Purpose: To tell the story of the evolution of the international CoP, share outcomes and outputs from the CoPBackground. Communities of Practice (CoPs) are formed by people who engage in social or collective learning in a shared area of interest; in this case, all the members were connected through PhDs at one university in Scotland and underpinned by values and research approaches consistent with person-centredness. The learning culture is an important factor affecting the quality of doctoral education (Lahenius 2012; Shacham and Cohen 2009) yet PhD students often report a dissonance between the expectations of being engaged with practising researchers and a community of peers and other experts and their experiences. We will show how the CoP has developed through a collaboration between student learners and professoriate learners. Given the social learning underpinnings, particular attention is given to process review and to evaluation in the CoP among the growing international membership with members at different stages in their research and lifelong learning.
Methods: A participatory approach was used along with evaluation questions. Data was collated retropsectively over the last 2 years from the CoP facebook page and concurrent data was collected from critically creative reflections across a numbe rof the CoP members.
Results: The CoP members are committed to learning how to do their own research more authentically and to advancing our knowledge on person-centred practice and theory. Members help and support each other, and challenge each other in various ways. They build relationships that enable them to learn from each other and they care about each other and their relationships. The QMU CoP for PhD students appears to be evolving into a hybrid between a social learning community and a distributed virtual network crossing multiple countries and organisational boundaries (Fischer et al 2007).
Conclusion: A model of join professional and academic learning is emerging that has relevance for professional development and research capcity building in the topic of perosn-centredness and in the university. Although Wenger (2001) makes it clear that the technology itself is secondary to social and cultural aspects, as we evolve into a more geographically distributed CoP, we have a greater need to understanding how technology affects social learning within the CoP and how we can use it more creatively.
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