Communities (of Practice)

It was another Sunday of various writing type tasks. I started thinking about Congress and London and this started a conversation with some former students about our time at Western. It is nice to still be in touch with so many of them even though it has been in some cases more than 13 years or so since I taught them. We are all in different cities for the most part, some have families, some are in other countries but we all share that same institutional knowledge and awareness that can bring us right back to a decade previous.

This demonstrates how much teaching and learning is very much about fostering communities and if you are lucky maintaining those communities for many years. Sometimes maintaining that community is difficult because of geography or diverging interests. But if you are lucky sometimes the community just happens and year after year there are lunches and suppers and weddings and sometimes babies and you have the opportunity to witness it all. When I think about teaching philosophies or teaching statements I like to focus yes primarily on what values or ethics one espouses but I also like to think about the sustainability of the philosophy and the longer term repercussions of what we believe and practice when we teach. Similar to how it’s nice and important to have a 5 year plan in terms of research so that your concepts can have reach and scaffold, it’s also significant to have a bigger picture of your pedagogy.

I know accessibility and inclusion is what I value the most and I practice this in different ways, from having an awareness of educational resource accessibility requirements (font, captioning, alt-text), looking over resources for representation and bias, and using an empathetic model with educational communication along with many other practices that become embedded in negotiating post-secondary institutions. This also ultimately leads to community building and maintenance; if you foster and insist on a space of inclusion folk will return to that space because they connect with it deeply. I know some of my friends (and some of you out there who read this blog) are working on job applications at the moment and reflecting on teaching philosophies. My suggestion is as you are revising or writing these pieces for the first time think about how community works in your educational spaces. It can be small c community (as in the classroom) or big C community (as in social location). Then think about how to best express how community is reflected in praxis. Communities are pretty key to creating, finding, and maintaining space- once you have that the practice is more authentic, more innate. Now is an excellent time to reach out to those you may not have heard from in a while and remind them how important they are to who you are as an educator today. You will be surprised how much you forgot you did, or you thought wasn’t that important but it made a great impact in someone’s life. Your community may not be geographically close, but they exist in your practice every day.