Launching Ngarrngga’s Community of Practice

Ngarrngga is launching a Community of Practice (CoP) for educators to learn and discuss ways to include Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander knowledge within their teaching work. This Community of Practice will run on a 6-month cycle with a cohort of 20 to 25 educators. The first pilot cohort is supported by seed funding provided by the Australian Centre at the University of Melbourne.

Interview with Steven Kolber

Ngarrngga’s Digital Engagement Officer, India Murphy sat down with the Community of Practice Facilitator, Steven Kolber, to discuss why educators should be excited by the opportunity to join.

Steven Kolber is a curriculum writer at Ngarrngga. Previously, he was an English and English Language teacher within a government school for 12 years. In 2021, he was named a top 50 finalist in the Varkey Foundation’s Global Teacher Prize. Steven has represented teachers globally for Education International, at the International Labour Organisation (ILO), the OECDs Global Teaching Insights, and UNESCOs Teacher Task Force 2030.

Hi Steven, could you tell me a little more about your teaching background?

Sure! I've been a secondary teacher for years and I now work as a Curriculum Writer at Ngarrngga. I started as an English and Humanities teacher. I retrained with a Masters of TESOL at the University of Melbourne so I could teach English as a Second Language (ESL). After completing a Graduate Certificate in Teaching Students with ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder) and a Grad Cert in educational research, I sort of moved into middle leadership in the school.

This enabled me to work more in the areas of inclusion, assessment and reporting. I initially came across Ngarrngga as a teacher when the team reached out to participate in some trial work. But, instead, I joined the team!

Lovely! Now, the Community of Practice – what is it? How would you describe it?

Well, to me, a community of practice is any time you get a bunch of educators in a space, and you get them to talk about their teaching practice. In theory, it is a group of people who meet regularly to discuss a shared passion and want to learn to do it better. Some people may call it a professional learning network, a professional learning community or a social learning space. There's lots of theory to explain it. But I think anytime you get a group of passionate and enthusiastic teachers in a room, then they will form a community of practice.

What inspired you to create the Ngarrngga Community of Practice?

In previous years, I started and facilitated the #edureading Community of Practice initially for teachers to get together and share in an academic reading group. The original idea was to bring together a bunch of teachers and have them read academic research and bring their own worldview to discover how the research may work in practice. Unfortunately, after 6 years, as Twitter (now X) faded away so did #edureading as that was where it was hosted.

The Ngarrngga Community of Practice is bringing the original spirit back to life, but with a new format, in a new place, and with a different focus. The previous focus was on research more broadly, and now we're focusing on First Nations knowledge and perspectives. I think that's something similar to research, as it is something that not many teachers are currently engaging with as much as they should or could.

The model of the Community of Practice is getting teachers to develop their ideas and see them to fruition. For me, I was highly interested in something called ‘the Socratic Circle’. That's a pedagogical approach to get kids to sit in two concentric circles, and they have a discussion about something that they've read. I had the opportunity to hear Al Fricker talk about yarning circles.

Listening to Al, I saw synergies between the two and began to think about how there are years of history that we should probably be tapping into, and that there's stuff that we could and should be learning from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples who've been teaching and learning and maintaining their culture for much longer.

I'm hoping the Community of Practice will be able to bring a similar revelation to educators, where they'll realise that there's all this knowledge and information sitting right under their noses that they've probably just never engaged with. So, the Community of Practice felt like a great opportunity to start encouraging that work.

How will the Community of Practice be structured? How will it meet?

We chose to host on a social media/online platform as you're basically pulling a group of people together and they're all connecting to one another and learning from each other.

We’ll all be in the Microsoft Teams group and each month we will be reading, probably a Conversation article or some other article/ text that's publicly available. It won't be a paywalled academic article because that means one less barrier for educators.

After reading the article, participants will be asked to post three short videos in response to a question or prompt. There will be a discussion at the end of the month to talk about the learning that took place and the directions that the discussion took to explore them further.

I hope that it will take on a life of its own, and the Community becomes the learning space. It’s a different model to a teacher and students’ arrangement, instead the Community itself is learning from one another.

They are building a strong network of other people doing similar sorts of work and trying to find connections as well as areas of strength that they can develop alongside others.

I think that's the strength of a Community of Practice; as a facilitator, I can provide the article and the questions that we should respond to, but then as a community, we decide the direction that the learning goes in and the topics that we discuss and share within the group.

What was the reasoning behind asking educators to record a video? Opposed to asking them to write something or do a Zoom?

The goal of the Community of Practice is to create this sort of staffroom that you wish you had. I’m sure many educators have had the experience of being in a staff room and everyone's talking about maths or TV shows or something like that. And for the teachers who are sort of super committed and interested in what's happening in the education sector, they might not have that opportunity to share that passion with other educators. The videos are intended to motivate educators to give a little insight into their life and build those bonds.

You can film the short video at the end of your teaching day in front of your whiteboard, a projector, or wherever you are in your school or your workplace. That helps other educators involved get a picture of the perspective that you're coming from and how it all fits together. Plus, it puts educators into the practice of speaking up, being empowered, speaking for themselves.

It’s important that teachers can speak to their own perspective and prioritise the knowledge they have gained from experience, opposed to simply reciting the research.

The next time something is raised in a staff meeting about a topic, they can feel confident that they have a whole bunch of ideas and knowledge they feel comfortable sharing as they’ve practiced sharing those thoughts on video already.

Wonderful! What is the next step after the Community of Practice for the educators involved? What are you hoping they take with them?

One of the focuses for setting up the Community of Practice is to establish that ongoing relationship and connection to educators who are doing good work and having Ngarrngga share what they end up doing with things. We are excited to provide new possibilities for the educators and see what happens!

What we've found previously from communities of practice is the people that do this kind of learning tend to end up being leaders in their school or go off to do further study at university.

That’s because the community of practice has drawn them into learning new things, the process of learning and, ultimately, empowered them to realise that they have unique thoughts and perspectives worth sharing.

In an ideal world, the educators would change their practice. Maybe they'd start to share that within small groups within their school. That could be a learning area, a level grouping or something similar. Hopefully, they feel motivated to then take on further responsibilities within the school or education environment, and maybe even take on a leadership position.

There are also possibilities for these teachers to do some writing about what they’ve learnt and get published or contribute to longer blogs or other publications to share their learning with others. They may want to speak at educational conferences around subject area specific stuff. I think there's a real need for teachers to show their imperfect learning more broadly.

What would you say to an educator interested in joining the Community of Practice but thinks “I'm stretched thin. I don't have enough time and energy to do it”?

I would encourage all teachers to prioritise their own learning. And as we know, the Australian Professional Standards for teachers specifically calls out the expectation that teachers know and share about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders cultures and histories and that they are actively involved in the process of reconciliation in their schools.

So, I think it's time that we as educators admitted that we're not doing as much as we should and that this, and other opportunities like it, are a good opportunity to catch up on something that we haven't been doing as well as we should. To start to shape the community that we want - our children and our students - to inhabit.

Join the Community of Practice

If you are interested in joining Ngarrngga’s Community of Practice, you can submit an expression of interest here.

For more information on the Community of Practice or any other related questions, please get in touch with the Ngarrngga team by emailing Ngarrngga-team@unimelb.edu.au.