Beginning in 2017, UNSW initiated an explicit strategy to provide academic staff with the opportunity to focus their time and energy on education through education-focussed (EF) roles, and to support them in this work. A common challenge for EF academics is their feelings of disconnection from not only their colleagues in their field, but from other EF academics across their universities and in the larger academic community.
To address this challenge, UNSW introduced EF communities of practice (CoPs): vibrant groups that gather academics to share expertise, explore innovations in teaching, and provide a welcoming place to connect with colleagues and foster a sense of professional identity.
Collins Fleischner (Lead, Academic & Education Focussed Development) said, “When we established the EF program, we knew from the existing literature on EF roles that EF academics might feel a sense of disconnection from their disciplinary networks. This was a new type of academic role and we wanted to provide supports to help staff navigate this new career pathway. The EF CoPs initially brought our EF academics together across discipline areas – to build a sense of community amongst the EFs – but we also wanted the CoPs to connect our EF academics with their teaching and research colleagues and professional staff at the university, to foster greater understanding between them, and greater recognition of EF academics’ educational expertise. One of the most wonderful aspects of our EF CoPs is that some of it was by design (the initial topic areas, the project officers, the planning and the end-of-year reporting), but a great deal of it (the events, the resources created, the practices shared, mentoring relationships and friendships) has been organic and community-driven.”
The EF program has built on research by Bronfenbrenner (1994), Woodward (1997), Wenger (1998) and Wenger-Trayner and Wenger-Trayner (2015) to bring not only UNSW’s EF academics together with teaching and research academics and professional staff, first within UNSW, but to expand the CoP program to institutions across Australia and internationally (including New Zealand and India). The CoPs have matured into cross-disciplinary, cross-functional and cross-institutional groups, and are also now integrated into formal decision-making processes on key educational concerns, consulted by university committees on issues such as assessment, academic integrity, equity and diversity, and student wellbeing.
Each CoP is centred around a topic or domain (for example, digital assessment, enhancing first-year experience, world citizenship, or student wellbeing). The CoPs support the development of expertise and experience in both teaching practice and the scholarship of teaching and learning through discussion, workshops, and mentoring relationships. The CoPs are each coordinated by two or more EF leads, who guide their CoP’s activities and coordinate their meetings, where participants share ideas, practice, and expertise, work on innovative projects together and catch up. The leads themselves have reported benefiting greatly from their involvement, mentioning the supportive and engaged environment that CoPs provide, the opportunity to showcase their colleagues and connect with people outside their faculty, the chance to gain leadership experience and contribute to the development of institution-wide teamwork, the enjoyment of working in a team, the satisfaction of providing guidance to recent alumni and newer academics, opportunities to influence policy areas such as assessment reform, and the chance to accumulate evidence of leadership for promotion applications.
A/Prof. Lynn Gribble particularly noted that co-leading the Artificial Intelligence CoP with Prof. Carol Oliver gave her a chance to develop her skills in distributive (or distributed) leadership, an approach that stresses sharing both responsibility and agency (Jones, 2022). “Leadership opportunities that are education-focussed are critical, because it is more than moving into leadership by taking on more administrative tasks. Instead, these leadership roles capitalise educational expertise to grow and develop others.”
Dr Nirmani Wijenayake Gamachchige, co-lead of the Teamwork CoP, commented, “It's a leadership opportunity in an area I’m genuinely passionate about, which makes it feel less like work and more fun.”
A/Prof. Karin Watson, who directs the CoP program, said:
“Our CoPs now have international membership, with more than half being teaching and research academics. The program is still based at UNSW, but we welcome members from other universities around Australia and internationally. We support them with project-officer and administrative support and ask them to give us a plan for the year ahead, so there’s a kind of direction to it, but we don’t say, ‘This is what you have to do this year.’ That makes these CoPs unique.”
The success of UNSW’s CoPs program has led to invitations to present at conferences such as the Higher Education Research and Development Society of Australasia (HERDSA), the Advance HE Teaching & Learning Conference, and the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (ISSOTL), and sparked interest from universities such as the Universities of Sydney and Melbourne, the National University of Singapore and Te Herenga Waka/Victoria University of Wellington. A number of these universities have begun applying UNSW’s CoP approach to form their own CoPs.
Prof. Susan Rowland, Vice-Provost at the University of Sydney, is enthusiastic about the CoP program:
“Communities of practice are an excellent way to provide support to academics who are just starting out as educators, and to give those who are more established a group of people with whom they can brainstorm, collaborate, and share their work. At the University of Sydney, we like the CoP approach UNSW is using. We see it as a particularly important approach for us, too.”
Similarly, Prof. John Randal, Director, Teaching-Intensive Academic Career Pathway at Te Herenga Waka/Victoria University of Wellington, commented, “As Director of a recently established teaching-intensive (EF) academic pathway at VUW, now three years old and approximately 50 staff strong, I consider that the open invitation to participate in UNSW's CoPs is both incredibly generous and immensely beneficial. Being able to engage over mission-critical learning and teaching issues that we all grapple with is useful in and of itself, but the CoPs are also helping us develop aspirations for what our own EF community might become, and how we might drive our university forward.”
Bronfenbrenner, U. (1994). Ecological models of human development. In International Encyclopedia of Education, 3:1643-1647. Oxford: Elsevier.
Jones, S. (2022). An ecological view of distributed leadership for higher education. In International Perspectives on Leadership in Higher Education (pp. 255-269). Emerald Publishing Limited.
Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice: Learning, meaning, and identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wenger-Trayner, E. and Wenger-Trayner, B. (2015) An introduction to communities of practice: a brief overview of the concept and its uses. https://www.wenger-trayner.com/introduction-to-communities-of practice
Woodward, K. (Ed.). (1997). Identity and difference (Vol. 3). SAGE Publications Limited.