Displaying items by tag: community of practice

A major outcome of the EnterMode project is a Virtual Community of Practice that allows to widen views on entrepreneurship education, share good practice and build a common stock of knowledge based on practical experience with entrepreneurship education.

According to Wenger “communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly“ (Wenger 2010). They build a common stock of knowledge, accumulate expertise in their domain, and develop their shared practice by interacting around problems, solutions, and insights. A Community of Practice (CoP) is a learning partnership among people who have learned to do something over time and have developed a shared practice, whereas practice is a historically developed way to do something (Wenger 2019).

“Employment Perspective for Migrants and Refugees” is a new community of practice, that is addressed mainly to persons who provide support to migrants and refugees in relation to employment, education and training, as well as to stakeholders active in the topics of education and employment for migrants and refugees.

Reflections on Communities of Practice is an audio series created to bring together experts in the EdTech and Lifelong Learning field in general. This initiative aims at bringing more visibilty to the DISCUSS community on the one hand and to learn from other experiences, on the other hand. The lessons learned and the good practices do matter not only for improvement purposes but also to ignite some reflection on the topic beyond the theoretical underpinnings.

Communities of practice are learning partnerships and offer opportunities for professional development; members share information, resources, learn from each other’s experience and create new knowledge together. In this webinar, you will learn from 3 community-builders about the communities of practice they are engaged in, what value has been created for the members of those communities and what challenges they faced.

The University of Glasgow is the leading partner in the consortium of universities that have developed this Erasmus Mundus Internationals Masters programme in Adult Education for Social Change.

The other universities are University of Malta, Open University of Cyprus, Tallinn University and Universiti Sains Malaysia. A distinctive feature of this programme is the connection between theory and practice, gained through focused placements and mobility periods between the partner universities. It draws together the recognised strengths of the consortium partners into a relevant, joint degree that engages with and responds to such issues as social inequality, migration and intercultural cooperation.

One of Cedefop’s main priorities is to support EU Member States and social partners in further developing and improving vocational education and training (VET) and lifelong learning policies and practices. To be able to do this systematically, Cedefop has launched a series of policy learning forums on a range of subjects.

The aim is to establish a continuous process of sharing and learning where initial policy learning events are followed up through continued cooperation. Experts from 24 countries gathered in Thessaloniki on 24-25 September for the first forum, which addressed the way the learning outcomes principle and approach is used to define and describe VET qualifications across Europe.

The XPLOIT project was created to enhance the exploitation of the many European learning projects. Most of them are producing excellent materials and resources which are vanishing after the end of the funding period. The question was (and still is) why and the mission was to find a systematic practice in supporting new infrastructures in the local communities to make use and adopt those many resources.

Lifelong Learning has to constantly re-examine and restate its beliefs and practices in order to stay relevant. When I started in Adult Education some 25 years ago, Local Authorities and all post 16 education providers had generous funding available to support adults who had either been disadvantaged by their education, or who simply needed new skills. Working in the Welsh Valleys area we were able to build upon the spirit of co-operation we found amongst the women’s groups that had sprung up during the miners’ strike. Using European funding we could provide ICT labs and intensive one year training programmes in post mining communities.

Alongside our part-time humanities degree in the community we offered European funded ICT training and this attracted more than 3,000 adults eager to learn new skills. These centres transformed their communities and still offer a vital lifeline. The centres were staffed by local volunteers who were part of the community and understood the community’s needs. We had contact with other providers but each body provided what they and the centres thought was required.

I interpret a community of practice as a group of people which learns how to improve its knowledge, its behaviour and its influence as a result of interaction between each other and with other groups. I suggest below 3 case studies where this happened.

Interview with Ana Raducanu, host community for RestartEDU Romania, a Community of Practice on Transforming Education in Romania. The interview was conducted by Magda Balica in Cheia, Romania - RestartEDU Camp 2015 for www.discuss-community.eu.