Interpreting a Community of Practice Perspective in University Mathematics Faculty Development

1. RESEARCH PRE-SESSION 2007 Interpreting a Community of Practice Perspective in University Mathematics Faculty Development Maria L. Blanton The James J. Kaput Center University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Despina A. Stylianou City College - The City University of New York • The research reported here was supported in part by the National Science Foundation under Grant # REC- 0337703. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

2. RESEARCH PRE-SESSION 2007 How does a “community of practice” perspective help us understand faculty learning as (or if) it emerges in the context of faculty professional development?

3. RESEARCH PRE-SESSION 2007 “Community of Practice” as a Lens on Learning • Learning is characterized as legitimate peripheral participationin a community of practice, where people learn as they move from participation that is at first peripheral “toward full participation in the sociocultural practices of a community” (Lave & Wenger, 1991, p. 29). • Evidence of learning is seen through shifts in one’s identity from “newcomer” to “old-timer” status. • Shifts in identity occur as participants tell stories about personal changes they have experienced.

4. RESEARCH PRE-SESSION 2007 “Community of Practice” Applied to K-12 Teacher Learning Franke et al (2005): • A critical ingredient of teacher learning in community is the “struggle around making sense of practice”. • Artifacts (such as student work) serve as a tool to negotiate meaning about practice. Stein, Silver & Smith (1998): • Teachers in the community who had experienced real change in practice (“old-timers”) were central in the enculturation of newcomers into the practices of the community.

5. RESEARCH PRE-SESSION 2007 Implications of this Research • the underlying culture of the community must, at some level, embrace the need for change; • there must be experiences within the community that can support shifts in identity so that new participants become fully engaged in the practices of the community; and • community emerges around issues in which participants are willing to be engaged.

6. RESEARCH PRE-SESSION 2007 What do these ideas mean in the context of mathematics faculty professional development? While K-12 TPD has its own set of challenges, faculty professional development brings a unique set of issues (e.g., “identity” of faculty as experts in a field) which require us to rethink notions of community of practice in this particular setting.

7. RESEARCH PRE-SESSION 2007 First...Faculty Seminar Design • Participants: 8-9 faculty mathematicians (75% of math department faculty) in a regional, mid-size university; 1 PTVL; 2-3 meetings per semester for 3 semesters • Organizing Principle: ‘long-term’collaboration that integrates issues of content and pedagogy; • Mathematical focus: Integrating mathematical proof more deeply into early undergraduate mathematics experience • Use of artifacts such as student work and video-taped episodes of our classroom instruction to promote discussion about the teaching and learning of proof

8. RESEARCH PRE-SESSION 2007 Preliminary Signs of an Emerging Community • Willingness exhibited by faculty to participate in these seminars. • The proposal by individual faculty to share data from their own classes on the topic of proof, in particular, to bring to the meetings copies of student written work as a point for discussion. • The exchange of views on issues related to instruction of proof. These meetings provided a forum for faculty to share instructional ideas and debate about the role of proof in various courses they taught. • Requests by faculty that we collaborate with them on specific courses they are teaching to embed ideas of mathematical proof into their course curriculum. • Informal conversations with (and initiated by) faculty outside of seminars to discuss issues related to proof (Faculty wanted to engage about content, but pedagogy?)

9. RESEARCH PRE-SESSION 2007 Competing Metaphors:Academic Freedomvs Apprenticeship

10. RESEARCH PRE-SESSION 2007 IDENTITY: What Are the Ideas Around Which Faculty Engage? • Student Learning: Dissatisfaction with students’ performance - focus on students’ lack of mathematical knowledge rather than own instruction: (THAT vs HOW) • Curriculum: ‘Covering’ a prescribed syllabus or textbook, not the nature of tasks and the types learning these could support • Instruction?: -Not a topic that naturally arises in faculty discussions; -Teacher-centered practice that included demonstration, using examples to clarify, and providing proofs of formal theorems: -Lortie’s apprenticeship of observation (Boice, 1991) "inadequate grounding in pedagogy disadvantages the professor in creating learning-centered teaching" (Saroyan, et al, 2004, p. 16, 2004);

11. RESEARCH PRE-SESSION 2007 WHAT CAN WE INFER ABOUT IDENTITY? • Identity as teacher was (allowed to be) determined externally; lack of reflective practice, more focus on whether students could ‘do the math’. • This reflects the reality that participants held a professional identity as “disciplinary expert” rather than “teaching scholar” (Saroyan, Admundsen, McAlpine, Wester, Winer and Gandell , (2004)) Faculty entered the community as disciplinary experts. How could we support shifts in identity to that of teaching scholar?

12. RESEARCH PRE-SESSION 2007 Identifying the Challenges • Need for culture of professional development This requires “sustained efforts to change the attitudes and repertoires of individuals, and to change the operating rules of an institution and its countless semi-sovereign constituent parts" (Frankman, p. 166, 2004). Challenge:“the institution often does not share [the] view of itself [as not having best educational practice]” (Harris, 2004). • Need for old-timers to enculturate newcomers • Participants comprised a homogeneous group with respect to practice - they were all newcomers and held identities a disciplinary experts • What experiences conspire to create an apprenticeship atmosphere?

13. RESEARCH PRE-SESSION 2007 • Need to challenge the culture of service • “You have to a certain extent to sell the engineers that their students really need proof. In other words, right now, unfortunately, their attitude is that we want these skills, or they act as if the most important thing is skills.” • “You have to convince the engineers that [teaching proof] is worthwhile; they want these skills. And I find this a lot with the differential equations course, especially because it is a one-semester course where you have to get a whole lot of differential equations stuff done and the theory does suffer.” How can a community of practice develop when it is lacking the sense of empowerment to make its own decisions regarding its practice?

14. RESEARCH PRE-SESSION 2007 • Need for a language to mediate thinking about practice: A community of practice includes a particular way of talking about a phenomenon (Riel, 1998). Participants ways of talking about teaching was rooted in content, not teaching scholarship If enculturating newcomers requires differentiated and mature (or maturing) experiences of practice to to be part of community conversations, how does this occur in groups that are homogeneous in their thinking and for which participants have new-comer status?

15. RESEARCH PRE-SESSION 2007 Concluding Thoughts…. • Goal: What insights does the lens of “community of practice” give us regarding issues of faculty professional development? • More questions than answers! • This work can be viewed as a first step for understanding how to design faculty professional development and connect design to theory: Thinking about FPD from a situated learning perspective helped focus our thinking about design issues -we need to understand faculty identities from the start -we need to understand if our group is homogeneous - are all participants newcomers -we need to understand what kinds of experiences can enculturate disciplinary experts to that of teaching scholar - e.g., what role do artifacts play?