Faculty development and community of practices: Exploring their interplay to facilitate change in pedagogical practices at HEI's

Abstract

The last decade has seen numerous calls from academicians, government agencies, and policy agents to facilitate change in instructional practices in higher education. The calls have encouraged numerous institutions to organize faculty development programs to build the knowledge and skills among faculty and promote large-scale reforms in STEM instruction. Despite many years of efforts by faculty developers and institutions, traditional teaching methods continue to dominate as the primary mode of STEM instruction. In this study, we explore the role of a Community of Practice (CoP) in achieving sustainable change in instructional practices after the completion of the faculty development program in India. A CoP was formed before the start of a 6-week faculty development program on technology-enhanced learning to encourage and build a sense of community among the participants. Qualitative data was collected during the 6-week program to analyze the different ways in which the CoP supported the participants to achieve the outcomes of the faculty development program. Results from the thematic data analysis revealed that the members of the CoP helped each other through the exchange of ideas, clarification of misconceptions, providing feedback, and exchange of knowledge. It was observed that participants with varied prior teaching experience supported each other as they designed and developed course websites (developing tacit knowledge). After the completion of the 6-week program, the participants continued to meet with other members of the CoP to share the experience of how they adopted technology-enhanced learning in their respective courses. The members of the CoP started to exhibit a commitment to the shared vision of technology-enhanced learning. This led to the transformation of the CoP members from participants of a workshop to change agents themselves as they started to conduct additional training programs for the other faculty in the institution.