CHAPADOS ALICATADOS

Any action research project requires an intervention to take place and its

outcomes evaluated in relation to the improvement in practice of the researcher (McNiff 2010b). Here, the outcome of the investigation into the academics’ values and concerns about information literacy was the implementation of a

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community of practice. The form of the community of practice was driven by the results of the interviews and survey, as was content it covers. It could have been online, or face-to-face, or both. It could have been synchronous, or

asynchronous, or both. To provide a long-term evaluation of the community of practice would be beyond the scope of this project, in which the first action implemented is the carrying out of interviews and the survey and to use the evaluation of that stage to inform the community of practice. However, initial reflections from the researcher, and members of the community of practice, are included, to give an indication of where future developments may lie. These are centred on specific examples of information literacy curriculum development which have arisen from the work of the community of practice and which are likely to have long-term effects. Indications from previous studies to employ communities of practice are that this is a worthwhile endeavour and that long- term benefits have been evidenced (Cochrane 2010, Cochrane 2014, Nixon, Brown 2013). Further to this, projects linking to the York St John curriculum which emerge from the community of practice will be outlined in chapter 4 showing impact in terms of outcome validity, catalytic validity and process validity.

The survey question about the wish to take part in a community of practice garnered a positive response from 43 of the 61 academics who responded. Of these, 32 left email addresses to find out more. There was a wish for an online platform, as well as face to face meetings, thus the facilitation was designed in light of this, offering synchronous and asynchronous interactions, in line with Wenger, White et al.’s (2009) recommendations. Initially a face-to-face meeting of one hour was organised, with follow up notes and discussions posted in the online site. From options of content offered, the preferred ones were of case studies from both York St John University and other institutions. It was also deemed important to reflect the student view.

The decision about the best way of hosting and designing the online platform was taken in conjunction with academic colleagues at the first community of practice meeting, and informed by the survey answers. It was recognised that it needed to be accessible both internally at York St John University, and externally, to allow those who may not yet have access to the university systems (e.g. visiting lecturers) legitimate peripheral participation. It was also the case that members

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of the community should be able to create content for it, and not have to rely on the facilitator to do so, so that the power dynamics of the academic librarian ‘owning’ information literacy in universities are disrupted, and that the power structures involved with academic publishing are uncovered and challenged, in line with the recommendations of Badke (2017) and Gustafson (2017). Finally, it needed to be removed at least a little from the traditional institutional systems already in place and on offer, as the importance of an ‘other’ space in which to work is valuable in allowing members the freedom to admit what they do not know without fear of judgement from the institution (Rand, Haines Lyon et al. 2016). The researcher’s reflections from the point of reading this paper further elaborate on this:

I read this paper[…] It gives a justification and philosophical explanation of why a third space, somewhat removed from the neoliberal HE institution, is important in the development of people’s identities as researchers. This made me consider the reasons why I thought it was important to have my online community of practice held in a space which isn’t entirely connected to the university. (Reflection 10.08.17)

It was decided to host the online community of practice on an institutional WordPress blog, after feedback was gathered from members of the new community of practice. This allowed for a website to be created that could be accessed by anyone, but rooted in the institution at which the research had taken place and which linked the community members. Further to this, plug-ins were available which allowed members to submit content themselves. This

content could then be edited and categorised by the facilitating librarian, to allow anyone visiting the site to find this information as easily as possible. Further advantages of this platform were easily installed statistics plug-ins, to track engagement, and the fact that it could be exported from this institutionally hosted option to the generic WordPress platform if it ever needed to be transferred.

It had originally been planned to use WikiSpace to host any documents

associated with the community of practice, and have these fed through to the WordPress blog as the front end service where these could be searched for and read. However, the WikiSpace service was discontinued early in the online community of practice platform design phase. It was then decided to use

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WordPress for everything, due to its sustainability – everything can be exported and hosted elsewhere if necessary.