Leveraging a Community of Practice to Build Faculty Resilience and Support Innovations in Teaching during a Time of Crisis

Abstract

Amidst the COVID-19 upheaval to higher education, a grantor-led community of practice (CoP) supported faculty members to deliver an innovative, sustainability-oriented entrepreneurship curriculum and maintain resiliency as teaching professionals. This paper discusses how through engagement in the CoP, this group of faculty from across engineering, material science, business, and geosciences demonstrated resilience, adaptability, and pivoted to create curriculum for students in real time, as the events of the COVID-19 pandemic unfolded throughout 2020 and impacted face-to-face learning. The role the community of practice played in sustaining and supporting the faculty will be discussed. Case studies from faculty members will demonstrate how sustainable design and social responsibility can be integrated into entrepreneurially focused classes and student experiences across disciplines. The primary contribution of this research is the important role that an emergent learning framework can play in informing how best to optimize the CoP format and approach in a way that leverages and addresses individual member strengths, challenges, and experiences, and supports the needs of CoP members during a time of significant change and crisis.