Category: Community of Practice

2025: A year of connection and community

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January 14, 2025

4:38 pm

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Collaborations, Community of Practice

Welcome to the Community!

I don’t really adhere to the new year, new you resolution-making approach to life, for a couple of reasons. First, as someone who works in academia, my “new year” feeling hits in September, not January. Second, personally, I’ve done the January enthusiasm-February fizzle cycle enough times to be hesitant to make any grand announcements that lead to nothing much.

That said, one of my resolutions for 2025 is to revitalize this blog. After all, another meaning of ‘resolution’ is the answer to a problem—so let’s think of this reboot as solving the problem of connecting to our community of practice.

In February 2023, I started writing a blog about my breast cancer journey. I found writing about my experience therapeutic, and that doing research to better understand my lived experience made me feel a little more in control, or at least more aware of what was happening and why. My cancer journey is (mostly) behind me now, but the writing bug still nibbles.

As a breast cancer patient, I had a unique insight into the disease and the treatments; as an educator, I have unique insight into the challenges and the rewards of the profession. I’ve been teaching for a long time: 20+ years at the Cégep level, and five at university. In that time, I added to my degrees in English Literature, completing my PhD in Education in 2020. I now teach Composition and Professional Writing at the undergraduate level at Concordia University, and in the Master Teacher program for Cégep teachers at the Université de Sherbrooke.

several hands touching in show of team spirit
Image by Bob Dmyt from Pixabay

My academic research has often focused on teacher development—one burning question for me has always been “how do teachers in higher education learn how to teach?” University and college teachers often have no formal training in pedagogy beyond a seminar or workshop; our greatest learning typically comes from what Dan Lortie (1975) called the “apprenticeship of observation.” I’ve studied that topic – and lived it – for over 25 years now. So, I want to reemphasize this platform’s purpose, of creating a community of practice to support and learn from each other.

Are you part of the community? Yes. While my focus is on college and university teaching, that doesn’t mean you have to be a Cégep teacher or a university professor. Are you a teacher at a different level or in a different place? Are you a retired teacher willing to share some wisdom? Are you trying to get your first teaching gig? Are you a student eager to let us profs know what we can do better? If you are interested in teaching and learning, then you are indeed a member of this community.

This year, these are some of the topics I’d like us to grapple with:

  • What makes a great syllabus and course plan?
  • Learning online and/or in the classroom
  • Spotting and surmounting student learning bottlenecks
  • Feedback for better learning
  • Integrating Universal Design into the English Lit & Comp classroom
  • Understanding the college and undergrad student experience
  • Mentoring and supporting grad students
  • Navigating political tempests in our pedagogical teapots
  • Generative AI from an academic disciplines perspective
  • Experiential learning in the Humanities classroom

Which of these topics is the most appealing, exciting, infuriating, or mystifying for you? What else would you like to bring to the conversation? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

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Wither the Water Cooler?

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February 24, 2022

12:09 pm

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Anecdotes & Experiences, Community of Practice

Many of us in academia, especially us social-constructivists, are familiar with Wenger’s notion of the community of practice as a site of teaching and learning (1998). If you are new to the term, chances are you are not new to the concept: as Wenger (2011) said, these communities are “so informal and so pervasive” that we are almost inevitably members of more than one, perhaps without any conscious effort or awareness. By nature, we are social creatures, and within our defined collectives, we find ‘our people’: the colleagues with whom we have a mutually beneficial rapport, or, more informally, our water-cooler crew.

But what happens when there’s no water cooler?

In March 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic shut down much of the world. In higher education, there was an almost universal shift to remote emergency teaching that lasted until the end of the winter term; most Canadian universities and colleges continued online for the Fall 2020, and then the Winter 2021 semesters.

Perhaps inevitably, we turned to social media. After all, teachers at all levels were active online, through Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest, among other platforms, long before the pandemic. TeachThought (2022) identified over 200 education-related hashtags on Twitter alone, covering topics from #educationalvideos to #collegeaffordability.

As we became resigned to being online for the summer and fall of 2020, and perhaps longer, some college and university teachers here in Montreal formed a Facebook group, and created our very own community of practice.

The primary goal of the group, at least initially, was to make space to provide peer support. In the first few weeks, we shared our experiences, but also shared resources and tools we were discovering as we learned, under pressure, how to move our teaching practice online. We hosted a few workshops, in which a member proficient in a relevant skill or tool demonstrated best practices, as well as live discussions to brainstorm (and, inevitably, to commiserate).

As one of the founding members of the group, I was keen to explore how the fact of the group itself affected its members – beyond the workshops, discussions, and shared resources, did members get something out of being part of the group? A few months after the creation of the group, I asked members to respond anonymously to a series of questions in an online form; questions were vetted by two colleagues before I made the form available.

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