Communities of Practice as a Paradigm

In the last decades radical changes have occurred in advanced societies, essentially due to three factors: the diffusion of information technologies, the acceleration of scientific and technological renewal, and globalization. The advanced society model today is characterized by rapid and forced innovation of products to put on the market and by a process where market and innovation feed each other. Information and knowledge are the resources to improve in order to keep the level of skills required to compete high. There is an increasing demand for professionalization which cannot be acquired a-priori and in a single solution. So, people very often learn from practical experience, by facing new situations that require effective solutions and give them a chance to acquire new knowledge. In pedagogy this phenomenon is defined as informal learning based on tacit knowledge. Therefore, the professional person, does not need static knowledge any more; on the contrary, he/she requires new tools "for learning to learn", in order to increase his/her expertise quickly. In this paper we want to propose the community of practice as a flexible and dynamic methodological tool (paradigm) for defining a professional figure. Our intent is to use the community of practice to create a model of a specific professional figure. Such a model, which traditionally includes the conceptual, logic-functional and physical phases, is not pre-defined, but built by analysing the interactions that occur in the community of practice. Thus, it is modifiable on the basis of the new demands identified in the practice of the profession itself. In order to verify our proposal we assumed the creation of a community of practice among the Didactic Managers of our university, a figure required by the Italian University Reform. The expertise necessary for this profile is not well-defined yet, and only through practice it is possible to clarify tasks and aims. Therefore, it seems an excellent environment in which to experiment our paradigm