Community building for new teaching
and learning contexts

Universities make a broad distinction between academic and non-academic staff. Professional interests, affiliations, roles, and conditions of service that identify and separate groups have long been established within the university tradition. However, as new social and institutional agendas emerge, the professional comfort zones are being challenged. While esoteric knowledge production is proliferating, the interdependence between practitioners and specialists across disciplines and professional sectors is more noticeable. Traditional communities of practice are gradually becoming more open and more participatory. Funding agencies - government and private - are encouraging and rewarding collaborative work that involves a wide range of participants form within and outside the university. Underpinning new institutional research and tuition frameworks are ideals such as transformation, relevance, quality, inclusiveness, and cross-disciplinary interactions.

In this paper I discuss the relationship between context, community, and communication. I will look at the possibilities and complexities of community building from an organisational learning perspective. I will refer to the Unisa (South Africa) context to illustrate the challenges presented by culture, discourse, space, power, and identity. With regard to curriculum, I will explore the communities created through our curriculum design decisions, conversations between authors and readers of teaching and learning texts, lenses through which we make representations, and knowledge domains that we legitimise or reject. Lastly, I will argue for a more courageous response to the omissions and presumptions of our current practices.