How can we improve on what we do? The potential of effectively utilising our community of practice

Communities of Practice (Wenger, 2007:8) have been fostered and initiated widely across many organisations as a social Knowledge Management vehicle. A higher education environment is a context rich in knowledge creation (the author prefers 'construction' as knowledge is constructed by individuals and not 'created' to live independently), sharing and utilisation. Students and academics are involved in various Communities of Practice; but with academics the primary methods of engagement in developing these Communities of Practice (CoP) are through e-mails, journals and conferences, thereby not fully utilising the inherent intellectual capital, the utilisation of which would be significantly enhanced through the fostering of CoP at departmental level. Much theory in Knowledge Management has evolved and subsequently moved away from knowledge as solely residing in artefacts (books, knowledge storage technologies) or individuals, to knowledge that is very dynamic, essentially being constructed by individuals through. engagement with people, artefacts and new knowledge being constructed by shared meaning. Hence, we have moved towards an era where further integration of Knowledge Management theories and 'Communities of Practice' adds additional growth potential for organisational behaviour. The author is an academic (and considers herself more 'teacher' orientated) in an academic support programme or 'foundation programme' whose main aims are to improve the learning and prior knowledge of the 1(st) year students entering the programme. However, the author's focus is on how to best improve the current practice (the practice of the staff teaching on the foundation programme) so that this can be better facilitated. To improve the current practice, the author suggests firstly creating and fostering a CoP amongst the staff, which can then effectively be used to indirectly better manage and utilise the knowledge of the staff Thus, the main concern of this paper is how best to manage the knowledge of the teaching staff as a department, so that issues related to student learning can be better addressed. The research method employed involved an in-depth interviewing process, analysis of the interviews and it was only after this that further literature sought to support or refute the claims were sourced. The paper subsequently focuses on looking at the results of this Grounded Theory research and discusses the mechanisms of how the potential of this CoP to 'improve on what we do" could be realised.