
Emergent Professional Learning Communities in Higher Education: Integrating Faculty Development, Educational Innovation, and Organizational Change at a Canadian College
Author(s) -
Julie Mooney
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
journal of teaching and learning
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 1911-8279
pISSN - 1492-1154
DOI - 10.22329/jtl.v12i2.5526
Subject(s) - professional development , context (archaeology) , narrative , faculty development , pedagogy , institution , learning community , professional learning community , sociology , higher education , narrative inquiry , meaning (existential) , psychology , medical education , political science , medicine , psychotherapist , paleontology , linguistics , philosophy , social science , law , biology
Centres for teaching and learning at postsecondary educational institutions in Canada seek to serve the professional development needs of faculty members throughout the college or university. Recognizing the limits of conventional frameworks for faculty development, such as one-time workshops, pedagogical conferences, and lunchtime discussion sessions, this interpretive inquiry explores learning communities as an additional framework for serving faculty development and cross-institutional professional development needs. The study asks: what does it mean for faculty, educational developers, support staff, and administrators to participate in a learning community at a college in Canada? Data collected through individual inquiry conversations (semi-structured interviews) and research memos were used to develop narrative descriptions representing the participants’ respective experiences of a learning community in a large, urban college context in Canada. These narrative descriptions offer portraits of the meaning that learning community members made of their own experience, revealing that the learning communities served not only as sites for professional development, but also formed microcultures within the institution, which, over time, influenced educational (academic) and organizational (administrative) change, both in policy and in practice.