COOPERATIVE LEARNING IN A COMMUNITY OF PRACTICE: EXPERIENCES OF THE INNOVATION AND TEACHING IN ECONOMICS AND BUSINESS

According to Wenger, McDermott and Snyder (2002), a community of practice, CoP, is a group of people "who share a concern, a set of problems, or a passion about a topic, and deepen their knowledge and expertise in this area by interacting on an ongoing basis”. For these authors, the three premises or dimensions in which the CoP must be settled are the mutual commitment, the existence of a joint enterprise and a shared repertoire.

In this sense, the Teaching Innovation Group in Economics and Business (called IDEÉ) has been established at the University of Murcia (September 2009) with the specific aim of exchanging among members experiences and knowledge about the implementation of the teaching methodology of Cooperative Learning in the studies organized by departments belonging to the Faculty of Economics and Business. The defining characteristics of this group fully fit into the definition of a CoP.

Our experience shows that is necessary to set up some kind of explicit internal regulations in order to achieve a correct way of functioning, even when the CoP is an informal group. The proposed regulation has to establish the requirements for becoming a member as well as for loosing membership. Another important point refers to the obligation of implementing the teaching innovation; a third one has to do with the academic production of the group.

The present communication is aimed at exposing the experience of the implementation of IDEÉ group as a CoP and at identifying its constitution characteristics, as well as describing the difficulties that have arisen and the solutions that we have adopted.