Exploring Communities of Learning Practice Value creation enabled by community participation and the interplay of social networks and peer feedback Triantafyllia Dingyloudi München 2017 Exploring Communities of Learning Practice Value creation enabled by community participation and the interplay of social networks and peer feedback Triantafyllia Dingyloudi Inaugural-Dissertation zur Erlangung des Doktorgrades der Philosophie an der Fakultä t fü r Psychologie und Pä dagogik der Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München vorgelegt von Triantafyllia Dingyloudi aus Alexandroupoli, Griechenland München, 26. Juni 2017 Erstgutachter: Prof. Dr. Jan-Willem Strijbos Zweitgutachter: Prof. Dr. Frank Fischer Mündliche Prü fung: 17. November 2017 Acknowledgements First and foremost, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my first supervisor Prof. Dr. Jan-Willem Strijbos, who has been a tremendous mentor. Thank you for supporting me throughout my doctoral journey with your knowledge, feedback, patience and encouragement. Your selfless time and care were sometimes all that kept me going. Thank you for letting me be myself (i.e., flourish, hyperactive, side-tracked) and giving me the ground to test my (and your) limits. I would also like to deeply thank my second supervisor Prof. Dr. Frank Fischer for welcoming my research project at his chair and for allowing it to act as a support structure for the master students of the Munich Center of the Learning Sciences. Your critical comments and suggestions were always moving the project forward. My deep gratitude and appreciation extends to my international supervisor Prof. Dr. Maarten De Laat, who enormously contributed in shaping my research at an early stage and extending its potential. Without your advice I would not have looked at learning communities and value creation the way I did. My special appreciation also goes to Sarah Varney-Burch, Ed. D., for being an amazing mentor in my first research endeavor with learning communities at the University of Brighton. Your question: “Do you know that book by Lave and Wenger?” and your personal view towards learning communities opened up a whole new world to me. Thank you for all your inspiration. I would also like to cordially thank Prof. Dr. Anne Frenzel for acknowledging, supporting and promoting the value of the learning communities within the master’s program at the Munich Center of the Learning Sciences. Thank you for letting this grow even after the end of my research project. Moreover, I would like to express my endless appreciation and special thanks to all participants in the community events, who gave life to the communities of learning practice with and through their participation. You made me experience how a community of learning practice looks and feels like! Thank you for every single minute of your participation. My special appreciation also goes to all students and colleagues who were involved in my research project as interns, coders, or student assistants and massively facilitated the set-up of the study, the video recordings and coding of data. I am particularly grateful to Stella Bellou, Maria Fysaraki, and Katerina Vasilaki for their major contributions in the data analyses! Hope you enjoyed it as much as I did and took the most out of this experience. I gratefully acknowledge the enormous help and technical support by Mr. Georg Kuschel. Without your support I would have ended up using a voice recorder and field notes only. It was a pleasure to be part of our research group with Maryam Alqassab, Markus Bolzer, Mirja Fowler, Ji-hye Kim, and Florence Kyaruzi. Thank you guys for always being there for me willing to help in any possible way. Last but not least, I would like to express my gratitude to my family. Words cannot capture how grateful I am for all your sacrifices and endless love that enabled me to finalize this dissertation. To my son Alexandros Table of contents Zusammenfassung in Deutscher Sprache/ German summary .................................................. i 1. General introduction ................................................................................................................ 1 1.1. Researcher’s theoretical positioning: A social learning theoretical framework ........................ 2 1.2. A conceptual framework and research setting: Communities of Learning Practice ................ 3 1.3. Core phenomena of examination .................................................................................................... 5 1.3.1. Phenomenon 1: Value creation in Communities of Learning Practice ............................... 5 1.3.2. Phenomenon 2: Peer feedback in Communities of Learning Practice ................................ 6 1.3.3. Phenomenon 3: Social networks—Connections between peer-feedback, personal, and academic networks ............................................................................................................................. 8 1.4. Methodological orientation ........................................................................................................... 10 1.4.1. Research context ..................................................................................................................... 10 1.4.2. Methodological overview ....................................................................................................... 12 1.5. Structure of the dissertation and research questions ................................................................. 15 1.6. References....................................................................................................................................... 17 2. Community representations in learning communities ........................................................ 22 2.1. Introduction ................................................................................................................................... 23 2.2. Community: A contested construct .............................................................................................. 24 2.3. The community construct in sociology ........................................................................................ 25 2.3.1. Early sociological community perspectives .......................................................................... 25 2.3.2. Prominent sociological community perspectives ................................................................. 27 2.4. The community construct in community psychology ................................................................. 30 2.5. The community construct in learning contexts ........................................................................... 32 2.5.1. Learning communities in informal learning settings .......................................................... 34 2.5.1.1. Communities of Practice ................................................................................................................ 35 2.5.1.2. Communities of Interest ................................................................................................................. 35 2.5.1.3. Communities of Innovation ........................................................................................................... 36 2.5.2. Learning communities in formal learning settings.............................................................. 36 2.5.2.1. Communities of Inquiry ................................................................................................................. 37 2.5.2.2. Communities of Learners .............................................................................................................. 37 2.5.2.3. Learning communities in Higher Education ................................................................................ 38 2.5.2.4. Knowledge-Building Communities ............................................................................................... 39 2.6. Learning communities: What communities are we talking about? .......................................... 39 2.6.1. Classical human ecology ........................................................................................................ 41 2.6.2. Relational ................................................................................................................................ 42 2.6.3. Functionalist ........................................................................................................................... 42 2.6.4. Social complexity .................................................................................................................... 44 2.6.5. Network ................................................................................................................................... 45 2.6.6. Sense of community ................................................................................................................ 46 2.7. Implications and conclusion.......................................................................................................... 46 2.8. References....................................................................................................................................... 49 3. A recombinant notion of learning community: Communities of Learning Practice ........ 56 3.1. Introduction ................................................................................................................................... 57 3.2. Setting the stage: Influential psychological perspectives on human development as foundations