SLS-4b4 Explosion - Community of Practice

At PolyU, as in many universities, SL subjects are academic courses, offered by academic departments.  Typically each department offers only a small number, typically only one or two, of such courses.  For the subject teachers, it may be difficult to find kindred spirits in the same department, withe whom one can brainstorm, cooperate, share resources and contacts, compete, or simply commiserate.  This is particularly challenging for people or departments who are just starting to implement service-learning.   People with common interest may exit in other departments.  But their paths do not often cross.  It can feel rather isolated.  

OSL takes the lead to actively cultivate a community of practice across the university, from the early beginning.  We started by offering workshops on various aspects of SL, where interested people can meet and get to know each other.  Most of the time, these workshops are focused on a relevant, timely, theme, such as writing proposals, teaching reflection, assessment, funding, etc.  But we do occasionally arrange informal gatherings    where there are no formal presentations or discussions, but just so people can gather to catch up, to maintain a sense of community.  

It has often been said that academic departments in universities can be likened to silos.  People do not generally communicate with people across department-silos.  This is, of course, somewhat stereotyping.  There has always been collaboration across academic departments. But the stereotyping can also contain some granules of truth.  We have witnessed academics defending their academic territory and accused academics from other departments of encroaching on their territory by offering academic courses in their area.  Even in service-learning.  Service-Learning at PolyU is, by nature, an area across departments.  Building a Community of Practice across departments is one way to bring people together, instead of allowing the silo effect to drive them apart.   

The community is bearing fruit in a concrete way.  The Department of Computing have been working on information technology related projects in Cambodia, when they noticed that electricity supply was unreliable even in the capital city of Phnom Penh, and non-existent in many parts of the countryside.  Subsequently they expanded the projects to Myanmar and Rwanda.  When colleagues in Electrical Engineering learned of this through the community, they expressed interest.  The two teams started working together.  Electrical Engineering sent a team to work with the Computing team in Cambodia while they started developing their own course.  Subsequently EE started sending their own team to Cambodia and the two departments continue to further develop the projects, and are planning to expand to other sites and countries.  

This community of people have applied for, and received small amounts of seed funding to organise the community of practice.  The funding would cover some of the expenses of gatherings.  It has also funded educational development activities such as attending training courses, small scale exploratory projects, travelling expenses to attend conferences where people present their research on SL, etc.  Together, members of the group have also jointly applied for and received funding to run significant SL-related research and development projects.  One project allow several teachers to run action research sub-projects to improve their own SL subject.  Another is a large scale joint-university project to develop the capacity to teach SL, which includes development of e-learning resources, cases studies, surveys, teacher development courses, …