What is this?

This is a way of describing how groups of practitioners (from many, even any, fields) can function in collaborative ways - to compare and share ways of working so as to sustain and grow knowledge about "what works, for which situations".
AMBIT and the TiddlyManuals that support it are significantly influenced by this simple idea, that practitioners like to get better at what they are doing, and, given the chance, they like to share their expertise with other practitioners.

This is why every team trained in AMBIT gets its own local version of the AMBIT manual which it is encouraged to use as a 'practice scrapbook' to document and share its present expertise and ongoing learning about "what works for whom, here."

Video

A description of Communities of Practice, what they are, why they matter is included in text below, or:

• See some video: Building a Community of Practice - Dickon Bevington.
• See videos produced BY the AMBIT CoP at AMBIT Conference presentations

Supporting the AMBIT Community of Practice

Communities of Practice need a certain amount of support. The AMBIT project from the Anna Freud National Centre for Children and Families is developing Support for the AMBIT Community of Practice

What's the AMBIT Community writing about?

Click the "Browse" button to see all the pages authored by different AMBIT-influenced teams in the recent past:

Browse Community of Practice » Shop for shared tips...

Membership of the AMBIT CoP

The AMBIT community of practice - members lists the current membership of this group, which is all teams that have received AMBIT training. If your team's name appears in this list (and only if) your team's manual will be part of the Comparing and Sharing functions

The phrase "Community of Practice" is most closely associated with the anthropologist, Jean Lave, and Etienne Wenger whose work began in the field of Artificial Intelligence. They described communities of practice following an examination of the learning processes that they observed from a close investigation of Apprenticeships.

See this external link to the wikipedia page about Communities of Practice for a good starting point for study if you are interested, though we have summarised the subject below.

Features of a Community of Practice

Quoting from Wenger:

• Mutual Engagement:

Firstly, through participation in the community, members establish norms and build collaborative relationships; this is termed mutual engagement. These relationships are the ties that bind the members of the community together as a social entity.

• Joint Enterprise:

Secondly, through their interactions, they create a shared understanding of what binds them together; this is termed the joint enterprise. The joint enterprise is (re)negotiated by its members and is sometimes referred to as the 'domain' of the community.

• Shared Repertoire:

Finally, as part of its practice, the community produces a set of communal resources, which is termed their shared repertoire; this is used in the pursuit of their joint enterprise and can include both literal and symbolic meanings.

Other ways of describing a Community of Practice are that they share the following features:

• Domain:

A domain of knowledge creates common ground, inspires members to participate, guides their learning and gives meaning to their actions.

• Community

The notion of a community that creates the social fabric for that learning. A strong community fosters interactions and encourages a willingness to share ideas.

• Practice

While the domain provides the general area of interest for the community, the practice is the specific focus around which the community develops, shares and maintains its core of knowledge.

Where does this fit with Mentalizing, TiddlyManuals and AMBIT?

AMBIT, increasingly explicitly, sees one of its aims as the development of a Community of Practice for teams working with chaotic, distressed, hard to reach young people.

The TiddlyManuals that support AMBIT, function as “windows” upon the work of other teams (we refer to a range of Comparing and Sharing functions), encouraging curiosity and the sharing of emerging expertise between services that, although geographically remote, frequently address similar clinical quandaries.

This aspect of Manualization builds on themes opened by Lave and Wenger (1991) in their landmark study of apprenticeship that has led to the theory of ‘Communities of Practice’ - the establishment of which is an explicit goal for AMBIT.

We believe that Mentalization theory supports, and to some extent explains, the phenomenon whereby much apprenticed learning does not come from “top down” expert authorities, but from apprentice peers who, we suggest, are more able than lofty experts implicitly to mentalize the hopeful learner’s particular dilemma ("why it is hard to understand or cope with this, right here, right now"). Being mentalized accurately by another person triggers the Epistemic Trust that Csibra and Gergely (2006) have shown facilitates and frequently precedes effective social learning from that person.

In seeking to provide a structured environment to host such relationships, AMBIT aims to capitalise on the learning potential that Communities of Practice offer.

Recently the development of the world wide web, and the ease with which expertise can be shared through text, video, etc, via this medium, has pushed these ideas further forwards. The online Wiki is one way in which communities of practice may collaborate to share and build knowledge. The authors of AMBIT and TiddlyManuals believe that the particular (and really unique) Comparing and Sharing functions that are built into the AMBIT manual offer a powerful way to support and enact this.