Interpreting a Community of Practice Perspective in University Mathematics Faculty Development

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Interpreting a Community of Practice Perspective
in University Mathematics Faculty Development

• Maria L. Blanton
• The James J. Kaput Center
• University of Massachusetts Dartmouth
• Despina A. Stylianou
• City College - The City University of New York

The research reported here was supported in part
by the National Science Foundation under Grant
REC- 0337703. Any opinions, findings, and
conclusions or recommendations expressed in this
material are those of the authors and do not
necessarily reflect the views of the National
Science Foundation.
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• How does a community of practice perspective
  help us understand faculty learning as (or if) it
  emerges in the context of faculty professional
  development?

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Community of Practice as a Lens on Learning

• Learning is characterized as legitimate
  peripheral participation in a community of
  practice, where people learn as they move from
  participation that is at first peripheral toward
  full participation in the sociocultural practices
  of a community (Lave Wenger, 1991, p. 29).
• Evidence of learning is seen through shifts in
  ones identity from newcomer to old-timer
  status.
• Shifts in identity occur as participants tell
  stories about personal changes they have
  experienced.

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Community of Practice Applied to K-12 Teacher
Learning

• Franke et al (2005)
• A critical ingredient of teacher learning in
  community is the struggle around making sense of
  practice.
• Artifacts (such as student work) serve as a tool
  to negotiate meaning about practice.
• Stein, Silver Smith (1998)
• Teachers in the community who had experienced
  real change in practice (old-timers) were
  central in the enculturation of newcomers into
  the practices of the community.

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Implications of this Research

• the underlying culture of the community must, at
  some level, embrace the need for change
• there must be experiences within the community
  that can support shifts in identity so that new
  participants become fully engaged in the
  practices of the community and
• community emerges around issues in which
  participants are willing to be engaged.

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• What do these ideas mean in the context of
  mathematics faculty professional development?
• While K-12 TPD has its own set of challenges,
  faculty professional development brings a unique
  set of issues (e.g., identity of faculty as
  experts in a field) which require us to rethink
  notions of community of practice in this
  particular setting.

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First...Faculty Seminar Design

• Participants 8-9 faculty mathematicians (75 of
  math department faculty) in a regional, mid-size
  university 1 PTVL 2-3 meetings per semester for
  3 semesters
• Organizing Principle long-term collaboration
  that integrates issues of content and pedagogy
• Mathematical focus Integrating mathematical
  proof more deeply into early undergraduate
  mathematics experience
• Use of artifacts such as student work and
  video-taped episodes of our classroom instruction
  to promote discussion about the teaching and
  learning of proof

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Preliminary Signs of an Emerging Community

• Willingness exhibited by faculty to participate
  in these seminars.
• The proposal by individual faculty to share data
  from their own classes on the topic of proof, in
  particular, to bring to the meetings copies of
  student written work as a point for discussion.
• The exchange of views on issues related to
  instruction of proof. These meetings provided a
  forum for faculty to share instructional ideas
  and debate about the role of proof in various
  courses they taught.
• Requests by faculty that we collaborate with them
  on specific courses they are teaching to embed
  ideas of mathematical proof into their course
  curriculum.
• Informal conversations with (and initiated by)
  faculty outside of seminars to discuss issues
  related to proof (Faculty wanted to engage about
  content, but pedagogy?)

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Competing Metaphors Academic Freedom vs
Apprenticeship
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IDENTITY What Are the Ideas Around Which Faculty
Engage?

• Student Learning Dissatisfaction with students
  performance - focus on students lack of
  mathematical knowledge rather than own
  instruction (THAT vs HOW)
• Curriculum Covering a prescribed syllabus or
  textbook, not the nature of tasks and the types
  learning these could support
• Instruction?
• -Not a topic that naturally arises in faculty
  discussions
• -Teacher-centered practice that included
  demonstration, using
• examples to clarify, and providing proofs of
  formal theorems -Lorties apprenticeship of
  observation (Boice, 1991)
• "inadequate grounding in pedagogy disadvantages
  the professor in creating learning-centered
  teaching" (Saroyan, et al, 2004, p. 16, 2004)

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WHAT CAN WE INFER ABOUT IDENTITY?

• Identity as teacher was (allowed to be)
  determined externally lack of reflective
  practice, more focus on whether students could
  do the math.
• This reflects the reality that participants held
  a professional identity as disciplinary expert
  rather than teaching scholar (Saroyan,
  Admundsen, McAlpine, Wester, Winer and Gandell ,
  (2004))
• Faculty entered the community as disciplinary
  experts. How could we support shifts in identity
  to that of teaching scholar?

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Identifying the Challenges

• Need for culture of professional development
• This requires sustained efforts to change the
  attitudes and repertoires of individuals, and to
  change the operating rules of an institution and
  its countless semi-sovereign constituent parts"
  (Frankman, p. 166, 2004). Challenge the
  institution often does not share the view of
  itself as not having best educational practice
  (Harris, 2004).
• Need for old-timers to enculturate newcomers
• Participants comprised a homogeneous group with
  respect to practice - they were all newcomers and
  held identities a disciplinary experts
• What experiences conspire to create an
  apprenticeship atmosphere?

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• Need to challenge the culture of service
• You have to a certain extent to sell the
  engineers that their students really need proof.
  In other words, right now, unfortunately, their
  attitude is that we want these skills, or they
  act as if the most important thing is skills.
• You have to convince the engineers that
  teaching proof is worthwhile they want these
  skills. And I find this a lot with the
  differential equations course, especially because
  it is a one-semester course where you have to get
  a whole lot of differential equations stuff done
  and the theory does suffer.
• How can a community of practice develop when it
  is lacking the sense of empowerment to make its
  own decisions regarding its practice?

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• Need for a language to mediate thinking about
  practice
• A community of practice includes a particular
  way of talking about a phenomenon (Riel, 1998).
• Participants ways of talking about teaching was
  rooted in content, not teaching scholarship
• If enculturating newcomers requires
  differentiated and mature (or maturing)
  experiences of practice to to be part of
  community conversations, how does this occur in
  groups that are homogeneous in their thinking and
  for which participants have new-comer status?

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Concluding Thoughts.

• Goal What insights does the lens of community
  of practice give us regarding issues of faculty
  professional development?
• More questions than answers!
• This work can be viewed as a first step for
  understanding how to design faculty professional
  development and connect design to theory
• Thinking about FPD from a situated learning
  perspective helped focus our thinking about
  design issues
• -we need to understand faculty identities from
  the start
• -we need to understand if our group is
  homogeneous - are all participants newcomers
• -we need to understand what kinds of
  experiences can enculturate disciplinary experts
  to that of teaching scholar - e.g., what role do
  artifacts play?