INTRODUCTION/BACKGROUND
Charles Sturt University has over 800 academics registered as graduate research supervisors. A supervisor’s role is a multifaceted one. The role includes ensuring timely completions and providing support more broadly throughout and beyond the candidature including supporting well-being and also career aspirations (Cater-Steel et al., 2017). While fundamental to creating a vibrant knowledge community for our graduate researchers, CSU’s supervisors are dispersed across a broad geographical area in regional NSW, often in small numbers, or siloed by discipline. Added to this, balancing supervision with wider workload may mean the ability to engage in regular supervisory training is curtailed.
To address these issues, the authors led the development of face-to-face and online Communities of Practice (CoPs) for supervisors to encourage cross discipline interaction and knowledge sharing. According to Wenger, a Community of Practice is a learning partnership focused on a particular domain or practice (Farnsworth et al., 2016). Through social interactions, members of a CoP learn from each other, while developing a mutually negotiated competence around that domain of practice (Wenger, 1998). CoPs have been successfully implemented in a number of Australian and international universities (for example, Cater-Steel et al., 2017; Hill & Vaughan, 2018), and through the Teaching Academy at Charles Sturt.
AIMS/OBJECTIVES
The CoPs were designed to support and expand supervisors’ understanding of their practice and identify additional training or skills through formal and informal information sharing. This presentation will explore how adopting a Communities of Practice (CoP) approach can be used to harness existing research supervisory capacity and engage supervisors at all levels in reflective discussion and knowledge-sharing.
APPROACH
The presentation will chart the development of multimodal CoPs for research supervisors that utilised an action research ethos. Each of the authors contributed written reflections after each session, which were combined with session notes and regular ‘debriefs’ designed to consider the challenges and successes of each CoP session while planning for subsequent sessions.
PRELIMINARY FINDINGS
Whilst this project is still in its early stages, there have been some key learnings that have led to ‘rethinking’ our approach to establishing these Community of Practices. These include:
- Differences between the online and face-to-face CoPs
- Knowledge-sharing and differentials in skills awareness
- Supervisory capacity and the desire to ‘make connections’
- Things we would do differently or avoid
- Next steps
CONCLUSION:
While preliminary responses indicate that the Communities of Practice are considered vital by many participants, different structures are required for both modes to foster maximum engagement by participants. This presentation will expand on the learnings to date and welcomes discussion and engagement from attendees.
REFERENCES
Cater-Steel, A., McDonald, J., Albion, P., Redmond, P. (2017). Sustaining the Momentum: A Cross-Institutional Community of Practice for Research Supervisors. In: J. McDonald, A. Cater-Steel. (eds) Implementing Communities of Practice in Higher Education. Springer. https://doi-org.ezproxy.csu.edu.au/10.1007/978-981-10-2866-3_1
Farnsworth, V., Kleanthous, I., & Wenger-Trayner, E. (2016), Communities of Practice as a Social Theory of Learning: A Conversation with Etienne Wenger, British Journal of Educational Studies, 64:2, 139-160, DOI: 10.1080/00071005.2015.1133799
Hill, G., & Vaughan, S. (2018). Conversations about research supervision – Enabling and accrediting a community of practice model for research degree supervisor development. Innovations in Education and Teaching International, 55(2). 153–163 https://doi.org/10.1080/14703297.2017.1406388
Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice: Learning, meaning and identity. Cambridge University Press
