Training University Teachers for Participation and Innovation: A Study from the Perspective of Communities of Practice

Abstract

Through a case study from an interpretive perspective, an innovative experience in the teaching of General Physics—the Physics Teaching Workshop, National University of La Plata, Argentina—was analyzed as a space for situated training and the professional development of university teachers.

Initially, the experience was characterized as a Community of Educational Practice through the analysis of its ways of building and maintaining mutual engagement; the definition and redefinition of its joint enterprise; and some elements of its shared repertoire, which are the dimensions that give coherence to a community of practice.

On the basis of this characterization, it was also defined as a Learning Community, that is, one that involves a commitment to sustained collaboration in practice and the careful design of social infrastructures that reinforce learning.

The analysis of the processes of negotiation of meanings that occur there—in their dual aspect as processes of participation in its practices and reification of them—made it possible to identify the circumstances, processes, and forms of knowledge brought into play in the training of its new members.

Thus, teacher training in the Physics Teaching Workshop was characterized, from different perspectives and dimensions of analysis, as an intentional, heterogeneous, plural, and multiple process, instituted fundamentally through participation in its innovative university teaching practices.

In this way, it became possible to visualize how this experience offers its novice teachers specific mechanisms of inclusion in the community, outlines trajectories of participation, and allows diverse teaching identities to be constructed.