It is Time for a Public "Community of Practice" on Disability, Development, and Tourism

Disasters have a way of exposing the veiled - like strains between Haitian DPOs.

What are some roles an intentional community play in reconciliation and capacity-building? One may be indirect as a Community of Practice that changes local power dynamics while respecting local expertise.

I have been pondering similarities between Africa's poorest nation and South America's and wrote "On Haiti & Mozambique: Development Strategies That Adopt Inclusive Tourism." What is lacking is a Community of Practice that is aroused to transform the promise of Inclusive Tourism into reality in Haiti.

Following the World Bank-funded southern African regional seminar on Inclusive Tourism in Maputo. Mozambique March 1-3, 2010 a Community of Practice (CoP) will be launched publicly.

The focus area arises from the converging interests of practitioners in development, tourism, and disability advocacy in regions as as diverse as Africa, Europe, and Asia. It incorporates individuals and organizations involved in projects as specific as post-disaster recovery in in Haiti, pre-FIFA development in Brazil, and the sustainability of traditional culture through innovative Universal Design projects such as Japan's Takayama City.

So, what is a community of practice?

CIO Insight in a 2002 article interviews Etienne Wenger on the distinction between Knowledge Management and Communities of Practice

Our tweak would be to make explicit the role of Universal Design for Learning (UDL) in any fully-functional CoP. Application of Universal Design generally and UDL specifically is a cross-cutting issue with special importance to Wenger's later category of the Identification-Negotiability Duality of Communities of Practice.

A very good discussion exists by Mark K. Smith at http://www.infed.org/ on CoP with conclusions for educators. An excerpt:

The characteristics of communities of practice

According to Etienne Wenger (c 2007), three elements are crucial in distinguishing a community of practice from other groups and communities:

The domain. A community of practice is is something more than a club of friends or a network of connections between people. 'It has an identity defined by a shared domain of interest. Membership therefore implies a commitment to the domain, and therefore a shared competence that distinguishes members from other people' (op. cit.).

The community. 'In pursuing their interest in their domain, members engage in joint activities and discussions, help each other, and share information. They build relationships that enable them to learn from each other' (op. cit.).

The practice. 'Members of a community of practice are practitioners. They develop a shared repertoire of resources: experiences, stories, tools, ways of addressing recurring problems--in short a shared practice. This takes time and sustained interaction' (op. cit.).

Relationships, identity and shared interests and repertoire

A community of practice involves, thus, much more than the technical knowledge or skill associated with undertaking some task. Members are involved in a set of relationships over time (Lave and Wenger 1991: 98) and communities develop around things that matter to people (Wenger 1998). The fact that they are organizing around some particular area of knowledge and activity gives members a sense of joint enterprise and identity. For a community of practice to function it needs to generate and appropriate a shared repertoire of ideas, commitments and memories. It also needs to develop various resources such as tools, documents, routines, vocabulary and symbols that in some way carry the accumulated knowledge of the community. In other words, it involves practice (see praxis): ways of doing and approaching things that are shared to some significant extent among members.

Source: http://www.infed.org/biblio/communities_of_practice.htm

Smith suggests the following:

Further reading

Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger (1991) Situated Learning. Legitimate peripheral participation, Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press. 138 pages. Pathbreaking book that first developed the idea that learning 'is a process of participation in communities of practice, participation that is at first legitimately peripheral but that increases gradually in engagement and complexity'.

Rogoff, B., Turkanis, C. G. and Bartlett, L. (eds.) (2001) Learning Together: Children and Adults in a School Community, New York: Oxford University Press. 250 + x pages. Arising out of the collaboration of Barbara Rogoff (who had worked with Jean Lave) with two teachers at an innovative school in Salt Lake City, this book explores how they were able to develop an approach to schooling based around the principle that learning 'occurs through interested participation with other learners'.

Etienne Wenger (1999) Communities of Practice. Learning, meaning and identity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 318 + xv pages. Extended discussion of the concept of community of practice and how it might be approached within organizational development and education.