AN EMERGENT COMMUNITY OF PRACTICE IN THE MIDST OF A PANDEMIC

As faculty across the country shifted to online instruction in mid-March, there was a clear demand and need for a support network to navigate the rapid change in teaching medium. In response to this need, the Washington State Board of Community and Technical Colleges (SBCTC) started to offer professional development support for faculty in different STEM domains. The desire by faculty for these emergent Communities of Practice (CoPs) quickly outstripped the capacity of SBCTC facilitators . The CoPs are now led by discipline-specific faculty. This emergent community started in a crisis mode, sharing resources and ideas that seemed to be working in the moment.

The first geosciences CoP included faculty from astronomy, environmental science, geology, and oceanography. In order to make meetings more manageable, bi-monthly meetings of subdisciplines began to meet. These synchronous meetings were supported by repositories, resources, and discussions in the state-wide LMS. Each meeting was emergent based on the faculty who were in the meeting using a modified version of a “lean coffee” agenda in which the agenda is created by the attendees at the start of the meeting. Throughout the spring quarter faculty met to share successes, failures, and questions about how to mechanically address certain challenges. For example, in the geology/oceanography meetings, discussions would often focus on rock sample identification. In environmental science and geology/oceanography, field experiences were a common challenge to address. In the summer, the lead faculty facilitators started to identify common trends from the lean coffee discussions and identified larger challenges that were facing the community as a whole. As a result, discipline CoPs continued to meet, but monthly meetings of all geoscience faculty were also held in order to tap into the full geoscience spectrum of expertise and approaches. All of these discussions were held through the lens of racial equity in order to assure support for all students. By leveraging the liminal state that faculty found themselves as a result of this pandemic, we have worked to create a professional development structure that affords deeper conversations that move us from surviving to thriving with ourselves and our students.