Cooperation, collaboration, “labs” and communities of practice—what are we doing here?
In designing Constellations as a practitioner lab, we honestly did not have many clear models to follow. Most of us had never been part of a research lab group, and we weren’t primarily focusing on research, so what was it that we were meeting for, and how would we do it? We decided to hold the idea of “labs” and “lab meetings” loosely, seeing what showed up as we simply gathered in service of our primary purpose—growing our collective understanding of contextual behavior science, and using that understanding in our work to create more effective, nurturing, contextually sensitive environments and communities that reflect shared values of compassion, cultural humility, sustainability, and social justice.
Constellations began with the idea that all of our work together would function in some way to establish and maintain a community of practice—a cooperative, intentional space that supported us in a process of learning together—both from and with each other—around a shared topic of interest, in an effort to do something meaningful, and to get better at a particular practice, both collectively and individually (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Wenger-Trayner et al., 2023). The concept of communities of practice fits our work well, because it is also fundamentally contextual in its foundational principles: “The learning is not separated from the learner, the knowledge from the knower, the practice from the practitioner” (Wenger-Trayner et al., 2023, p. 13).
We think it is important to recognize that communities of practice are by their very nature, cooperative: they require actively building bilateral relationships in order to learn from one another, as opposed to being taught by an expert, and require taking the time to “develop a shared repertoire of resources: experiences, stories, tools, ways of addressing recurring problems—in short a shared practice” (Wenger-Trayner & Wenger-Trayner, 2015, p. 2). Notably, communities of practice involve the sharing of stories, as they are practitioner spaces, which recognize the value of many ways of knowing about our work, exploring diverse perspectives, as told through our real life experiences.
In an effort to honor this practice, our first work together as a lab was a presentation at the LaMiss conference about how the importance of cooperation—not only presenting how we can conceptualize cooperation from a behavior analytic standpoint, but also authentically illustrating the importance of cooperative repertoires with examples from numerous real-life experiences from our work and lives. We are currently working to turn that presentation into a longer paper centered around some of our own stories, to unpack the concept of cooperation and its component repertoires. We’ll be sharing more of our thoughts and writings-in-progress on this topic over the next several months.
References
Fiebig, J., Gould, E., Kaminski, B., Ming, S., Marroquin, N., Ouelega, S, & Zhou, J. (2024) Together we go far: Creating cooperative contexts for change in behavior analytic practice. Panel community discussion at the LAMiss ACBS chapter annual conference (online).
Lave, J. and Wenger, E. (1991) Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge University Press.
Wenger-Trayner, E., Wenger-Trayner, B., Reid, P., Bruderlein, C. (2023). Communities of practice within and across organizations: A guidebook. The Social Learning Lab.
Wenger-Trayner, E. & Wenger-Trayner, B. (2015) Introduction to communities of practice. https://wenger-trayner.com/introduction-to-communities-of-practice/
