we are faced with, is a technique Macfarlane promotes to provide a more equitable education system leading to more engaged students. Will this impact our next steps for ERO and more importantly, will this impact the global phenomenon of push pull referred to by Fullan? Time will tell.

References:

(2015). Lave, Situating Learning in Communities of Practice - Scribd. Retrieved February 5, 2016, from https://www.scribd.com/doc/130747559/Lave-Situating-Learning-in-Communities-of-Practice.

ERO,. "3 Curriculum - Education Review Office". Ero.govt.nz. N.p., 2016. Web. 5 Feb. 2016.

Johnson, Kirsty. "Uphill Battle For Sir Ed". The New Zealand Herald 2015. Web. 5 Feb. 2016.

Fullan, M. (2013). The new pedagogy: Students and teachers as learning partners. Learning Landscapes, 6(2), 23-29.

Macfarlane, Angus et al. "Creating culturally-safe schools for Māori students." The Australian Journal of Indigenous Education 36 (2007): 65-76.

New Zealand Immigration, "Jobs In New Zealand For Skilled Migrants | Move To NZ". Newzealandnow.govt.nz. N.p., 2016. Web. 5 Feb. 2016.

TKI, The Cultural Wheel - School Version. 2013. Web. 5 Feb. 2016.

Wenger-trayner.com,. (2016). Introduction to communities of practice | Wenger-Trayner. Retrieved 4 February 2016, from http://wenger-trayner.com/introduction-to-communities-of-practice/