The second session for the HERESA Café focused on how educators and researchers in entrepreneurship and innovation can learn from each other and the role of communities of practice.
Last year, HERESA established four Communities of Practice (CoPs) in the following areas: Entrepreneurship of Teaching And Learning, Work-Integrated Learning (WIL), Competency-Based Learning and Curriculum Development for the fourth industrial revolution (4IR). In Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation, the seminal book in which the term “community of practice” was coined, anthropologist Jean Lave and computer scientist Etienne Wenger promoted the idea of learning as a social or communal activity in which a process called “legitimate peripheral participation” (LPP) occurs. The participants in these communities of practitioners then move on to engage in the socio-cultural practices of a community.
For the second edition of the HERESA Café, Dr Helen McGuirk, Head of the Hincks Centre for Entrepreneurship Excellence at Munster Technological University in Ireland, gave a presentation on how educators and researchers in entrepreneurship and innovation can learn from each other and the role of communities of practice. On behalf of THENSA, Khanya Mtshali spoke to Dr McGuirk about Communities of Practice, how best they serve as a mechanism for higher education reform and why they could be beneficial to educators and researchers in entrepreneurship and learning.
Dr McGuirk’s (PhD, MA, BComm) work focuses on supporting entrepreneurship in all its forms at a regional, national and international level. This involves leading a strong team of researchers, managing various publicly funded projects and supporting staff and students. Her research also focuses on four interrelated topics of entrepreneurship, enterprise competitiveness, the economics of innovation and public policy. She has presented her work at 40+ international conferences and is published in top-ranked peer-reviewed journals. She has many years of industry experience in project management, financial services and as an entrepreneur in Ireland and Australia.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Khanya Mtshali for THENSA: Dr McGuirk, thank you for joining me today.
Dr Helen McGuirk: Good afternoon and thank you for having me.
T: So I would like to start with what might strike you as a basic question: what, in your view, is a Community of Practice?
HM: Yes, I don’t think there’s a definite definition. For me, as an academic, it’s about sharing ideas. It’s about sharing both ways in that I learn from my peers and my peers learn from me. So it’s about the sharing of ideas and a community coming together, maybe on a one-on-one basis but most often in a larger group of peers. Those groups can be composed of academics, students or a support team. It’s essentially a group of peers learning from each other.
T: Is there a difference between a community and a community of practice? In other words, does a group of people communing because of a commonly held interest or idea make a community of practice? Could you perhaps outline some of the characteristics that distinguish a community of practice from other communities like a neighbourhood or, to use a more superfluous example, a group of Beyoncé fans congregating on different social media platforms?
HM: Well, I have to say, it’s the first time I’ve heard Beyoncé and communities of practice being compared! So communities of practice, particularly from an entrepreneurship point of view or the perspective of entrepreneurship educators and researchers, is about the willingness to share. As you mentioned, you can come together with shared ideas or a shared interest in a particular topic, but a willingness to share, a willingness to learn from each other is vital. Sometimes communities of practice are referred to as “learning communities” where we have a desire to pick up things from each other. So I think those are probably the distinguishing factors: willingness and learning. Peers being able to learn from each other. Again, it goes back to peer-learning. As for similarities to Beyoncé ? Maybe that’s for another discussion!
T: If you were to look at the higher education sector, you will notice that academics and educators tend to work in isolation across various disciplines. How does a Community of Practice combat that tendency to work in silos?
HM: Yes, that tendency to work in isolation is all the more reason to have communities of practice. For instance, when I was doing my PhD way back when at the University of Limerick (in Ireland), we PhD students worked on our own. It wasn’t until a few of us had coffee and said, “ you know, maybe others would like to share the trials and tribulations of being a PhD student”. So we formed an informal group and we later learnt that that was a community of practice or a learning community where we came together and we shared our ideas. I think in the last five to ten years that more academics realised that yes, there is merit in working on your own but we also have to share our ideas. Whether it’s ideas related to our specific field of research or ideas from projects like HERESA, we have to tell the world about what our findings are which will also increase impact. So it has multiple levels of benefit when you’re a member or a contributing member of a community of practice.
T: Within HERESA, we have established our four CoPs each with their own chair. How can the chairs ensure that their CoPs are beneficial and worthwhile to all involved? Are there some basic pointers that you can provide our chairs, as well as our other members who may want to form their own CoPs?
HM: Great question. From my experience, we have a community of practice that is internal to the Munster University of Technology (MTU) which is called the Community of Practice for entrepreneurship educators and researchers (CPEER). I’m also part of the [Entrepreneurship and Teaching and Learning] community of practice for HERESA. And I think empowerment is important and I think it’s worth remembering that these communities of practice are for peers so they should be driven by the peers or the participants. It’s not always about the chair. The chair will organise the Zoom links, for instance. The chair might ask in advance for a particular speaker. It’s easy to set up something but for a community of practice to succeed, there needs to be the will to sustain such a grouping. And to achieve that, in my opinion, you need to empower the participants. For example, you may have a participant from a university down south where they give a talk and they might have a discussant chosen from a university in the north of the country. Or you can organise speakers from different disciplines or regions. It’s also important to rotate the chair as we do here in CPEER. Those are some pointers I would suggest.
T: I imagine that a community of practice can be like a group project. You will have members who are more vocal and participative and others who are quiet and rather shy to share their knowledge or contribute ideas. How do you propose members of a CoP work around potential bashfulness or fear that some academics and educators might have with regards to sharing their views and ideas? Especially those who are early in their academic careers? And to add on to that, how do you avoid a CoP becoming too clique-y or prioritising those who appear to bring more to the table?
HM: Ah, great question. What you’ve listed there are issues that, in my experience, we go through at different levels of a community of practice. So it’s a matter of working through it. To your first point about some participants being more vocal than others, maybe some of those participants are just quieter than others or maybe some are more early in their academic careers. It might be difficult for the early-career academic to speak up amidst the more experienced faculty members in the group. I think overcoming that involves creating a culture where you emphasise the idea of peer-learning. And perhaps that responsibility will fall on the chair. You want to create an environment and a culture where we can all learn from each other. So that’s a step to ensuring that everyone benefits from the community of practice, I suppose.
There’s also the fact that we all learn in different ways. Some people learn from being very vocal and talking while other people learn through just listening. However, you want to encourage the quieter participants to give their opinion. And that goes back to an earlier point I made about having one speaker in the group who talks but having a discussant who asks the questions. For example, say if you had an experienced professor giving a talk. You’ll find that that professor, if you give them the opportunity, will tend to support early-career academics. At every step of the community of practice, you’re encouraging early-career academics, as well as people who are well-experienced and have much to share, but wouldn’t be as vocal as somebody else. You need the skill of the chair and the skill of the chair supporting peer-learning. That’s how I would approach this very crucial part of organising and sustaining a community of practice.
T: I would like to briefly touch on your journey into an academic career, if that’s okay with you. One could say that you took, for want of a better term, “a less conventional path” into academia. You went to secretarial school, travelled abroad, started a café and gained industry experience in project management and financial services as I mentioned earlier. Do you think those experiences in different vocations gave you a greater appreciation for collaborative approaches to learning?
HM: I’m considered what we in Ireland call a mature student so I came to academia when my children were of school-going age. I’d already been an entrepreneur, had my own restaurants and other businesses and I think it gave me a broad perspective on learning and how differently people learn. As I alluded to earlier, we all learn at different paces, at different stages of our lives and I believe communities of practice are a great vehicle to promote that and to highlight that everybody has something to contribute. Even if they are early-career academics who haven’t worked outside the third-level institution sector. They also have hobbies and backgrounds. Just because I was a mature student coming with years of industry experience doesn’t make it less possible for early-career academics to share their ideas and vice versa. Just because you’re a career academic doesn’t mean you can’t learn from somebody like me coming in mid-way through their career life. Everybody has something to share.
T: We conduct so much of our personal and professional lives online and the COVID-19 pandemic has only exacerbated that. From our own experience at HERESA, we know that CoPs can be virtual but how do you navigate the fatigue and exhaustion some might feel towards working online? And to follow up on that, how do you strike a balance between people’s right to be safe in the context of this ever-mutating virus and their desire for in-person contact within a CoP?
HM: COVID has changed all of us. So we had a very successful community of practice here at MTU where we met face-to-face over coffee and a scone and people might go, “oh it’s just coffee and a scone”. But we found that set-up helped relax people and created a different dynamic. Probably most of the chit-chat and networking happened over this coffee and a scone. But in the CPEER group, we were so determined that we needed even more from each other. So whether we were video-chatting from underneath a staircase in our homes, on the edge of our beds or in our kitchens, we wanted to have a “safe space” where we could talk about an area of interest which, in our case, is entrepreneurship teaching, learning and research.
So I think there was pure determination from [the CPEER] participants to continue the community of practice and I know from my experience with HERESA, there is that pure determination and belief in the model of communities of practice which is still going strong. Maybe that urge to continue these communities of practice is also related to what the true meaning of entrepreneurship and innovation is: pivoting, resilience, embracing change because change is constant. Hopefully, we will go back to face-to-face communities of practice but there is merit in online communication because it is an hour, one person talks at a time and you can monitor how long people speak for. So there are benefits to online communities of practice because if they didn’t exist, I wouldn’t have had the chance to speak to the HERESA communities of practice on a regular basis because I’m based in northern Europe and you’re mostly down in South Africa. Maybe there’s a hybrid version of the two that we will all begin to use? But what COVID has taught us is how to share ideas around different ways of teaching and conducting research, especially during the initial phase of the pandemic where there were stumbling blocks in terms of delivering the best education to our students.
T: How do you see CoPs aiding higher education reform and curriculum development, if at all?
HM: Again, it goes back to that willingness to learn from your peers. Given that HERESA is an international project with many universities across South Africa but also in Europe, we all have something to learn and something to share. I suppose because I truly believe in the power of communities of practice, I think [HERESA] is going to be huge and impactful in the higher education sector in South Africa. I certainly hope that it will be sustained far, far beyond the three-year pilot period. I also hope that the HERESA Café conversations and the HERESA podcast sessions will help support the sustainability of these communities of practice where we learn from each other.
T: Well said, I think that’s a perfect end to a wonderful conversation. Dr McGuirk, thank you so much for your time.
HM: Thank you.
Written by: Ms Khanya Mtshali (THENSA Media Liasion)