CoPlog

Intro to ARP 1999-2000

I entered Pepperdine University’s Master’s program in Educational Technology under the leadership of Dr. Linda Polin in July, 1999. (Cadre 2, Blue Crew). Though there were different courses each quarter, one part of the study was spread through the whole year, an Action Research Project (ARP), in which we each proposed an area of study based on our working environment, and documented what we found and how our thinking changed over the course of the year of study.

The following, and the two subsequent postings, comprise the summary of my ARP research, 1999-2000.

What I wanted to do

I wanted to know how to effectively design curricula for online presentation.

I’ve been a teacher for over 20 years, and have designed or help design a lot of different curricula, ranging from cobble-it-together to do-it-yourself.

I didn’t really see the MA in Ed Tech as an investigation at first so much as learning techniques and principles, then getting advice as to how well it would work. Investigation was just the first phase of getting it done.

Why

Previous efforts using Authorware were too time-consuming, even though the product looked nice. After a lot of work, I wasn’t sure that it would really help anyone learn. It was just another nice presentation tool – had some sound discovery elements to it, but I knew it wasn’t a good solution – it took way too long to make, and it wasn’t flexible enough, even though I had tried very hard to put a lot of possible paths into it to sustain interest and maintain flexibility in modes of learning. One of the Japanese administrative staffers that reviewed it shook his head and said, “You’ve put everything in there that you’ve learned in 20 years about English conversation practice… it will take too long to make the lessons at this rate.” He was right, but I didn’t want to just put out something that was pedagogically inept.

What did I think I could do about it?

First Iteration: (June 99)

learn how to design a whole curriculum

I thought I could take some courses, read some books, talk to some people, and I would be able to do the design or lead the design team.

Second Iteration: (September 99)

designing a prototype distance-learning program for English composition

I thought I could get some good ideas from others trying the same thing, talk to some of them, and I would be able to do the design—no problem. I have lots of experience in this. I’ve sometimes had ‘magic’ happen in my classrooms when teaching composition, and I looked forward to the challenge of taking that to a wider audience.

Third Iteration: (November 99)

“I’ve been seeing the applicability of the LPP and CoP concepts as particularly applicable to what I do in my regular job. The change? To complete the process of making missions participation at HGC a community involvement (a CoP), rather than a more “academic” exercise of just “becoming informed” about what others are doing and sending them money. Since we have 2000 people in the larger church community, about 800 involved in financially supporting, and about 200 or so who actively get involved in some kind of action, the COPs will have differing definitions.” “My new ARP centers around Communities of Practice—I will identify some key COPs that I am involved with, and responsible for, and seek to improve the practice in them and create an LPP “on-ramp” for each.”

I was really excited about the concepts – Community of Practice was fairly easy to understand. LPP was harder, but once I saw it, I was eager to move into a ‘program formation’ stage right away. I knew of two very good examples that I believed were good prototypes for what I want to do in other spheres:

A quote from December 99:

“We have a couple of good models of LPP: Touch the World (TTW) and Training in Ministry Outreach (TIMO).

Touch the World is a program for Junior High and High School aged kids which trains them and sends them to serve in inner-city, camp, and cross-cultural environments. Short trips are taken during spring break or Christmas break, and trips from 10 days to one month are taken during the summer. The key to this program is learning while doing. And now in its ninth year of existence, the program works better than ever because of the kids that do it again and again, who help the leaders train the newbies. All three of my kids have been involved in multiple trips, and have become a part of the informal leadership. I am also part of the training team for the summer trips, involving about 250 kids.

TIMO is the program used by Africa Inland Mission to train their new missionaries who will be planting churches in situations where there were no previous churches, either in remote areas (such as the one I visited in Tanzania) or in urban areas among ethnic enclaves untouched by current church congregations due to language or extreme cultural differences. I wrote about their program briefly in my Learning Situation paper.

• Training in Ministry Outreach is the program I was assisting during my two trips to Tanzania. It is designed to train fledgling missionaries in the skills they need to learn a language and plant a church. I was able to observe the Sukuma, French and American team members during a two-week period last year, as they were beginning their second and final year of training, and able to see the final results as all of the members have now graduated on to other assignments this year.
• TIMO members (including a Tanzanian couple [Sukuma tribe] from an urban area for whom the adjustment is just as great as for whites) undergo a rigorous training which includes very little bookwork but a lot of practical training. The heart of it is learning how to live among a tribal people, learning their language and customs, and contributing to the community through building and teaching, or by sharing any medical skills they may have.
• The team members learned how to eat strange foods, cope with sickness, drive 4WD vehicles in the bush, use basic medicine, purify water, cook in a variety of settings with wood, charcoal, propane, etc., build a brick or mud and wattle house, and fix and maintain all of the equipment they brought with them. They also learned important attitudinal lessons in humility, sharing, reliance on others and when and how to give advice.
• The chief methods of learning and teaching centered around the modeling they observed in the team leaders, a veteran couple who love the life there and poured their lives into the people. The LAMP book (Language Acquisition Made Practical) was their beginning tool for language study, but they learned mostly from their host families and from each other, since the Datooga language is not understood by hardly any outsiders.
• Learning styles included imitation, mutual storytelling, discussion, reflective questioning, delegated responsibility, and evaluation. Active learning, learning while doing, achieved the practical skills necessary.
• I observed the two families that were still in the area. They were highly successful, their attitudes good, and their standing among the community secure—they were respected and loved, listened to and helped. They had truly learned all of the skills necessary to prosper with very few classroom sessions.
• I believe there is merit in further analyzing why these two models work so well, and what is possible for us to adapt in our wider church situation in bringing people from non-involvement into the [other active CoPs in the church]. Structuring active participation will be the key.”
  

  
  I was still working on others, not so much working on myself…
  

  
  Fourth Iteration: (Dec 99)
  

  
  So the key to all of this as far as I can see it now is to create an atmosphere of learning by doing – but not just throwing everyone into the pool, sink or swim. We want to create an authentic atmosphere of doing what is really useful – and help each other learn how to do our service, our communication, our organizing, our planning, our financial management, our time management, our language study, our “attitude adjustments” – we want to learn together how to do it all better!
  

  
  Put communities of practice in charge of their learning (Wenger 96)

“...subsequently [the listserv] will be used for guided discussion, using a resource called Perspectives in the World Christian Movement, a text currently widely used to train missionaries and laypeople who help them. Many of our current missionaries took their training long enough ago that they are unfamiliar with the concepts and updated information in the text. I will try to put into practice a number of the suggestions delineated in (Ryan 97) and (Sharp 96, 97), but until I have had a chance to talk these over with critical friends and some of the missionaries, I don’t know which are applicable.

I hope in so doing to create a community of discourse (Sharp 97) which will encourage our missionaries to reflect, dialogue and ultimately improve their practice.”
(March 2000)
” And in December, I introduced a listserv which I use at least weekly. The next step is to invite discussion in an asych environment. Because of the difficulty of communication for 15 or so of our missionaries – bad or very expensive connections – I have to make adjustments in the way I introduce the technical “challenge”

• some of the missionaries don’t have internet access – just email. For them, participation would mean reading a transcript of a discussion and adding to it, if their contribution is not too far out of the time sequence. In Tanzania, access to a server might only be twice a month.
• a newsgroup is one of the best ways to have threaded discussions, and intranets.com allows this for free – this would work in the technical sense except for those who do not have internet access, but the time necessary to log on, read, respond, etc., may prove to be a barrier to acceptance.
• we can use the listserv itself if we limit our discussions to one topic at a time, but we have to allow people to opt out if it costs them money (access fees based on long-distance or sat phone charges) to participate – unless they are willing to pay the costs for the value received (creation of a discussion-only listserv is one good possibility here)
• a BBS type of posting – www.eboard.com – the browser barrier holds true for this one as well, but it is the least challenging and least intrusive, since a listserv posting goes to everyone
  I believe the next step will be to simply ask a few of the missionaries to try a couple of the alternatives and then we will seek to recruit involvement by the majority.”

The displays showing our ARPs – July 2000

References:

Ryan, S. 1997
“Building An Online Community “http://builder.cnet.com/Business/Community/

Sharp, J. 1996
“Notes on Going Virtual” http://www.tfriend.com/cop/n-govirt.html

Sharp, J. 1997
“Key Hypotheses in Supporting Communities of Practice” http://www.tfriend.com/hypothesis.html

Snyder, W. 1997
“Communities of Practice: Combining Organizational Learning and Strategy Insights to Create a Bridge to the 21st Century” http://www.co-i-l.com/coil/knowledge-garden/cop/cols.shtml

Wenger, E. 1996
“How to Optimize Organizational Learning”
Healthcare Forum Journal, July/Aug 1996, p.22&23
http://www.co-i-l.com/coil/knowledge-garden/cop/olearning.shtml

Wenger, E. 1998a
“Communities of Practice: Learning as a Social System”
Systems Thinker, June 98
http://www.co-i-l.com/coil/knowledge-garden/cop/lss.shtml

Wenger, E. 1998b
Communities of Practice: Learning, meaning, and identity
Cambridge Univ. Press

ARP 99-2000 Actions Taken

What did I do?

Further developed online community – connected three CoPs

With (Cadre2 BlueCrew) Don Wolff’s help, I began a listserv for the missionaries in December 99, sending out weekly messages. I added two other CoPs to this listserv in March 2000. This was an extension of an online community that has been forming since May 97. In the next section, I will describe the major impact this has had on my work. Throughout this section, though artificially separated, what I have done and what I have learned from these actions have been synergistically intertwined (as all situated learning is, I suspect).

Awakened to the CoPs around me

Though I knew better on one level, I was still thinking of CoPs as organizations that have a shared practice and ethos. Then I spotted some that are simply parts of organizations – our missions committee and missions education committee, for example. But then, as I started working more collaboratively, I realized that my office is a complex of CoPs – computer users (those good at graphics, layout, online research, database, etc.), counselors, organizers, etc. etc., with multiple overlaps. As I began working more and more collaboratively, that spirit, though already present, began to be an active part of our office culture. It was no longer—“Here, you do this, you’re good at it “—instead it became, “How do you do this? I want to learn how.” More on this below, but the central illustration for these relationships was used in my ARP display:

At first glance, all of these diverse groups, especially my family, may not be obvious as communities of practice, (they weren’t to me) but an examination of Wenger’s Communities of Practice led me to this seminal realization. My wife and I and all three of our (mostly grown) kids have a shared ideology and practice when it comes to helping others, verbally sharing our faith, participating in the same community of believers, and valuing and enjoying many of the same songs and stories. As I am writing this, my son is in Japan working at a Japanese Christian camp, and my second daughter has just returned from a 10-day stint in Cuba, helping 25 fellow Americans and many scores of Cubans to rebuild their church, sharing in their poverty (of things) and wealth (of spirit). Both kids did this even though they could be lying on a beach or working to save money for college. Clearly, this did not come from Mom and Dad (who are concerned about the college money), but from the CoPs that we all are a part of. All total, my three kids have participated in 15 short-term trips, from one week to six weeks in length, including local work in the Bowery, youth work in Washington DC, Habitat for Humanity-type construction work in Arizona, Mexico and Jamaica, rebuilding a burnt-out church in Alabama and interacting through drama and Bible school outreaches in Spanish and English with many, many children. These are activities they have learned countless skills and good attitudes from.

This realization, that I belong to connected CoPs, has meant that I can see my life more as an integrated whole, rather than as a large number of competing activities. I’ve actually been doing the integration for a long time, but I can be more purposeful and less ad-hoc about it now that I understand the centrality of practice as the essence of teaching and learning. I have noticed that I have a much more excited manner when I explain some aspect of practice from one group that I think has relevance to another. I have realized that one of my key functions is that of brokering: sharing the stories and visions developed by one CoP with members of another, which bridges the barriers between them and can often give fresh vision and energy.

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brokering



Communities of practice do not usually require heavy institutional infrastructures, but their members do need time and space to collaborate. They do not require much management, but they can use leadership. They self-organize, but they flourish when their learning fits with their organizational environment. The art is to help such communities find resources and connections without overwhelming them with organizational meddling. This need for balance reflects the following paradox: No community can fully design the learning of another; but conversely no community can fully design its own learning.(conclusion to Wenger 98 – emphasis mine)



Wenger’s striking conclusion means for one thing, that CoPs need each other – that brokers who communicate key concepts and help negotiate meaning between CoPs are one of the keys to improving the practice of each CoP. I now understand one of my key roles as being that of a broker—and that I have been doing it for years.



I will call this use of multimembership to transfer some element of one practice to another brokering…. The role of managers is often construed in terms of directing people, but it is worth noting that a good part of their activities have more to do with brokering across boundaries between practices…. Brokers are able to make new connections across communities of practice, enable coordination, and—if they are good brokers—open new possibilities for meaning. p. 109

Etienne Wenger, 1988, Communities of Practice: Learning as a Social System, Cambridge Univ. Press

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Critical Inquiry & Collaborative Workstyles

As described in a report for the Shaping the Learning Environment course and another one for the Leadership and Technology course, I have changed the way I work in the office. I am no longer the weird Mac guy in the back office…. I’m now part of a more collaborative environment, helped by putting the insights from Peopleware into action, understanding better how to seek and give advice and help with routine tasks and big decisions as well. These first steps have made it much more likely that my suggestions will be taken positively as I have been asked to share with the staff and board my technology proposal and vision for what the church can become in the next few years. I’m now quite bold and confident in my desire to share my vision for what can happen, but I’m also much more prepared to negotiate the different ways that the vision will change as it is shared by others.



from the conclusion to my CBAM report:

All of us in the office are spontaneously helping each other with a lot of … tasks – there is much less sense of ‘territory’ and specialization. One act of collaboration leads to another. There is an atmosphere of wanting to learn. (We’re a CoP, and eventually they will all know what that is).



Mentoring

Although I was reluctant to do so for a number of reasons, I have begun two formal mentoring relationships, and a number of informal ones. The details of the first of those relationships is described in a report for the Mentoring and Leadership course. That relationship has continued and promises to be a most beneficial one for both of us. CAB has finished his initial training as a coordinator, and together we are actively planning an upcoming course. Although still leery of the time demands of a mentoring relationship, I now see it as crucial to developing lasting commitments and relationships which will outlast difficulties.

Developing Dialogue

During this program, I met with some of my Japanese colleagues regularly. At several different times, they have been challenged and excited as I described what I’ve been learning. They want me to hurry up and finish and design a new program for them. But since I have to explain everything in Japanese, some of the key concepts have been a real challenge to communicate. I can speak about a lot of things, but educational philosophy has its own lingo – whichever language you’re speaking. One of the ‘aha’ experiences I had was when I was talking about ‘negotiated meaning.’

I used an alternate phrase—’constructing new meaning between us,’ would be how it translates. They seemed to get it OK, and then they were surprised at my surprise—of course we have to negotiate meaning. And of course they are right – in Japanese culture, negotiated meaning is a key concept—from my Western, Christian, absolutist perspective, meaning is meaning, and we may understand or misunderstand different parts of it, but the meaning exists out there somewhere objectively. It is Truth. To most Japanese, all truth at this social level is of course relativistic. Its meaning has to be investigated, rephrased, double-checked, and yes, re-negotiated when it seems we do not see things the same way. It’s one reason that Japanese meetings last so long, and that everything is never ever completely settled.

My wife has shaken her head at me for years because I am not a dialog-oriented person. I listen, and I speak, and I try to be sensitive and catch the meaning that another person is working from, but truly, I do not dialog unless they already agree with me at least in some respect. I don’t negotiate. I put the facts on the table, take it or leave it, and if we don’t agree, then I’m ready to move on. By nature I’m a bottom-line, fish-or-cut-bait type of person, and if one thing doesn’t work out, I’m looking around for the next thing.

The emphasis on dialogue as a form of learning and collaboration as a lifestyle – not just working together, but synthesizing—these are aspects of learning that I had not really practiced so much. But I’ve begun to do so far more. And it has been transformative in a number of respects. I’ve always been able to synthesize ideas when I could get them from books or from some other source where I could pick and choose what to take and what to leave. But dialogue requires that you engage with people and work out meanings, if possible, even when you do not agree. I’ve begun the process of learning how to learn from others by listening and engaging—not just passively listening or listening and then walking away without a significant exchange of ideas.

Once I realized that I was a member of several different CoPs that formed a constellation—according to Wenger's definition of shared characteristics listed above, I was able to look at my practice in each CoP in an inter-related, rather than an isolated manner. I spotted even more overlaps of practice than I had realized before. All of the CoPs in my initial diagram share at least 4 or 5 of these characteristics. So, for example, I have been able to bring insights and techniques from Hawthorne Gospel Church and Hinoki Educational Services into Touch the World, where I serve as a trainer, and Star of Hope, where I am on the governing board. And I plan to take key practices from TTW and help adapt them to both HGC and Hinoki. Each has something to give to the others.

I have made the connections, first in insight, then in deliberate dialog and action.

ARP 99-2000 Conclusion

What did I learn?

In a word, I was looking for a good solid vehicle, something like a well-built bus, that would carry lots of people and be reliable. Instead, I learned how to help others figure out how we can build that bus, or a Honda Civic, or a 747, or whatever is appropriate. In that respect I got just what I wanted from the inquiry, which included all of my coursework, readings and discussions.

I learned that you don't design a curriculum alone. Even if you were a genius, it wouldn't be a good idea. It would rob others of their contribution and their ownership of the results.

I came into the program wanting to be a better technician....and believe I've now become more of an engineer -- not a loner engineer, but a social engineer.

In the following respects I got more than I bargained for.

The (Social) Nature of Learning

Two of the books we studied early in the program had a big impact on my perception of how people learn new concepts and skills. The Book Of Learning and Forgetting and Situated Learning - Legitimate Peripheral Participation were like bombshells, especially as they connected with what I already knew about language learning. It took a while for the key insights to sink in, but once I got it, I was more excited about learning, and yet more confused about how to engender it, than I had ever been in my teaching career. This picture became a touchstone for my understanding of the social process of learning:

My son is a drummer. He is also an avid graphics artist. He did not learn either of these skills in a classroom, though he has been helped by a couple of tutors here and there. Trained in drumming on a regular studio set, he "picked up" the skills necessary to become an acknowledged master of the djembe, a West African drum. This is one of his life's passions -- one that he spends enormous time on, both alone and in two different bands. He learned to drum by being around other drummers, by desiring to be like them. And he takes great satisfaction in the beauty he creates with his drums and on a computer screen with Photoshop or Illustrator. His whole sense of himself has changed from having become skilled in these areas.

My understanding of this process, and just how normative it is for all of us, was considerably deepened by reading Wenger's Communities of Practice book. It built upon my background in anthropology that helped me more thoroughly understand some of the key social factors in learning.

So I have slowly begun to put the pieces of a theory of learning together - how a community of learning is engendered.

It is not about curricula - the content - so much as it is about the relationships between those who know the content and have the skills, and those who don't. Learning takes place when a neophyte wishes to join in a shared practice, and is given the necessary help to do so. We learn by doing, but there is more to it than being shoved into a role for which we are totally unprepared. We learn from those around us who are a little ahead of us, or the patient few who are far more skilled and give us small, authentic tasks to accomplish. My son began to learn drumming from an instructor who gave him small, doable but enjoyable tasks, and then he progressed to the point that he could begin to learn from others without formal instruction. He has become able to hear and imitate beats and subtleties that I cannot even distinguish. He has been making music with others, giving and receiving pleasure and blessing in the process. And now he is learning how to play the guitar, transferring much of his hard-earned drumming skill into that task. He hears and attempts to imitate, or he asks someone more skilled, or he looks on the internet and downloads guitar chords from music he likes, and then practices the chords, 'playing until his fingers bled,' as the song goes. He has become a musician, helped by other musicians, not by fake lessons but by authentic, enjoyable production of music.

Craig has moved beyond a 'curricular' model here -- he has not only mastered one specific song or set of songs after another, but he is now a full-fledged practitioner, because he was able to move step-by-authentic-and-postive-step from the periphery of practice to full practice. There will always be those who are more skillful, but he has been able to enter full practice through a whole series of social relationships, which has changed his identity. Like someone learning another language, he did not spend the majority of his time studying the phonemes, morphemes, syntax and grammar in isolation - but in meaningful practice. He is fluent in music-- at least his dialect of it.

There is a powerful example here. It was one of my chief epiphanies.