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. 

Circular Economy and Digitalisation Creativities

April 2026. We have finished, colleagues and I, delivering an undergraduate management course titled "Digitalisation and Circular Economy". It was a very interesting course (I think), where we created a synergy between two paradigms:  Digital Transformation (DT), and Circular Economy (CE).  

The DT paradigm has been for longer.  It proposes a radical rethinking of organisational or business practices which, according to many, can be simplified or accelerated, if not obliterated, with digital technologies.  

The CE paradigm, most prominent in Europe than other regions in the world, points to a similar direction of simplification by creating or closing loops in practices so that their resource use can be recycled, reduced or prevented.  

A champion of this paradigm in the is the Ellen MacArthur Foundation.  

I was fortunate to work with colleagues that introduced me to this foundation many years ago (thank you Rokiah from LEAP Micro AD) and other colleagues at Royal Holloway which know more about digitalisation and DT.  I provided my knowledge and expertise in CE which I have developed in projects like "Somebody's food" (mentioned already in this blog).  And I also used my work experience and ideas on systemic innovation provided by my former PhD supervisor Gerald Midgley.  

We were also fortunate to involve our campus senior gardener Daniel Steel who kindly walked us through different sites.  He talked about how him and his team are working to restore native species.  This to him is an essential form of CE.  

Visiting the green composting facility. 

If we consider our campus as a system, we can then think of how this system can keep a better balance between its different elements.  Native species seem to have been overtaken by foreign ones.  Us humans seem not to take notice of what goes on.  In our daily lives, we consciously or unconsciously marginalise certain elements of this system. 

Having another look at species that live next to our Moore Annex Building. 

What can we do about this?  In our course, we asked students to use their creativity to identify issues of concern on campus and beyond, issues that have been also flagged up by proposers of the CE paradigm when they talk about reduce, reuse and regenerate.  

With those issues, students were to develop digital prototypes of a solution, which they then refined by reflecting on why it could fail or non fail, if we refine the solution with emerging digital technologies like data analysis, internet of things (IoT), blockchain, artificial intelligence (AI) and so on.  

With the above, we hoped students could then better understand the possibilities and challenges involved when we think of rethinking (radically) how we are to operate as CE-driven individuals and organisations.   In particular, if as individuals or future managers we consider the potential inclusion (or marginalisation) of valuable species or resources (i.e. food and its waste; clothing garments; vehicles, etc) in what we do. 

I was impressed with the quality of students work, in particular with their reflective accounts of why/how could their solutions (not) work.  I also perceived that they value the idea of digital product passports to help organisations trace products and alert consumers to events, for example when a product needs or can be reused or recycled.  Perhaps they value this idea too much, which in terms of creativity narrows the spectrum of possibilities.  

The futures of this course and creativity look bright.  The rise of AI offers possibilities that could be realised by adopting a responsible attitude to its adoption. CE needs to continue if we are to make positive impacts in our planet.  I hope students become better at seeing situations from different perspectives, considering tradeoffs of implementation.  

Presenting a poster about our course at the Royal Holloway Education Conference in April 2026. 

I also hope to continue helping myself and them to manage the changes that emerge when we decide (or are decided) to innovate.  

Sheerwater rediscovered!

Since 2014, the Sheerwater housing estate near Woking, in Surrey (UK), has been the subject of a partially completed regeneration project which is negatively affecting residents and despite some achievements. 

The regeneration project was stopped due to Woking Borough Council facing financial difficulties. At the end of 2025, some decisions were announced to refurbish dwellings that had already been vacated. Others were to be sold for redevelopment.     

December 2025 Map of Sheerwater planned refurbished/completed/to sell dwellings

(courtesy of the Mascot Hub) 

The Systemic Life Stories Project

I have been a regular visitor to the Sheerwater Parkview community centre since 2015.  In 2025 and after a very intersting conversation with a university colleague, I decided to apply for funding to organise a research project with Sheerwater residents and organisations. 

I partnered with the MascotHub (a partnership that provides aid and advice to residents) and the SurreyHistory Centre (a council sponsored organisation with more than 16 million historical records about Surrey). I recruited Dr Cecilia Loureiro from the Business School and Isabelle Kemp from the Social Science Impact Accelerator team. The project effectively ran between July and December 2025, with a main exhibition-workshop event on the 29th of October.  

 

Mr Paul Salt (left), resident of Sheerwater for 61 years being interviewed at the Mascot Office (September 2025).

 

With the help of partner organisations and personal contacts, I interviewed residents for their life stories. Using the systems thinking rich picture technique, with the information obtained from the interviews we (myself and Cecilia) produced and disseminated a visual history of Sheerwater as told by residents.  

A history of Sheerwater

We organised the picture (see above) into three (3) stages:  a ‘past’ (of resilience), a ‘present’ (of diversity) and a ‘future’ (of hope). In a nutshell, the past shows a community where people cared for each other.  The present shows the arrival of diverse community groups, supported by new facilities and by social media communication.  The reader can zoom in in the picture above for more detail.  

The future of Sheerwater

The future of Sheerwater as perceived by residents, is about building bridges between different community groups or constituencies.  

Participants at the "Sheerwater Rediscovered!" event, October 2025, Surrey History Centre. 

There are challenges and opportunities to do so.  A key challenge is to facilitated inter-group communication and understanding.   One opportunity to address this challenge as proposed by participants at the main project event (pictured above) is to design disseminate a welcome pack and restablish a community newsletter.  

During 2026, this possibility has been mentioned to representatives from some Sheerwater organisations.  There could be scope to do so, provided that there is an adequate form of leadership to take it forward, and that an appropriate format (i.e. electronic or other) is agreed between interested parties.

Hope for the future

We (myself included) are to 'move on' from what Sheerwater was: a fantastic, a very happy time (as told by many residents).  We are now in the present where, according to the philosopher Bying Chul Han (2024), it is still possible to act with hope and despite a sense of despair: to do something meaningful, to do something for others, spontaineously or in improvised forms.  To be open to possibilities as we do when we 'dream'; to positively turn to each other (positively), to trust in each other, and search for those possibilities together.  

The hope, paraphrasing the philosopher Byung Chul Han (2024) is for Sheerwater residents and groups to be open to accept that the future is uncertain, and that hope "increases our sensibility for what-is-not-yet, on which we have no direct influence" (p.27).  

With hope, the future becomes then up for the taking.  Let's try to infuse a good sense of hope in Sheerwater.  As we do when we cheer the Sheerwater Football Club team:

Come on Sheers!, Up the Sheers! 

Reference

Han, B. C. (2024). The spirit of hope. John Wiley & Sons.

Note

Further details about the event and the project “Systemic Life Stories for regeneration:  Helping Sheerwater” can be seen at: 

https://pure.royalholloway.ac.uk/en/projects/systemic-life-stories-for-regeneration-helping-sheerwater-social-/, accessed April 2026

 

In the classroom - what are we all doing here? Being seriously playful?

We now have different lifestyles that are part of our higher education.  Busier, mobile, remote, what sometimes is called hybrid. 

Students seem to be pensive in the picture, busy, and so am I as an educator. 

No doubt, social media (ever present, even in students' laptops!) has invaded our lifestryles and classrooms.  For the last few years, I get increasingly worried when I notice students checking their mobile phones, or typing fast in their laptops or tablets/  Something is going on!

What are we all doing here?

As an educator, I try to relate the exercise to concepts already explained in lectures. Some questions come and go when I check on students. It seems we all learn, or try to, whilst paying attention to our lives outside the classroom.

The technologies are supposed to help us remember, practice, get feedback, personalise. They are supposed to be the true complement of hybrid learning. Online access to material, simulations, presentations, exercises, case studies, discussions. All of these learning resources are there.

In many cases, instead, these technologies are allowing us to escape the interaction, the conversation, the reflection. They are allowing us to escape the classroom.

Like Edgar Morin (2016) says, part of the problem is that we have fragmented knowledge into disciplines. We have severed connections between knowledge, experience and learning. We need to rediscover such connections.

In one of my books (2020), I made an attempt to do so by bringing the idea that it is possible, within and outside the classroom, to play and be serious, to let our best selves come to the fore and help us be creative.  In the class, there are opportunities to be seriously playful.  

The results were unexpected. In one session, some students took videos of me playing the flute to create an association between music and numeracy. In another (an examination), others complained when the more 'serious' display (a graphic of a linear equation) did not show. I remember panicking at the time and solving the problem as fast as I could.  Some serious students said that this should not have happened.  And they were right.  Only that I felt as if I was in the wrong place trying to nurture my creativity and theirs.  

This las experience also taught me that there is still a long way to become seriously playful in management education.  Many university administrators operate too inflexibly and pass the blame to others, without considering that perhaps they are also part of the problems that emerge.   Luckily, the classroom still is a space to create, but we need to be there in body and soul to fully do so.  


After this and other experiences, I have changed focus (I also stopeed teaching and leading on big courses - 400 students and over!). I have designed exercises and assessments that aim to be more interactive, and I try my best to check the display of information.   

I have also ventured outside the classroom.  I also ask students to go around campus and observe situations, talk to venue managers or other 'customers', so that they also ask questions.

So, going back to the question

So, to the question of: "What are we all doing here?", I can only answer that we are simply here and there. We should try to be here, not try to achieve too much when we play with creativity, and be aware that social media (the gateway to the 'there' ) is also a member of our classes. 

We need to manage our technologies carefully, so that not all the attention to the here goes away.  And we need to find the appropriate spaces to be seriously playful with creativity  

References

Córdoba-Pachón, J.R. (2020). Creativity in Management Education: A Systemic Rediscovery. London: Palgrave McMillan. Have a look at the spirit of play and seriousness, and the experiences chapters.

Morin, E. (2016). Enseñar a vivir. Manifiesto para cambiar la educación. Barcelona: Paidos. A well explained vision for systemic education.