Workshop co-presented with Keith Pond at the Chartered Association of Business Schools #LTSE2017 in Bristol, 25 April 2017. Developed in collaboration with the L'boro SBE Community of Practice founders, Chris WIlson and Alex WIlson.

1. From Disciplinary Teaching to Scholarly Teaching -
Action Research in a Community of Practice
Workshop for Chartered ABS Conference, 25 April 2017
http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/sbe/contact/
Gabi Witthaus, Keith Pond, Alex Wilson, Chris Wilson
School of Business & Economics

2. Workshop Outline
1. Action research overview
2. Community of Practice (CoP) overview
3. Group activity
4. Discussion and wrap-up

3. Are you a scholarly teacher?
 On what evidence do you make decisions about
your teaching?
 How does this meet the standards you set yourself
for evidence-based research?

4. The Scholarship of Teaching & Learning
 How might we think of teaching practice, and the evidence
of student learning, to be investigated, analysed,
represented and debated?
 Insider research – may be used to develop:
 personal knowledge
 local knowledge
 public knowledge
(Weller, 2016, p.218)

5. Communities of Practice
‘Communities of
Practice’ (CoPs) allow
participants to share
common concerns to
fulfil individual and group
goals (Lave and Wenger
1991; Wenger et al.
2002).
Image by laurent on Flickr, CC-BY-NC-SA

6. CoPs in Higher Education
 In HE, CoPs have been employed to stimulate dialogue to
enhance teaching practice (Lindkvist 2005, Roberts 2006,
MacKenzie 2010).
 Recent literature confirms benefits of CoPs for participants:
 Collegiality,
 dialogue,
 sharing of knowledge,
 social learning and
 collaboration
(Nixon & Brown, 2013;
Ward & Selvester, 2012;
McDonald et al., 2008;
Mayne et al., 2015)

7. Our CoP at Loughborough
 Within the School of Business and Economics
(SBE), with 140 academic staff and 3,500 students
 Regular face-to-face workshops and online
resources for academics

8. Action Research in Communities
of Practice: the Beachball Model
Gabi Witthaus & Keith Pond, CABS LTSE 2017

9. Groupwork
 Plan an action research project that you would be
willing to (eventually) share publicly.
 Consider:
1. What is the problem/ issue? (See next slide)
2. What are you trying to achieve?
3. What do you know about the current situation?
4. How will you gather data?
5. What change might you introduce as a result of your
analysis?
(Weller, 2016, p.228)

10. Possible Action Research Questions
1. What actions do my students take as a result of
the feedback I give them?
2. In what ways does the provision of Lecture
Capture affect my students’ learning?
3. What factors related to my teaching make my
students feel more included?
4. What impact does group work skills training have
on the outcomes of group work?
5. What do my students understand by
‘independent learning’?

11. Gabi Witthaus: g.r.witthaus@lboro.ac.uk
Keith Pond: k.pond@lboro.ac.uk
Image by Orin Zebest on Flickr, CC-BY
Contact

12. References
 Lave J., Wenger, E. (1991). Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation (Learning in Doing: Social, Cognitive
and Computational Perspectives). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
 Lindkvist, L. (2005). Knowledge Communities and Knowledge Collectivities: A Typology of Knowledge Work in
Groups*. Journal of Management Studies, 42(6), pp. 1189-1210.
 MacKenzie, J., Bell, S., Bohan, J., Brown, A., Burke, J., Cogdell, B., Jamieson, S., McAdam, J., McKerlie, R., Morrow,
L., Paschke, B., Rea, P. and Tierney, A., (2010). ‘From anxiety to empowerment: a Learning Community of University
Teachers’, in Teaching in Higher Education, 15(3), pp. 273-284.
 Mayne, W., Andrew, N., Drury, C., Egan, I., Leitch, A. & Malone, M. (2013). “There’s more unites us than divides us!’ A
further and higher education community of practice in nursing. Journal of Further and Higher Education, 39(2), pp.163–
179.
 McDonald, J.Collins, P., Hingst, R.D. & Lynch, B. (2008). Community learning: Members’ stories about their academic
community of practice, in Engaging Communities. Engaging Communities; 31st HERDSA Annual Conference, (March
2016), p.10.
 Nixon, S. & Brown, S. (2013). A community of practice in action: SEDA as a learning community for educational
developers in higher education. Innovations in Education and Teaching International, 50(4), pp.357–365.
 Roberts, J., (2006). ‘Limits to Communities of Practice’, in Journal of Management Studies, 43(3), pp. 623-639.
 Ward, H.C. & Selvester, P.M. (2012). Faculty learning communities: improving teaching in higher education.
Educational Studies, 38(1), pp.111–121.
 Weller, S., (2016). Academic Practice: Developing as a Professional in Higher Education. London: Sage.
 Wenger, E., McDermott, R.A. and Snyder, W. (2002). Cultivating communities of practice: A guide to managing
knowledge. Boston: Harvard Business Press.

13. Licence
This presentation, excluding the images, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-
NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
For further permissions please visit http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/sbe
Please see individual images for attribution and licence information.