Building partnership

Angie Hart – University of BrightonKim Aumann – Amaze

In the beginning…

Using the CoP approach“CoPs are groups of people who share a concern, a set of problems, or a passion about a topic, and who deepen their knowledge and expertise in this area by interacting on an ongoing basis”.

(Wenger, E., McDermott, R & Snyder, W.M., Cultivating Communities of Practice, HBS Press, 2002)

CoPS

• ‘groups of people informally bounded together by shared expertise and passion for a joint enterprise’. (Wenger and Snyder 2000, pp.139-140).

• ‘share their experiences and knowledge in free-flowing, creative ways that foster new approaches to problems’.

• ‘As a locus of engagement in action, interpersonal relations, shared knowledge, and negotiation of enterprises, such communities hold the key to real transformation – the kind that has real effects on peoples lives’. (Wenger 1998, p.85).

CoP ingredients

• Domain .... has an identity defined by a shared field of interest; shared commitment and competence that distinguishes members from others.

• Community ... members engage in joint activities, discussions, help each other, share information – to pursue their interest in the domain together. They build relationships that enable learning from each other.

• Practice ... members are practitioners who develop a shared repertoire of resources: experiences, stories, tools, ways of addressing recurring problems – a shared practice.

A group of people who …

• share similar challenges

• interact regularly

• learn from and with each other

• improve their ability to address their

challenges

• bring out each others tacit knowledge

BOUNCING BACK Building resilience with children and young people

having tough times

• Folk who wanted to develop their thinking and practice around applying a resilient approach to work or home

• Common interest in children, young people and families

Who was involved

• 21 members: 3 parents, 6 academics, 8 voluntary sector practitioners, 4 statutory sector workers

• Monthly 3 hour meetings over 2 years

• Facilitated meetings

• Space to meet, think about and test a range of discrete resilience ideas in their own settings….with a view to developing RT further

• Core group (2 community partners and 2 academics) administered the group and evaluated the CoP activity

Different perspectives Different types of knowledge

In role

• What’s your unique knowledge base?

(regarding children and young people

socially disadvantaged and/or resilience)

Identifying what you bring

In role

• What do you need to happen in the CoP for it to be useful to you?

How we did it

– Group agreement: commitment, research participants

– Group forming time

– Initial training and learning in resilience and RT

– Experimenting with resilience ideas in their own homes or work settings

– Feeding back to group; using group as a resource to critique, refine ideas and practices

– Willing to create and share resources

– Additional support time for parents

COPs

• Add to our understanding of how we come to know and learn

• Raise issues about what knowledge is, whose knowledge we are talking about, how we come to know things, whether different approaches to finding things out result in different knowledge

• Offer a framework that helps to see past the usual way of knowing and learning that happens within organisations & classrooms

• Focus is on engagement with practice and the informal learning that comes with that engagement

• Involve a process (not just an event) – brings out tacit knowledge

Second CoP - East Sussex

• Focus on building resilience with young people 11+

• 15 members: 2 foster parents, 3 voluntary sector workers, 9 statutory workers, 1 academics

• Monthly meetings for 3 hours, for 1 year

• Co-ordinated and facilitated by community partner

• Evaluated by University

Capturing impact

• Interviews with CoP members at beginning and end of the project to capture their: – Understanding of RT– Ways in which they have or have not been able to implement it

into their practice/families– How RT has or has not impacted on their own well-being– Own evaluation of the RT approach

• Evaluators also observing CoP meetings to explore the detail of the transition from theory to practice

CoP products and activity

• Training resources - Resilient Casework examples; Musical Resilient Bingo; workshop exercises tested and refined

• Ready Steady Secondary Course – building resilience with parents and young people anxious about the transition to secondary school

• Kinship Carers Action Research Project• Using RT with staff practice forums• Integrating RT into staff supervision • Building resilience with learning disabled young people

via inclusive arts work

CoP products and activity

• Using RT alongside Under 5s Protective Behaviour course for parents and little ones

• Bullying Workshop for Parents including resilience building ideas

• Applying RT to an organization’s strategic plan• Testing RT as a framework to evaluate a Telephone

Helpline • Understanding Resilience – workshop for local authority

children’s workforce delivered by service users• Applying RT in group work with LGBT young people • Linking resilience and the Common Assessment

Framework tool• RT & Cognitive Behaviour groupwork with women

refugees

East Sussex CoP products

• Foster parents applying RT in their work with ‘looked after children’

• ‘Pick ‘n’ mix’ box of resilience ideas to help client identify their own goals and a plan of action which provides a visual means of evaluating progress

• Tool box to use with young men’s group: each tool engraved to include resilient ideas as a prompt for discussion

• Incorporating RT into parent support course• Evaluation tool to measure resilient outcomes that

incorporates young people’s views about their progress or positive change

East Sussex CoP products

• Creating a range of different games:Magic box + questionnaire to be used over series of sessions with young person to chart progress Children's game using body maps and a series of exploratory questionsBoard game to assist young people to identify their own resilient qualities and those around who can be enlisted to help them

• Organisational Review of Young People’s Pathway Plan, adding a stronger resilience emphasis to review young person’s progress

Challenges

• Need a budget

• So hard to get folk to read even though they kept turning up

• Insufficient challenge for academics

• Raising questions without answers

• Getting beyond the superficial

• Sensitivities might need to be held

Positives

• Sets up relationships for the future

• Built confidence of many – now training, doing more with their organisations

• Developed knowledge base for some

• Further developed RT

• Cross fertilisation between members

CoPs over time…• Accumulate knowledge and become bound by the value they find in learning

about resilience and RT together

• Develop a unique perspective on RT as well as a body of common knowledge, practices and approaches (eg tools, standards, manuals, materials)

• Develop personal relationships and established ways of interacting with each other

• Encourage inclusion by making connections and consolidating learning across potential lines of division in relation to joint enterprise

• Cross boundaries which causes people to look afresh at their own assumptions, facilitated by creation of ‘boundary objects’ - eg language, artefacts and ‘brokering’ - eg linking differing perspectives.