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.