UNIVERSITY PROFESSORS TRAINING FOR PARTICIPATION AND INNOVATION: A STUDY FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF THE COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE

Abstract

ABSTRACT

Through a case study from an interpretative perspective, we look at an innovative experience of teaching of General Physics (Physical Education Workshop, Universidad Nacional de La Plata, Argentina) as space for training and professional development of university professors. We initially characterized the experience as a community of educational practices, through the analysis of their ways to build and maintain the mutual commitment; the definition and redefinition of its joint enterprise; and some elements of their shared repertoire (which are the dimensions that give coherence to a community of practice). On the basis of this characterization, we define it also as a community of learning, i.e. one that implies the commitment to collaboration in practice and the careful design of the social infrastructures that reinforce learning. The analysis of the processes of negotiation of meaning occurring there (in its double aspect of participatory processes in their practices and reification of them), allowed us to identify the circumstances, processes and knowledge put at stake for the formation of its new members. We characterize the teacher training in the Physical Education Workshop, from different perspectives and dimensions of analysis, as an intentional, heterogeneous, plural and multiple process instituted, mainly through the participation in its innovative University teaching practices. We thus see how this experience offers to its teaching novice specific mechanisms of inclusion in the community, delineates trajectories of participation and allows to build diverse educational identities.

Keywords: Community, Practice, University teaching, Innovation.