1. Supporting participation and reification in Communities of Practice
Communities of Learning II
Bernadette Charlier, Marie Lambert, Annick Rossier

2. Plan Problematic : Practice and teacher professional development
Context : PALETTE European research and development and
Theoretical framework and design principal
Development results: Palette Services and scenario
Evaluation, conclusion and perspectives

3. Problematic
Practice is at the heart of teachers’development models (Huberman, 1995; Charlier, 1998 ; Daele, 2006)
A shared practice is at the basis of CoP’s : It is developed by members in order to increase day-to-day efficiency (Lave and Wenger, 1991)
Cop's could be a good mean for teachers' professional development through participation, reification and reuse of practices
But : What is a practice ? How to express, reify and reuse it ? Is it possible ? Is it effective ?

4. Context : PALETTE R & D European Project
PALETTE main goal is the facilitation and enhancement of both individual and collective learning through Communities of Practice (CoPs)
PALETTE is partially supported by the FP6-IST EC research program
The main goal of the project remain the same : « The facilitation and enhancement of both individual and collective learning through Communities of Practice (CoPs)”. However, The results will be precised and focused on so called generic scenarios and their implementation in chains of services, We will also focus our efforts on the necessary support services (such as single signed on, global search, notification of events, and common resource repository) but also on the development of Learning and Organisational Resources (LOR) that will allow CoPs animators and members to : assess their learning, assess their activities and assess their needs AND to choose services and scenarios in order to meet these needs.
Thus on the basis of our analysis of the specific scenarios validated by WP1 during the year 2,we have identified three generic scenario that will support : Practice reification , Participation in debate and decision-making and support to COP animation..
Generic scenarios will be less specific of the current activities of the CoPs and more oriented towards innovative activities typical of CoPs in general; they will be less influenced by the current state of PALETTE services and more focussed on innovative functions and added value of integrated services; they will suggest possible improvements to better sustain the CoP development by innovating both at organisational and technical level; they will promote the implementation of such improvements through innovative architectures and interfaces.
Tools and services
Teams of researchers and CoPs have been reorganised to focus the efforts on the validation of generic scenarios, the integration of services and the design of Learning and Organisational Resources.
This period is a challenging one. A major effort is now put on the conceptual and technical integration to produce the palette of services and scenarios.
Review meeting, Luxembourg, 8-9 April, 2008 4 4

5. Context : PALETTE main goal
PALETTE will result in a set of services and scenarios technologically and pedagogically sustained to support :
Practice reification
Participation in debate and decision-making
Support CoP animation
PALETTE is co-funded by the EC under the FP6

6. Context : PALETTE PDM methodology
Review meeting, Luxembourg, 8-9 April, 2008 6 6

7. Context : 7 7

8. 8 8

9. Goals of the Did@ctic CoP
Representation, reification and reuse of teaching practice
Expression and sharing of practice
Seeking practice renewal
Trialling of modified or new practice
Revise the description of modified or new practice 9 9

10. Theoretical framework and design principal
Practice
Reification

11. A concept of practice includes
For Wenger (1999)
both the explicit and the tacit
what is said and what is left unsaid
what is represented and what is assumed
Related to a context, situated
For Giddens (1979)
Refers to behaviour which is recurrent or routine i.e. happens on a day to day basis and is embedded in the normal routine of daily life. Therefore a ‘practice’ is a way of doing something, the pattern of which is reproduced in a social context [i.e. work] according to certain rules.
For Charlier (1996)
A teaching practice includes : conceptions of teaching and learning, personal theories, knowledge, decisions, actions schemes and routines, attitudes and values
Teachers’ practices change
For wenger
the language, tools, documents, images, symbols, well defined roles, specified criteria, codified procedures, regulations, and contracts that various practices make explicit for a variety of purposes, the implicit relations, tacit conventions, subtle cues, untold rules of thumb, recognizable intuitions, specific perceptions, well tuned sensitivities, embodied understandings, underlying assumptions and shared world views

12. Components of a practice
Routines
Representations
Peers’ knowledge
Personal theories
Emotions
Behaviours
Knowledge
A shared practice includes
a corpus of various types of empirical, theoretical and procedural knowledge, both explicit and tacit
a framework of references, models, principles
behaviours, routines
acquired knowledge, exemplary practices, heuristics
tools and documents and other artefact that reflect knowledge
A shared practice is built from individual practices that include representations, personal theories, emotions.
Not all practice are shared
Not all practice produce a CoP
Communities and practice are linked to a specific type of social structure which is driven by specific goals and purposes
Objects of reification
Not information 12 12

13. Reification!!!
“the process of giving form to our experience by producing objects that congeal this experience into ‘thingness’” [Wenger p58].
No reification without participation !
The text could be a good support (Barton and Hamilton, 2005)

14. Development principals
What could be represented ? : routines, behaviors, knowledge, rules, conceptions, values. Planification decisions (scenarios)
The « template driven » solution (Keep Toolkit)
To reify practice in text form enabling the expression of the context of this experience but also the knowledge that informs it.
This representation must be accessible, sharable, negociable, adaptable and reusable.
Carnegie Foundation

15. scenario
Representation, reification and reuse of teaching practice
1. Expression and sharing of practice
2. Seeking practice renewal
3. Trialling of modified or new practice
4. Revise the description of modified or new practice

16. Palette Services and the Did@cTIC Scenario
1.expression and
sharing of
practices
2. Seeking practices renewal
3. Trialling of
Modified or
new practices
4. Revise the
Modified or
new practice
Producing
structured
documents
Debating
Searching
Logbook
Working on
structured
documents

17. Evaluation, conclusion and perspectives
The Palette services sustain the representation and reification of professional practice.
Data collected include : representations, personal theories, decisions and attitudes
Data collected are considered as valid and useful
Unsolved questions :
Will teachers really reuse reified practices to enhance their teaching ?
In which conditions will they do this ?