Communities of Transformation: Creating Changes to Deeply Entrenched Issues

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this article is to describe a new variation of communities of practice: communities of transformation. We define communities of transformation as communities that create and foster innovative spaces that envision a new future. This article is based on research examining four undergraduate STEM faculty communities of practice designed to engage faculty in STEM reform work. It is informed by the communities of practice, professional learning communities, and transformational learning literatures and analyzes data gathered through document analysis, interviews, and observations. We highlight three elements critical to these communities and suggest implications for future research and practice.

KEYWORDS:

• Communities of practice
• faculty
• STEM reform
• higher education

Notes

1. Other articles from the project (in press) using quantitative survey data of approximately 4,000 faculty members across the country demonstrate the large-scale impact of these communities. The stories in this article about CoTs’ evolution describe the CoT leaders’ views about creating change, but we have quantitative survey data that also captured the impact. For example, our data reflect that individual teaching practices of several thousand faculty have been altered and that 35% of the sample surveyed had also created changes in their departments, across several departments, or institution-wide. The scale and scope of changes reflected in our survey demonstrate the impact that these types of CoTs can have and why they are such an important vehicle for change.

2. While there is a literature base on distance CoPs (Allee, 2000; Stuckey, 2004), much of the research and studies have been conducted on more traditional CoPs.

3. The CoP literature helped to examine and understand formation, stages, and design, while the literature on PLCs provided research on the relationship between structure and outcomes, such as learning by PLC members (DuFour, 2004; DuFour et al., 2008). For example, unlike CoPs, which emerge organically and coalesce into a community, PLCs tend to be more intentionally designed in terms of elements that will sustain them such as leadership, infrastructure, or funding (DuFour, 2004; DuFour et al., 2008). The literature on PLCs has spoken less about stages and challenges and more about critical conditions (e.g., resources, decision making) that sustain the communities and help them to thrive. In summary, we used the most relevant and related literature to frame and understand the study but recognized that the groups we examined were unique in some meaningful ways.

4. Although this article does not focus on the quantitative data, we briefly review the survey information (see Note¹). Data for the survey study were collected through the Achieving Scale for STEM Reform Survey. In the spring of 2014, the survey invitation was sent to 17,868 e-mail addresses. The survey was custom-designed for each community’s particular structures (e.g., activities, communication vehicles) but followed a common survey design to allow for comparison across the four communities. A total of 3,927 participants responded to the survey invitation, indicating a 22.0% initial response rate. Descriptive statistics of the sample showed no bias in the sample. The survey addressed the following areas: participants’ involvement in the community over time; perceptions of community activities; perceived benefits of community involvement for individuals, their departments, and their institutions; perceptions of the importance of community design elements on their participants’ practice; and individual and professional characteristics. Survey design was informed by the information gathered in the first phase of data collection as well as in the literature pertaining to the design and benefits of networks and CoPs.

5. From our survey we know these COTs involved contingent faculty but they were not among our interview sample as given the nature of their positions they were unable to engage as deeply as other faculty types. COTs are currently engaged in strategy development around involving more contingent faculty. Additionally no assistant professors were part of our sample but that does not mean assistant professors were not involved with the CoTs. Given the length of our study, short time that individuals are in assistant positions, many had been involved in CoTs while assistant professors but by the time we interviewed them they no longer had that status but many spoke about their experience as an assistant professor.

6. The deductive codes that we brought to the study were from the CoP literature and included areas such as Wenger, McDermott, and Snyder’s (2002) lifecycle model—(a) potential, (b) coalescing, (c) maturing, and (d) stewardship—and accompanying concepts of coalescing around an idea, finding a balance between new and old ideas, and crisis. They also included design principles, such as designing the community to evolve naturally or to welcome and allow different levels of participation, and challenges such as legitimacy, growth, and leadership succession.

7. Participants also discussed regional networks that were created by all these entities and said they typically did not represent the CoTs because these regional areas were lacking the key leaders who embodied the philosophy, did not have an infrastructure where the philosophy was built into the design, and did not have enough of the cadre of dedicated volunteers. Although all recognized the regional networks could perhaps one day become a CoT, at present, they lacked what the more central efforts were able to create; it is these elements that we captured in the narratives. Project Kaleidoscope was an exception to this finding and had stronger regional networks.