Forums, Fellowship and Wicked Problems in Teaching

Many of the concerns of university teachers constitute ‘wicked’ problems—wicked not in the sense that they are evil, but rather in the way that they resist definition and analysis, are presented differently by different stakeholders, and at best are ‘resolved’ rather than ‘solved’. This could explain why there are no globally-, nationally- or even institutionally-accepted ‘right’ ways to teach in any discipline, and why communities of practice have become important mechanisms for pooling and sharing the knowledge, experiences and skills of university professionals who are focused on teaching and learning in a given context. Can the encouragement of shared reflective thinking as a tool of inquiry in a fairly transient community of practice (CoP) provide these university teachers some respite from the constant search for ‘the’ right answer by helping them understand the realities of finding ‘an’ answer? This chapter reviews the characteristic CoP interactions that occur among participants in online discussion forums that augment face to face professional development and professional recognition workshops about teaching and learning at an Australian university. Even though these online interactions are relatively fleeting, cross-disciplinary, and constituted by diverse groups of participants, empirical analysis suggests they provide adequate evidence of the nine thematic signals of effective communities of practice described by Wenger (Communities of practice: A brief introduction, 2012), and illustrate the kinds of wicked problems with which university educators grapple on a daily basis.