John Mitchell & Suzy McKenna

Communities of Practice change practice but not always or easily

Cohen and Prusak - CoP's are difficult to sustain

Practice has been the tricky one to embrace (earlier in this blog [September?] I have a graphic about practice in CoPs .that spells it out for me from a RTF workshop)

CoP valuable, but Hodkinson & Hodkinson also draw attention to the possibility of promoting poor practice & social inequality, or may obstruct or frustrate organisational learning (final point Huysman 2004)

Waltja CoP from 2004 had some interesting starting points as the participants had a strong awareness of what their communities needed, and then they formed the space to have discussion about their domain and practice. Has led to some participants completing a unit from the new Cert 4 in TAA. The purpose of the CoP was to look at the question of "What if we/ our communities knew about VET?"

A key element of the case studies that were used was the strong and considered facilitation including focus on trust to overcome poor practice, distance and language differences. Benefits are not always uniform for all participants within a CoP. CoPs do contribute to social learning and organisational learning/ development.