Rediscovering communities of practice in education

I was very pleased having Ricardo Barros-Castro from Universidad Javeriana in Colombia visiting Royal Holloway for several weeks this year of 2026.  He brought his enthusiasm and ideas (also Colombian arequipe!), and his research expertise in Communities of Practice (CoP).  

We were also grateful to have a research seminar in which Ricardo presented his latest co-authored work on CoP.  As the seminar progressed, we found ourselves discussing how best CoP can help improve education in our universities around the globe.  

A community of practice can be generically defined as a group of people with a shared enterprise (or shared set of enterprises or practices), where learning is nurtured and sustained through time.  

It is a bottom-up effort, where individuals get together periodically or regularly to learn from each other and advance their practices which they are are somehow passionate about.  

A community as a 'net' of fishermen

Not all members of a CoP need to have the same passion or degree of engagement.  Hence, the importance of allowing some people to begin in the 'periphery' of the community and if they want, to remain there.  Through time, other people might become more competente at certain practices, and hence move to the 'centre' of the community.  

Ricardo is currently exploring what it takes for several educational CoPs to thrive.  He and co-authors have devised and used instruments to assess this thriving. They have identified factors that could help a community.  They include:  

• Awareness of if/when a CoP needs to be set up or nurtured.

• Developing of goals and competences, and

• Making sure people participate and benefit

From findings studying these and other factors in three (3) different CoP, it seems that continuous and meaningful engagement could help a community survive in the long run and provide desired benefits to its participants.  How this engagement takes form would depend on what counts as participation for learning in a community.  

The presentation prompted an interesting discussion, in which Ricardo explained what a CoP is NOT.  It is not a group of people that have to accomplish a pre-defined task, with such definition coming or being derived from the outside.  Therefore, the learning goals of a community need to be established by participants themselves.  

It can therefore be said that in organisations, managers can suggest, but not impose, certain CoP orientations or goals for others.  Managers can facilitate the structuring and running of community groups.  In this regard, it becomes important to distinguish CoP goals from other educational goals.  The latter could, but not necessarily, become the result of communities working and learning, disseminating their learnings in the classroom and beyond.

Goal setting, negotiation, rehearsing or reifying of experiences in relation to practices, are part of what CoPs do.  To an outsider, or to a manager, a key challenge is that of being able to effectively observe or organise a community so that it creates and sustain a continuous learning flow.  

In the discussion, we mapped the possible presence of CoPs in our university by referring to an input-output model (see below).  This helped us identify and assess if/ how CoPs could help in meeting certain goals via indicators like student satisfaction and educator morale.  

An input-output model with CoP at the centre (Thanks to our colleague Lucy Gill-Simen for helping to draw it!)

Currently, many universities (both in Colombia and the UK) are finding challenging to continue improving education whilst satisfying demands from agencies that collect and disseminate indicators data (for instance QS).  At the same time, morale and dissatisfaction by students (and educators) seems to be on the increase.  

Ricardo was enfatic in clarifying that a CoP might not be the best solution for educational settings, where the need to profile them as achieving specific indicators has become or is the norm.  There could be other types of groupings, perhaps more short lived and hierarchically managed, where work could be developed (by managers, educators and why not, students) towards contributing to these indicators.  

From the presentation and discussion in Ricardo's seminar, it seems that it is also important to be able to unearth and study the internal processes by which CoP unfold.  Both processes and issues/factors could be assembled and studied as a 'learning system'.  

Several years ago and with Ricardo, we researched on such a possibility.  A main finding of our study at the time was that learning takes place in unexpected ways.  Such ways need to be acknowledged and nurtured if deemed relevant by and for learners.  

For educational settings which currently aim to standardise learning (so that it can be effectively quantified and measured), this finding seems to be counterintuitive.  Nevertheless, it needs to be included in our efforts to make learning more effective, inclusive and meaningful, if settings like universities are to continue delivering what society expects us to:  a good education.

Sheerwater rediscovered follow ups

A photo about our event in October 29 2025 reported in the Woking News and Mail 

After our successful event in 2025 "Sheerwater rediscovered!" (also reported in this blog), in 2026 I have been following up with several activities which I would like to share and reflect on.  

Here is a summary to date: 

• In November 7^th, 2025, and thanks to the support of the Mascot Hub and St Michael’s church, I was radio interviewed in the BBC Surrey Breakfast by Mr James Cannon (at 7:21am). I offered a quick summary of the project leading to the event, and highlighted the key project finding that “The Sheerwater community is still alive, we just need to know where to look for it.” 

 

• Also in November 18^th,  Mr Paul Salt visited Royal Holloway, University of London (my workplace) to talk about the “Sheerwater group” to the business school’s M.Sc. students.   This Facebook© group of around 2.3k members currently acts as a main forum for discussion and news about the Sheerwater community issues. Paul engaged very well with our students, and they enjoyed his company.  He made us all aware of the importance of having clear boundaries in both the design and use of social media and technology in general. Thank you Paul, it was a pleasure having you on campus! 

 

Sheerwater resident Paul Salt talking to Royal Holloway M.Sc. students (AI in Business and Business Analytics 2025-2026, November 18^th, 2025)

 

• In January 14^th 2026 I was invited to talk to teachers about the history of Sheerwater at the Broadmere Primary Academy in Sheerwater. The feedback received was very positive. One of them suggested to have the same talk at the David Bishop Brown secondary school next door. This is something to be considered for further funding and dissemination.  Many thanks to Tracey Francis (St Michael's Church in Sheerwater) and Karen Barham (Headteacher at Broadmere) for making this talk possible. 

 Presenting a history of Sheerwater at Broadmere Primary Academy

• On the 23rd of April 2026 and thanks to the invitation of Trevor Wenden, Sheerwater Football Club secretary and a long standing member of this club, I attended a Sheerwater residents meeting which included residents and local councillors.  During the meeting, I ventured to speak out to present our research project and one of its posters (history of Sheerwater).  Having listened to several problematic issues raised by residents during the meeting, I suggested that our project gave us the key suggestion to work together to face these and other issues as it was done in the past. I also offered an idea: to join forces with the Sheerwater Football club to help clean the rubbish that is still lying around from the buildings that have been vacated for more than a year now.  Am happy to report that the community engagement team of Woking Borough Council had a similar idea, and in May 22 2026 they organised a community litter picking event. Whether they took my suggestion or not, that will be up to the jury (of the meeting) to decide.  

• Throughout the football season of 2025-2026, I have become an almost staunch supporter of the Sheerwater Football club.  It is a great community of fans and volunteers which has given me a place to learn more about Sheerwater, take my children to live football on Saturdays and meet lovely people. We are to volunteer for the children's tournament on the 13th of June and are looking forward to see the mini-sheers in action.  

As I finish writing his post, and finally have managed to join the facebook Sheerwater group,  I can still say that the Sheerwater community is much alive, and that now I am more familiar with the places and events where this happens. I hope to help them continue rediscovering their communities and regaining a sense of hope for the future.   We all need it!

New course on creativity and problem solving

2025-2026: New wine in old bottles for creativity and problem solving (MN2515)?

No. 

Through our revamping of business education, we (me and colleagues) have kept the same course code.  

But this is a new version of our undergraduate management course on creativity and problem solving at Royal Holloway.

Under the new business and management portfolio, it has been a a very positive relief to be able to include systems thinking ideas more openly and extensively in this course.  And many students seem to have liked it.

As the course leader, this year I faced now a different problem: Which systems ideas or methods to include alongside their counterparts in creativity? Since 2015 (year of inception of this course), I have been combining creativity with other areas of knowledge.  In 2017, I integrated ideas from process management, which also included the study of six sigma and lean approaches to improvement, and how the later (lean) has been used with a systems thinking lens.  

This year, an answer to the above question has emerged gradually.    

I decided to start by raising the importance of thinking in terms of systems, something that could help us as individuals or organisations deal with VUCA situations. 

VUCA, a military term to account for situations exhibiting volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. In the systems thinking world we name those "messes".  Such situations do not have a clear cut formulation or solution.  Moreover, they change as we try to solve their problems, because there are interconnected elements.  It is better to see them as systems which have environments.  Any change on the system or environment will affect both.  

In the course, I asked my students to choose situations of their own, and start treating them like messes.  They would then express them with the help of systemic perspectives (Jackson, 2024), a kind of metaphor or lens that highlights certain aspects of the situation whilst obscuring others.  

Students would then select and assemble three (3) relevant issues from their expressing of the situation as a system. They would formulate three (3) solutions to tackle those issues. 

We spent some time talking and practising complexity as a specific lens to identify patterns in VUCA situations.  We used Kumu software to model situations.  This is a great tool, easy to use (and free) that allows us to model systems as sets of elements and connections (using flows and stocks for example).  We can also document and label all these elements.  As seen below, we practised modelling systems with the theme of sleep (self-care).  Together with students, we identified some possibilities to improve our own self-care, creatively.   

For the second part of the course, students were asked to refine one of the chosen solutions using the six thinking hats creativity technique of Edward de Bono.  After, they were to present their solution to relevant audiences, and receive feedback.  

With the hats techniques, many students were able to add features to their solutions, and consider if it was the 'right' solution.  When presenting it, they received very useful feedback (some students used the hats to get the feedback).  They also ventured to model what had happened when presenting their solutions.  I suggested they could use another software tool for this modelling: Canva-AI.  

During workshops, I noticed that the use of this tool took students sometime.  Not only to learn about it, but to get the outputs they needed.  So for their second assessment, I made explicit where it could be used.  I also made it explicit which content needed to be generated in Kumu.  My aim was to encourage students to appropriately learn both tools.  

The final part of the assessment was to design a system with the feedback obtained.  Students could choose to design, using Kumu, a system archetype (similar to the one presented above, to identify and address patterns of behaviour); a human activity system or HAS (a purposeful system that could be discussed to identify possible accommodations between parties); or a systems boundary, which could be drawn by referring to Werner Ulrich's critical systems heuristics (CSH) or Gerald Midgley's boundary critique.  

I was very and positively impressed with many students' work.  They took it very seriously and engaged with situations varying from our university library services or accommodation to restaurants, pubs and commuting.  In their engagements, they also used the models or presentations they had produced for their course, and this helped them communicate with people who had similar or different views to them.  

Moreover, when asked to reflect on their attempts to be positively creative, many students acknowledged the value of their ideas when presenting them to others.  They also valued the resources they used (i.e. networks of friends) and overall, the possibility of using their knowledge to benefit others meaningfully, so that they could help (at least on paper) solve messy situations.  

Throughout the course, there as a perennial issue of students attendance to face to face sessions, and this seems to have affected their engagement and performance.  This is something of a systemic issue, as it is experienced not only in my course but in others.  Many students do part-time work nowadays.  Others carefully decide, on financial grounds, which sessions need to be attended and which do not.  And others are still finding the meaning of what it means to be at university.  

When I look back at this course in the previous years, I can see many differences, not only in the content or the groups of students that have taken it, but also in myself.  I am more confident to put systems thinking ideas (including my own) about, to use them to educate my students, and to support their interests to apply knowledge beyond the classroom, if that is what they want to do.  

What about the future?  Well, who knows.  My only idea to face the future with this course is to try to stay open to emerging opportunities and challenges.  And to support students who want to broaden their boundaries of thinking and action with this course.