Online Community of Practice for High School Teachers in China

Abstract: Informal learning is becoming an integral part of teachers' daily activities. Marsick and Watkins (2015) described such behavior as tacit, non-routine, context-dependent, and sourced from daily experience. High school teachers utilize discretionary time, taking the autonomy of learning regarding learning activities, time, location, material, and tools (Ryan & Deci, 2020). They seek support from outside in addition to the regular, allocated instructional and planning schedule. In this way, they can promptly solve problems in practice that have not yet been formed in formal training.
To improve teaching skills through informal learning, teachers participate in various online communities or networks. Research showed that the communities teachers join are heterogeneous in size and member composition, with many people simultaneously participating in more than one online network or community (Macià & García, 2016). In China, there are almost 20,000 networking learning spaces for teachers at the national level, such as iCourse and Smart Education of China, which have accumulated 1.146 billion visitors and 6.9 billion views (Ministry of Education, 2022). The online communities connect teachers across regions (e.g. rural and urban), at different levels (e.g. school, district, provincial, national), of common interests (e.g., English as Foreign Languages), with university researchers and practitioners from industries (Qiao et al., 2017). When teachers join communities, they engage in various activities such as reading case studies, learning new teaching tools, sharing best practices, and watching online video clips (Luo, 2020). Typically, the learning activities are accompanied by diverse, open, and heuristic communication, in which teachers collaboratively construct, disseminate and accumulate shared knowledge.
Nevertheless, learning through online communities does not necessarily contribute to the professional development of teachers (Hammond, 2014). Instead, fatigue and dissatisfaction are exacerbated by the information explosion, which is dispersed, high-volume, rapidly expanding, and complex. It may place excessive demands on a person's digital competence to retrieve, process, and manage data, resulting in information, communication, and system features overload (Lee et al., 2016). Consequently, many teachers complained about the absence of meaningful opportunities. In addition, online communities also involve legal, privacy, and ethical issues. Teachers who get into online communities asserted that low trust, unstable relations, dysregulated behaviors, and deviated sense of self all impede the learning within.
In recent years, researchers adopt the notion of Community of Practice (CoP) to interpret teachers’ learning activity online (Tseng & Kuo, 2013; Yoon et al., 2020). According to Wenger et al. (2002), CoP refers to "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" (p. 4). It is composed of three dimensions: domain, community, and practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991).
However, there are limited research on how teachers in China explore, and choose the appropriate online platform, engage in communication, connect with others, and resolve disagreements through the lens of Online CoPs (OCoPs). Teachers face difficulties of sustaining active engagement and balancing their role as a user, mentor, and/or administrator. Especially when one CoP disperses, teachers concern how to suit themselves in another CoPs. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to explore the ways in which high school teachers in China develop their professional skills focusing on OCoPs through an in-depth literature review. An ultimate goal of the study is to develop a conceptual framework of high school teachers’ OCoPs in China. Two guiding questions are below. 1. How can the findings of OCoPs studies help better understand the professional development of high school teachers in China? 2. How, if at all, do OCoPs contribute to teachers’ informal learning?
The authors employ an integrative literature review approach (Snyder, 2019), limiting the time from 2010-2022. Various databases are used including ERIC (EBSCO), Education Source, Web of Science, JSTOR, CNKI for literature in Chinese, as well as references from selected articles. The search terms consist of “informal learning”, “online community of practice”, “high school teachers”. These terms are combined with Boolean search operator.
Based on the synthesis of the literature, the authors establish a proposed framework to explain teachers’ informal learning experience in OCoPs in the context of high schools in China. The study highlights the features of teachers as adult learners who possess the life-long intrinsic pursuit of self-development. It is designed to enrich the informal learning experience of teachers through the feasible framework of OCoPs. We are hopeful that the proposed framework can provide insights for school administrators, faculties, and HRD professionals regarding the improvement of a learning supportive environment and system.