Caring for Our Communities of Practice in Educational Development
Our paper names the importance of communities of practice for ourselves as educational developers, inviting us to witness and name: the communities in which we belong; the important functions they engage; who they nurture and how; and what visible and hidden labor is undertaken to sustain these communities. We include narratives from educational developers who share examples of the functional roles and relational meanings from their membership in different communities of practice. Through these stories, we amplify the particularly important role these groups have played in our professional and personal lives during 2020. As these groups are fragile, we end with specific actions we can take to tend to our communities of practice, maintaining them so that they will provide us support and shelter into the future.