Wenger, E. (1998) proposes the idea of Community of Practice (COP) as “simple social systems in which learning takes place as people and social situations interact. The idea of COP is to necessitate members to understand community values, ask them to engage productively with co-members and allow them to use resources owned by the community and gradually, it becomes a community of practice.” Inspired by this idea we have been working towards building a Community of Practice for teachers in Nepal with the goal of enhancing the practice of promoting Learning through Play in our classrooms.
One of our graduate students, Dipeshwor Shrestha is from Nepal and also a founding member of a Kathmandu-based social enterprise called Karkhana that designs learning experiences for middle school youth. Using existing networks and relations with formal as well as informal educators in Nepal, he brought together 22 teachers (2 from public schools, 7 informal educators, and 13 from private schools) to participate in an 8 week engagement program. After the engagement program was over, 12 teachers have continued to attend weekly sessions facilitated by members of the teacher community.
The teaching community comes together every week to discuss, share, reflect, learn and navigate their own teaching styles and approaches and understand playful learning. This community has become a learning platform for teachers. They not only share the same profession but also learn from productive teacher development workshops, which help them to reflect on their own teaching pedagogy and share success or failure stories of their classroom within the community. We organize weekly virtual reading sessions and also monthly in person teacher development workshops with teachers to strengthen their understanding of Community of Practice and progressive learning pedagogies and to enhance their capacity to deliver hands-on lessons that promote learning through play.
The teachers have been documenting the sessions and writing blog posts about their experience, that are being posted in the Tufts CEEO Tech & Play website. In addition to that, the Karkhana team has selected 5 members from the teacher community as Early Adopters for the (Playful Engineering-Based Learning) PEBL project.
Collaborations with specialist partners
In addition to direct collaboration with Tufts CEEO (e.g. two Karkhana teachers have enrolled for the Novel Engineering course, Milan is testing Smart Motors with the teacher community), Karkhana has also been trying to collaborate with other Tech&Play specialist partners.
In mid-January 2020, Karkhana is organizing a virtual meetup with the Scratch Foundation team to connect them with organizations in Nepal that have already been doing amazing work using Scratch. Representatives from organizations like Karkhana Samuha, Code Chautari, Beyond Apogee, and Smart Cheli along with teachers from schools like Kathmandu World School, and Kastamandap Vidyalaya, will be attending the meeting. In addition to that, Karkhana Samuha has also applied for the Scratch Education Collaborative (SEC) cohort.
Likewise, Karkhana has also been in conversation with folx at the Exploratorium to plan engagement sessions for the teacher community with tentative dates around March 2022.
Other collaborations
The Karkhana team has also been in contact with the LEGO Foundation to enroll in an online course to learn more about Learning through Play Experience Tool and how it can be used in a different context like Nepali classrooms.
Karkhana Samuha has also been collaborating with Fab Lab Nepal to work with government school teachers and students.
Research
In terms of Research, two Karkhana teachers Sangden Lama and Suresh Ghimire have been added to the IRB as research affiliates and have received the CITI training certificate. They have been helping Dipesh conduct interviews, translate and transcribe interview data, take field notes, conduct in-person observations (in accordance with the local government guidelines) of classrooms, and co-design lesson plans and activities to test with the community of teachers.
Initially, Dipesh had only used the mandala design to structure his ideas around different themes but as he refined the mandala representation, he realized its usefulness in thinking about the interconnectedness and relationality among the different components and the possibility of communicating his ideas to teachers and educators using a graphic representation based on a traditional motif. He plans to use Warren et al.’s (2020) conception of three sensibilities: multiplicity, horizontality and dialogicality to explore connections to concepts of heterogeneity and relationality among the four themes: Play, Storytelling, Making, and Engineering, and how they are connected to learning.
Building up on those ideas, Dipesh is interested in pursuing these research questions:
- What relationships do teachers construct and express among play, making, engineering, and storytelling?
- What impediments or barriers do the teachers express in trying to bring this work to their classrooms?
Dipesh and Brian have started analyzing interview data and Dipesh is working on a case study about one of the teacher participants.