MS Teams: illuminating a research community
Kelly Trivedy
What is the idea?
Research can be an isolated activity involving individualised processes (Wenger, 1998). Over time, there has been a welcoming of open and collaborative research between colleagues, students, and researchers. I wanted to inspire relationship building (Serrat, 2017) and rich, inclusive conversations by creating an MS Teams research space for my students.
This chapter provides insight into using MS Teams as part of a PGCE, postgraduate research module. The idea is rooted in building communities of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991) and strengthening bonds between a group of researchers working on individual projects.
Student research is a journey, not a destination. An MS Teams research community encourages students to share in the lightbulb moments, struggles, and the wins that research brings! This applies to undergraduate as well as post-graduate students.
Fruitful conversations around unfinished ideas, book recommendations, imagery of home life, honest pleas for support, and sharing of creative practice are among the topics that can enrich the student experience. Additionally, this helps to cultivate meaningful and engaging spaces which endorse active learning and knowledge collaboration to occur naturally in the online sphere.
Wenger (1998) discusses essential structural qualities for the operation of a community of practice:
Using Wenger’s three qualities, here are my adapted three steps to implementing this idea in practice:
- Pre-module warm-up
- Module familiarity
- On-going development
These points will be discussed in turn below with the idea of learning for research as a social activity at its core for first-time researchers such as undergraduate students working on a dissertation, MA students, and those new or returning to Higher Education (HE).
Why this idea?
Following the constructivist stance allows students to create meaning from their own experiences (Girvan and Savage, 2010). Marrying this with Vygotsky’s (1978) view and translating the importance of community can be transformative practice in HE, where student researchers connect existing knowledge with new knowledge in a shared space that is conducive to this development.
As the leader of a research module for an in-service PGCE programme for the post-compulsory education sector, I was conscious of my students’ busy lives outside of their studies. Inspired by Wenger (1998), I sought to provide a space for them to share in their wins and talk openly about their challenges without fear of judgment. In their presentation of an ‘ecology of interactive learning environments’ Johnson (2014) discussed how shared online experiences scaffold individual interpretations. Coupled with Johnson’s ideas, I was also fuelled by the awareness that interactivity online could motivate and stimulate learning (Keengwe et al., 2013).
The interactivity attracted me to use Teams with my students. It gave them a space in which they c