CRS ICT4D Conference

Communities of Practice are groups of individuals formed around a specific domain of interest in order to improve the practice of participating community members as they flourish from mere participants to colleagues, finding meaning and identity within the community. In the teaching profession, communities of practice provide ample opportunities for teachers to build communal epistemologies that guide their practice as teachers and define their pedagogies and discourse within their classrooms for the betterment of student learning. However, teachers play other roles within and outside the school communities that sometimes, unfortunately, overwhelm their ability and capacity to exploit the maximum benefits provided by these communities. In this session I will discuss my research in developing an online Collaborative and Support Environment for Teachers (CLASET) for Native American Pueblo schools in New Mexico that empowers teachers through use of collaborative ICTs to build communities of practice. The tool contains a learning management system, social media, blog, discussion forum, and video snippets of concept teachings captured during professional development, classroom, and coaching sessions. This work is guided by four research questions: first, will Pueblo teachers be willing to use CLASET? Under what circumstances and expectations? Second, how will the teachers express Native American culture using CLASET's collaborative technologies? Third, how will the teachers use CLASET? Finally, what are the attributable 'spillover' effects in the classroom regarding STEM teaching and student learning? In this session I will discuss CLASET's design considerations, findings, how CLASET interplays with Native American culture, and underlying factors that hinder development of effective communities of practice. The goal of the session is to demonstrate some of the contributing factors, which have resulted in failure of about 70% of ICTD projects around the world, and some potential considerations that might prevent these failures.