Teacher Learning in a Community of Practice: A Case Study of ...

MM:
Shirley:
How many EMS workshops have you attended that were run by the
department?
One last year. It was OBE training but we didn't touch on EMS. They just
told us OBE and it was more HSS. And at the end of that HSS workshop,
they gave us a brief feedback on what is EMS, that's all. No one sat there
and told US how to teach EMS and what is EMS. So technically speaking, we
did not have a workshop on EMS, except the one I had in school with you.
That was the first one that I was exposed to.
Participants developed and produced a practice to deal with what they understood to be
their enterprise. Their practice as it unfolded belonged to their community in a
fundamental sense. So although conditions, resources and demands may have influenced
the community ofpractice, it was the participants who negotiated these constraints and
shaped the practice.
The TEMS teacher learning community also presented tensions that the participants had
to negotiate. The essential tension ofprofessional development, that of curriculum
development and deepening subject matter knowledge was prevalent in the TEMS
community. Curriculum development and the development ofpedagogic content
knowledge focuses on the improvement ofstudent learning, while teachers' attempts at
deepening subject matter knowledge focuses on teachers as students ofsubject matter.
Some teachers (Shirley and Kim in particular) were essentially concerned with the direct
applicability oftheir learning to their classroom practice, and could be viewed as product
driven. Grossman et al (2001) note that the occupational reality ofteaching does not
permit the time and space for teachers to read without an immediate apparent goal.
Reading and turning newly acquired subject matter knowledge into concrete ideas for
teaching certainly is a challenge for most teachers. Others teachers, (John and Debbie and
Mary) were also interested in personal intellectual renewal. They saw the need to acquire
subject matter knowledge through reading. This tension became more overt in the mature
stage ofthe community's development. Participants with competing goals generally kept
each other in check. Seeking an appropriate balance between presenting information and
facilitating teachers' construction ofnew practices was a dilemma that was dealt with and
negotiated by the core group in their planning for the TEMS workshop sessions.
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