A Community of Practice for Early Career Biology Teachers: Social Networking and Digital Technologies

Abstract

The challenge for science teacher educators is to develop pedagogies and employ technologies which embrace "communities of practice" as core to both science practice and teacher learning. In this presentation, we consider early career biology teachers - those who are presumably of the "net generation", but whose engagement with both online communities and communities of practice in their fields of teaching is surprisingly limited. We present pedagogical practices (and online tools) specifically designed to foster a community of practice and the collaborative creation of a multimodal e-learning resource. These represent our first steps towards reconceptualising 'method' studies as a longitudinal community of practice rather than a 'one shot wonder'.