Reevaluating collegiality: Relationality,learning communities,and possibilities

Abstract

Researchers normatively view faculty or professional learning communities as effective methods for sharing teaching approaches. Such a view overlooks the potential impacts the groups can have more broadly on higher educational communities. In this article, three studies about university-affiliated faculty learning communities are considered from a relational perspective. Confucian relationality, which envisions people as interdependent, considers the development of collegiality that emerges from the communities as a form of personal cultivation and highlights the process-oriented aspects of the studies considered, insinuating the importance of quality interactions, commitment, and reciprocity. In particular, a relational view suggests that learning communities may enrich collegial relationships and generate collaborative projects, and other unimagined possibilities, in ways that affect institutions beyond the contexts of the communities. This work challenges scholars to consider how a relational theoretical framework situates collegiality in the context of research about university-affiliated faculty learning communities as an important achievement.

‘I now have a community of peers to troubleshoot with’, a former participant of a faculty learning community said in response to a survey question about the experience (Ward and Selvester, 2012: 118). While the study’s designers sought to evaluate the extent to which participants learned about the teaching approach universal design for learning, the comment about the implications of collegiality is easy to miss. Sandwiched in a list of other responses mostly about technology use and practice with computer programs, the comment hints at the potential for future interactions, providing an indication of how the development of collegiality generates the context for possibility.

Researchers often view faculty or professional learning communities from a product-oriented perspective as effective ways to share teaching approaches. They situate the development of collegiality that emerges from these communities as part of the method of achieving the goals of learning teaching innovations. For example, they describe these communities as collegial, often interdisciplinary groups of faculty and staff who want to collaboratively address a broad range of student needs and learning styles by learning about varied teaching approaches (Ward and Selvester, 2012). Generally topic or cohort focused, participants and facilitators strive to create contexts conducive to risk-taking where faculty members feel comfortable sharing their teaching experiences and questions; in fact, the communities need to feel trustworthy and non-competitive in order to encourage participants to reflect upon their experiences together (Glowacki-Dudka and Brown, 2008; Limbrick and Knight, 2005; Ward and Selvester, 2012; Yayli, 2012). However, a narrow focus on learning teaching approaches as sought-after outcomes places less emphasis on the significant participant commitment and effort required in the learning communities to develop collegiality. It also overlooks the learning communities’ potential broader contributions to higher education institutional contexts.

In this article, I use a lens of a Confucian relationality drawn from classical Chinese philosophy to consider three studies about university-affiliated learning communities. Engaging relationality, which envisions people as necessarily interdependent, situates fostering collegiality as a form of personal cultivation that has extensive impacts. Learning through relating to others offers more than familiarity with particular teaching innovations; it enriches the relationships of those involved in unpredictable ways. In particular, relationality situates the development of collegiality as a process and a valuable achievement that recognizes facilitators and participants must expend effort and use time to create the conditions to generate it. Relationality increases the visibility of how quality of interactions among participants, commitment and reciprocity all contribute to enriching networks of relationships and collaborative projects beyond the contexts of particular learning communities. In other words, it recognizes that the development of collegiality in learning communities requires hard work.

Engaging relationality provides an opportunity to ask what is overlooked in product-oriented views of faculty learning communities and the way the development of collegiality is normatively situated. While institutions may marginalize and relegate interdisciplinary, supportive pedagogical-spaces – such as learning communities – as faculty development or support, relationality, which accommodates the complexity of such groups and the significance of quality interactions, suggests that they miss envisioning the value and potential for the development of collegiality to cultivate university communities more broadly.

Relationality

I notice that theorists generally use the term ‘relationality’ as a way to resist or counter notions of binary thinking about mind/body, subject/object, and sciences/humanities, among others. Often intoned as a kind of alternative or reverse discourse, it is deployed for various and particular reasons. For example, some scholars use relationality to challenge epistemological, ontological or methodological norms. As a result, I find it difficult to try to characterize relationality beyond a general notion of connection or relation without delving into specific contexts. Rather than seeing this as problematic, I suggest the term’s flexibility and malleability reminds scholars and educators that our endeavors are specific – necessarily spatially, sensorially, and temporally located. In fact, the more ways that relationality as a conception is theorized and explored in specific contexts, the broader, more complex and richer the field of relationality that develops. The multiplicity of purposes presents an opportunity to consider how the term’s meanings take specific shape in part from how it will be used.

Given that there are multiple conceptions of relationality, why select a Confucian one as a theoretical lens through which to read research about faculty learning communities? I chose this perspective of relationality because it takes as its focus the meaning of relation in the human world and specifically articulates the roles of learning and personal cultivation and their implications for communities. To select this frame does not detract from or devalue others. I selected it not because it is qualitatively stronger or more improved in some abstract or singular way, but because it suited the context I wanted to explore.

More broadly, relationality offers a useful epistemological alternative to Platonic and Rousseauian educational theories that tend to reflect dualistic beliefs and ways of knowing (Stone, 1988/2013). Lynda Stone suggests that a relational epistemology is feminist and potentially transformative because relation is basic and emphasizing it challenges the notion of transcendental truths. This construct echoes post-structuralist interests in considering how power relations shape notions of truth and knowledge, destabilizing assumptions that there exists some kind of direct link between them (St Pierre, 2000). For example, engaging relationality loosens notions of identity and positionality from being essentialist and fixed. A relational view suggests that people are located in specific temporal and spatial configurations that influences how people feel or think about what we know.

Barbara Thayer-Bacon (2009) makes a more specific case for a relational epistemological perspective when she frames knowing as transactional. This pragmatist social feminist view, as she calls it, situates beliefs, expectations and standards as socially constructed and requiring continual critique and adjustment; people construct what we know through our relationships with others. An idea, for example, cannot be isolated but exists in a web of knowing that emerges through peoples’ embodied interconnections, surroundings, and social environments. Her characterization of a relational epistemology can be useful for what she calls ‘active engagement’ and ‘democratic inclusion’ as a way to connect educational theory and practice (Thayer-Bacon, 2009: 3). For educators, this means not prioritizing ideas (or abstractions or objectivity) over experiences (often seen as subjective, concrete, temporal) or vice versa, but rather to envision their interconnectedness. This move emphasizes the importance of developing awareness of the role of contexts and beliefs in the construction of knowing while also accommodating ambiguity. When people, Thayer-Bacon points out, are situated as active participants in a natural world that is contingent and changing, such a focus considers a view of what phenomena are possible rather than what may be perceived as actual.

While Thayer-Bacon uses relationality as a way to reframe philosophical notions of epistemology, Karen Barad (2007), drawing on quantum physics, suggests that relationality can be used to consider how notions of epistemology, ontology and ethics are mutually implicative and inseparable. She offers a concept of what she calls ‘agential realism’ in order to complicate and destabilize scholars’ perceptions of the normative boundaries among humanities, social sciences and traditional sciences, in order to provoke more far-reaching conversations. In particular, she suggests that a relational ontology provides the basis for her ‘posthumanist performative account of material bodies’, which indicates that agencies form through relation. A key part of her conception of agential realism is the notion of intra-action, which she describes as different from interaction because it implies that identifiable agencies do not precede relation but emerge from it. Agencies are enmeshed, she suggests, and only become distinctive through relation.

Barad further invokes relation between humans and nonhumans through her suggestion that there is reciprocity between ‘thinking about something and knowing your intentions (concerning the matter)’ (Barad, 2007: 21). The nature of intentionality needs to be rethought, she points out, because circumstances inform thinking. As a result, intentions cannot preexist relation. In fact, she states – provocatively – that,

Perhaps intentionality might better be understood as attributable to a complex network of human and nonhuman agents, including historically specific sets of material conditions that exceed the traditional notion of the individual. Or perhaps it is less that there is an assemblage of agents than there is an entangled state of agencies. (Barad, 2007: 23)

Humans and nonhumans, then, cannot ever be considered as existing separately from others but, rather, as necessarily embedded in particular contexts. While one may seek to identify or describe a person or thing in particular ways, the act of description itself is always partial because it entails the act of selection, which smacks of artifice because to select is to distinguish and background relation. For Barad, relationality can be a useful theoretical tool to reconfigure notions of meaning, boundaries, and characteristics, that envisions the world, human and nonhuman, as deeply interconnected.

While Barad discusses relationality with regard to the inextricability of agencies and its implications for the entangled relations between humans and nonhumans, Bruno Latour (2004) invokes it epistemologically with a cultural context in mind. He argues for a repositioning of the critic not simply as one who participates in a process of critique and deconstruction of objects for the sake of it, or for possible misuse, but one, who through thoughtful, even ethical analysis, can contribute to the generation of meaning. In particular, Latour argues that epistemological matters of fact are situated as emergent and relational to matters of concerns, implying a reality that is not bounded by matters of fact. They are limited representations of experience: ‘Matters of fact are only very partial and, I would argue, very polemical, very political renderings of matters of concerns …’ (Latour, 2004: 232). For example, the process and intention of identifying something as an object or fact implicates it in a web of matters of concern. Latour uses relationality to consider how matters of fact are always embedded in matters of concerns rather than existing in isolated or transcendent ways devoid of contexts.

While the renderings of relationality that I have described so far veer toward metaphysical concerns, a relationality drawn from classical Chinese texts decidedly does not. Rather than an emphasis on perceptions of reality and knowing, relationality from this perspective envisions a world as specific and embodied, and takes as its focus the human realm of activity and conduct. Here, I want to point out again that engaging a specific notion of relationality does not simply cancel out the value of the others. Choosing to use a Confucian relationality to read research about learning communities does not presume that, for example, Barad’s consideration of the interconnections between humans and nonhumans or relational epistemologies are moot. Rather, I see them together as generating a broader field of relationality; rather than antithetical, the frameworks have different emphases that can coexist and complement each other. The frameworks develop meaning when they are engaged contextually and I situate myself as one of many exploring the implications of these constructions. In the case of learning communities, I use a Confucian relationality to consider the primary value of enriching human relationships and communities through dynamic interactions.

A Confucian approach

I elaborate on a framework of Confucian relationality largely by drawing on a philosophical interpretation and translation of the Zhongyong, a classical Chinese philosophical text, produced by Roger Ames and David Hall (Ames and Hall, 2001). The Zhongyong, attributed to Kong Ji (483–402 BCE), the grandson of Confucius, exists in its current form of 33 chapters after the Song era scholar Zhu Xi (1130–1200 CE) edited it and added interlinear commentary. Relationality suggests that each moment offers an opportunity for learning that contributes to the cultivation of people through relating with others in ways that can have far-reaching impacts. I focus in particular on three aspects of relationality that hinge on a notion that people are interdependent:

Emphasizing the value of quality interactions;

Situating personal cultivation as occurring through relation; and

Suggesting the extensive impact of personal cultivation.

In brief, the Zhongyong explores the aspects and processes of becoming an exemplary person and provides specific examples of people Confucius was thought to have identified as such. For example, when, in Chapter 20 of the Zhongyong, the Duke Ai of Lu asks about proper governance, the response attributed to Confucius is that leaders need to develop their characters through the cultivation of ‘authoritative conduct’, which ‘means conducting oneself like a human being, wherein devotion to one’s kin is most important’ (Ames and Hall, 2001: 101). Rather than tackle obstacles and solve complex problems that would provide one with the experiences needed to be a leader, the text describes the grinding work of a process of personal cultivation that is much more mundane – that it is through continual attention to daily living and acting with propriety, especially with family members, that one can develop the qualities to be a wise person and leader.

To describe personal cultivation from a perspective of continuing interdependence is to reflect a broader processual orientation that envisions the world as ongoing, subjective and changing, and people as developing through relationships. It also suggests that people cannot exist as ‘individuals’ (for further explication on this, see Rosemont, 2016), even if we are not always aware of it. Our communities, our relationships, constitute our personal identities – they make us who we are. But to strive to be exemplary is not relevant solely for leaders: the text suggests people have the capacity to become exemplary if they have a committed interest to ‘go the way of study and inquiry’ and learn to conduct themselves in ethical ways through relationships and everyday activities (from the Zhongyong Chapter 27: see Ames and Hall, 2001: 109). The qualities of exemplary persons are not simply embodied as essences and independent states but, rather, can only emerge through the context of relating to others.

The value of quality interactions

Relationality implies that if people are considered interdependent, that who we are is constructed by our actions toward others, then the quality of our relationships matters because it influences our day-to-day lives, and vice versa. Our actions constitute our lives. Chapter 20 of the Zhongyong states,

Ruler and minister, father and son, husband and wife, older and younger brother, friend and mentor – these are the five ways forward in the world. Wisdom, authoritative conduct, and courage – these are the three methods of excelling in character. How one advances along the way is one and the same. (Ames and Hall, 2001: 102)

Relationships drive the human world and in order to improve them one must take reflective action to interact with others with a sense of integrity, earnestness and reciprocity. If people are constituted by each other through their interactions, then the effort expended to maintain and cultivate relationships influences what they do and how they perceive their identities.

To situate quality simply in terms of ‘good’ or ‘bad’ misses the point, because such a frame implies fixed and static states marked by objectivity. To consider quality in terms that convey direction, movement and contextual subjectivity, that require a continual striving to seek balance is more relevant. The robustness of our lives is connected to how we choose to live each moment. Because people are necessarily relational, it involves attempts to achieve harmonious interactions – from Zhongyong Chapter 2: ‘Exemplary persons are able to focus the affairs of the day because, being exemplary, they themselves constantly abide in equilibrium’ (Ames and Hall, 2001: 90).

Personal cultivation occurs through relation

From a relational perspective, in which our actions directly influence the quality of our relationships and our lives, even those activities that seem the most personal, such as mindfulness, reflection, will and choices, only have meaning when contextualized relationally. These can be critical approaches that people can use to improve their relationships with others – they can help persons develop and grow as people. To strive to create balance and harmony from a relational view does not mean people should try to come to agreement with each other or indicate the right to absolute authority. Rather, it means that people (those who want to become exemplary) should interact with others with propriety, integrity and earnestness. For people who want to be exemplary, this means striving to live ethically through harmonious interactions with others.

Relationality includes the notion that to live properly, then, is an achievement that requires personal cultivation through relationship with others. To live in an exemplary manner requires active engagement with others and reflects a heightened attentiveness to the meaning and consequences of one’s actions in each moment. For Confucius, living well required personal cultivation, which necessitates attention and work. Throughout the Zhongyong there are lamentations about how difficult it is to be exemplary. For example, distinctions are made between exemplary persons and petty persons, and the text makes reference to numerous comments attributed to Confucius about those who quit trying to be exemplary (see Ames and Hall, 2001: Zhongyong Chapters 2, 4, 7, 9, 11, 14). Notably, Confucius even admits that he cannot achieve his own expectations regarding living properly when he points out that he is not able to be the son to his father in the ways that he would expect of his own son, or to treat a friend in the way Confucius himself would wish to be treated by others. That said, he suggests it is important to make a continual effort. In Chapter 13, he is reported to have said, ‘Where in everyday moral conduct and in everyday attention to proper speech I am lacking in some respect, I must make every effort to attend to this’ (Ames and Hall, 2001: 94).

While it is difficult, if not impossible, to become exemplary in every moment, the actual methods of living well are not out of reach for those willing to undertake the work of personal cultivation: for instance, from Chapter 12 of the Zhongyong, ‘The proper way of exemplary persons is both broad and hidden. The dullest of ordinary men and women can know something of it, and yet even the sages in trying to penetrate to its furthest limits do not know it at all’ (Ames and Hall, 2001: 93). People have the intuitive potential to learn and the resources to live in harmonious ways, but this requires constant effort to realize, as this quotation from Chapter 1 illustrates: ‘What tian commands is called natural tendencies; drawing out these natural tendencies is called the proper way; improving upon this way is called education’ (Ames and Hall, 2001: 89). ¹

The extensive impact of relational personal cultivation

A process of personal cultivation, from a relational worldview, is important because it can shape the contexts in which we live. The Zhongyong states, in Chapter 20, ‘… those who realize how to cultivate their persons realize how to bring order to others; those who realize how to order others properly realize how to bring order to the world, the state, and the family’ (Ames and Hall, 2001: 102). To cultivate oneself through one’s relationships affects not only a person but also those with whom a person interacts. This view differs from that of a substance-oriented notion of personal cultivation that assumes people are separate from others and that a process of learning should be undertaken largely for the benefit of a self. Relationality accommodates the complexity and extensive effects of interaction.

A process of personal cultivation can influence not only how we interact with others but also those with whom we might connect. For example, the Zhongyong suggests, in Chapter 20, that leaders who seek to find people to help them with proper governance should undertake processes of personal cultivation because in doing so they will attract the ‘right’ people to work with them: ‘One gets the right persons with one’s own character, cultivates one’s own character with the proper way, and cultivates the proper way with authoritative conduct’ (Ames and Hall, 2001: 101). A process of personal cultivation, then, happens through interaction with others, and in particular with those who are closest: ‘Thus, exemplary persons cannot but cultivate their persons. In cultivating their persons, they cannot but serve their kin. In serving their kin, they cannot but realize human conduct. And in realizing human conduct, they cannot but realize tian’ (Ames and Hall, 2001: 101). These passages suggest that if people undertake the work of personal cultivation through their relationships by living each moment with attention to their conduct and interactions with others, that they emerge as harmonious forces to shape their contexts: ‘If one cultivates one’s person, the way will be established therefrom’ (Ames and Hall, 2001: 102).

A framework of relationality emphasizes the importance of relationships. Such a framework situates people as necessarily interdependent because we live in relationship to others. Because living is an ongoing process, each moment provides an opportunity to undertake a process of personal cultivation, which can only become manifest through relationships with others. When a relational frame is used to consider higher educational endeavors and institutions, those aspects that cultivate collegiality, such as faculty learning communities, take on inordinate value. They are valuable because they contribute to the development of the quality of a university context more broadly. When people are situated as specific and networked in relationships to others in ways that construct their identities, then how they interact can have a resonant impact.

Development of collegiality as personal cultivation: a review of three studies

I use a lens of relationality to consider how three articles, selected because they were largely representative of contemporary research about university-affiliated faculty learning communities, could re-envision the value of the development of collegiality toward participants’ personal cultivation with an extensive impact. While the articles discuss the importance of collegiality, they do so in the context of situating it as a method for learning particular pedagogical practices rather than as a valuable achievement in itself. I want to be clear that I am not considering these articles for the purpose of critique, as a reviewer might, but rather to consider the possibilities engaging a framework of relationality can construct with regard to the value of the collegiality the authors describe not only for the participants but also, potentially, more broadly for university communities. To see collegiality as an achievement makes more visible the effort and time required to generate it; collegiality, with this emphasis, emerges as valuable to creating the conditions for personal cultivation.

In brief, the development of collegiality in faculty learning communities is, from a relational perspective, a form of personal cultivation. To learn collaboratively as part of a learning community, from a relational perspective, does not simply consider only the learning of a teaching innovation and how it may affect participants’ pedagogical approaches as major outcomes, but also considers them as activities that contribute to the growth of people in ways that enrich their relationships and actions. Learning through relation is personal cultivation because it has a broader influence to potentially enrich people's networks of relationships. To read the development of collegiality in the research articles about faculty learning communities as personal cultivation with a lens of relationality has three primary emphases: (1) it highlights the value of the quality interactions that develops from learning communities; (2) it situates the communities as forums for the development of reciprocity that requires time and effort; and (3) it suggests that the groups have unpredictable and extensive impacts.

Attributing value to research purposes

The three articles I discuss construct the value of learning communities with the particular purpose of sharing new teaching approaches with faculty. Andrew Furco and Barbara Moely, authors of ‘Using learning communities to build faculty support for pedagogical innovation: A multi-campus study’, published in the Journal of Higher Education, reported the findings of their three-year grant-funded study about the development of faculty learning communities on eight campuses across the United States (Furco and Moely, 2012). The communities were created to promote the understanding and institutionalization of service-learning initiatives, an approach to teaching that integrates community service with academic work. The authors suggest that faculty often resist teaching innovations because they may not understand an innovation’s goals or its practices, or feel that it competes with their personal teaching approaches and even curbs their academic freedom. They also suggest that the creation of learning community seminars that spanned a time frame of eight to ten weeks on the campuses addressed these issues because it provided a structure and conditions for participants to learn about service-learning in ways that contributed to the participants’ professional growth.

Daniela Friedman, Tena Crews, Juan Caicedo, John Besley, Justin Weinberg and Miriam Freeman, in ‘An exploration into inquiry-based learning by a multidisciplinary group of higher education faculty’, published in the journal Higher Education, wrote about their experiences as part of a grant-funded faculty learning community of six that was created to explore inquiry-based learning – an approach to develop students’ critical thinking skills (Friedman et al., 2010). The purpose of the community was to explore ways in which university faculty could integrate inquiry and research methods into their teaching. The authors hoped that through the discovery of how inquiry-based methods support student learning they, the authors, would revise their classroom curricula and prepare themselves to teach courses about inquiry fundamentals. Over the period of a summer, faculty participants were expected to meet together six times, design a course that engaged students in inquiry, learn about practices that supported inquiry, and make campus-wide presentations about inquiry-based teaching. The majority of the paper discusses how each interdisciplinary member of the group implemented the approach in their classroom contexts.

Finally, in ‘Faculty learning communities: Improving teaching in higher education’, published in Educational Studies, Hsuying Ward and Paula Selvester describe a learning community at a medium-sized university supported by a two-year grant that introduces faculty to universal design for learning – an approach to teaching that uses technology to make course content accessible for students in multiple ways (Ward and Selvester, 2012). They suggest that many faculty members found using new technology in their classrooms challenging. The purpose of the development of a faculty learning community was to introduce faculty to universal design for learning practices, to help them to use instructional technology within the learning framework, and to support faculty to develop related projects that could be published in order to support the compilation of tenure and promotion portfolios. Faculty members met twice a month for an hour and a half and, in the second year, broke into two groups of between five and seven participants in order to accommodate varied schedules. They suggested that participation in a faculty learning community before and throughout a semester could help faculty members construct content and make adjustments to the use of universal design learning approaches in their curriculums.

The product-oriented perspective of the three articles regarding university-affiliated faculty learning communities finds expression in how the authors describe the purposes of their research and, also, how they determined the success of such communities based on whether they perceived the purposes set out at the start of the research to have been realized. This type of focus delimits a notion of the outcomes that emerge deemed as valuable. Part of the reason this is the case is that they position learning communities as an effective method to pursue the realization of particular goals. They consider the development of collegiality as an expectation rather than a valuable achievement or outcome. While this approach is not in and of itself problematic, it does overlook the value and unpredictability of broader and more extensive impacts. Relationality, on the other hand, makes increasingly visible the importance of the development of collegiality in faculty learning communities toward higher education contexts.

Foregrounding the value of collegiality

From a perspective of relationality, the quality of interactions contributes to a process of personal cultivation. When people are considered interdependent, they are necessarily constituted by relationships and cannot be isolated from them. Thus when care is taken with regard to cultivating interactions in thoughtful ways, it directly influences the lives of those interacting. In other words, how people engage with others is of inordinate value to consider and quality interactions are goals in and of themselves. While the authors of the articles situated the development of collegiality as a method to achieve the purpose of learning about teaching innovations, they also described facilitators’ varied attempts to foster rich and open conversations to cultivate collegiality. Facilitators encouraged dynamic conversations and process-oriented activities, and introduced interaction norms to develop quality interactions. From a relational perspective, these activities should not be overlooked or simply mentioned in passing but, rather, acknowledged for their critical value in encouraging personal cultivation.

In the Furco and Moely (2012) article, facilitators of the faculty learning communities sought to develop collegiality through dynamic communication in part through the validation of participants’ perspectives about student learning and, at the same time, by challenging participants to learn about a teaching approach with which they were unfamiliar; they encouraged participants to ‘discuss issues and questions about teaching openly and in confidence’ (Furco and Moely, 2012: 133). They describe their learning communities as topic-based cohorts that facilitators set up to be voluntary, interdisciplinary, structured, goal-oriented, safe and supportive. A process of dynamic communication, facilitators intimate, both generated a supportive environment and encouraged collaborative learning. Collegiality, they also suggest, is an expectation in the sense that it contributes to the goal of learning about service-learning. I want to point out that I distinguish a notion of expectation from that of a goal. The term ‘expectation’ implies the undertaking of a process that is assumed to function in a predictable way, while the term ‘goal’ accentuates an intent to achieve. One aims and works hard to reach a goal while one may take an expectation for granted. A goal, from this perspective, has more purchase than an expectation.

While Friedman et al. (2010) do not write explicitly about the generation of the value of a supportive environment, they provide a specific example of how their group initially worked to collectively define inquiry-based learning in order to create what could be described as a safe and open environment by means of their process-oriented activities. For example, one of the first activities the group of six undertook was a process the authors call ‘brainwriting’. Each person anonymously wrote down a definition of inquiry-based learning on a piece of paper, and the papers were passed around to others who would write comments, edit, and ask questions about each definition. The group then discussed the process and collectively constructed a working definition of an inquiry-based teaching approach. This activity shows how participants sought to create a context where people felt comfortable to share their perspectives.

Ward and Selvester (2012) describe the introduction of meeting norms to encourage ‘efficient group work to allow the processes of critique, self-reflection and self-disclosure to take place’ that would ‘facilitate a positive environment in which to take risks’ (Ward and Selvester, 2012: 115). The norms the authors identify include: (1) openness to improvement; (2) trust and respect; (3) a foundation in the knowledge and skills of teaching; (4) willingness to offer and accept supportive and constructive feedback; and (5) shared commitment to teaching and learning. Facilitators sought to develop learning contexts in which participants felt respected and comfortable to converse with others so that they could more easily adopt an attitude of learning.

The authors of the articles suggest the importance of developing quality interactions through fostering collegiality in varied ways. While their approaches may differ, they sought to create the conditions for genuine conversations and supportive contexts. From a relational perspective, giving attention to the generation of such contexts is important because it contributes to personal cultivation through the development of collegiality.

Acknowledging the value of participant commitment and reciprocity

From a perspective of relationality, the quality interactions involved in personal cultivation emerge from learning through thoughtful and inquiring interactions with others, requiring commitment and reciprocity. While the three articles discuss the development of collegiality amongst participants as part of the facilitation of faculty learning communities, they also imply that such expectations do not happen magically or automatically but, instead, require time for interaction and the cultivation of reciprocity. In other words, the development of collegiality requires work, suggesting that it cannot be taken for granted or assumed. For example, while a group may agree to adopt norms for interactions, the continual realization of the norms would require attention and effort. Similarly, while a group may engage in a brainstorming activity that asks participants to share their ideas, its success relies on participants’ willingness to make an effort to respond to such requests. Engaging relationality highlights how the articles describe the commitment required of participants in varied ways, including – for instance – setting up clear expectations for meeting durations and times. The authors allude to the development of reciprocity in the groups through the mention of occasions for exchange of teaching experiences, perspectives and materials.

The authors of the articles discuss how the facilitators of the faculty learning communities created the contexts for the development of collegiality through the generation of a sense of commitment between participants. The structures of the learning communities fostered this commitment by taking into account the notion that the development of dynamic interaction requires time. In other words, the participants needed time together in order to create respectful contexts in which they felt they could speak openly about their experiences and share their ideas. In order to address this belief, the facilitators of the faculty learning communities included plans for multiple meetings, with the expectation that participants would attend as many as their schedules would allow. Ward and Selvester (2012) mention that their faculty learning community met twice a month for an hour and a half; Furco and Moely (2012) set up the expectation that groups would meet for an eight to ten week seminar; and Friedman et al. (2010) met seven times, mostly in person and twice online. The meetings provided participants with a space for interacting with others. The expectation to meet regularly implicitly confirmed that the development of respect and openness required time and a level of commitment to cultivate.

The development of reciprocity also contributed to the emergence of collegiality. Ward and Selvester (2012) note that,

Building trust and ensuring bonding are critical for a successful FLC. The elements of ‘openness’, ‘trust and respect’, ‘willingness to help’ and ‘accepting criticism’, when put into practice, require a lot of care on the part of the facilitators. (Ward and Selvester, 2012: 116)

The authors situate the trust and bonding that emerge from the mutual sharing and discussion of ideas amongst participants as expectations. For example, Ward and Selvester mention that participants would start their meetings with what they called the ‘critical friends protocol’, which invites faculty members to share their syllabuses with others, discuss the objectives, and reflect on their effectiveness. Others would then offer constructive feedback or ask questions with a universal design for learning framework in mind. In Friedman et al. (2010), a sense of reciprocity developed from ‘elaborate discussions’ (Friedman et al., 2010: 767) in which faculty members exchanged ideas about how they would incorporate inquiry-based learning into their specific class plans. Furco and Moely (2012) reported that group members invited leaders of community organizations to join the meetings and to contribute to discussions about service-learning, facilitating the development of bonds between them.

The research articles suggest that facilitators and participants developed collegiality through the generation of dynamic conversations characterized by commitment and reciprocity. The structures of the groups emphasized repeat gatherings, which sought to create contexts that fostered active discussion about ideas, syllabuses and curriculums. While the articles position the development of collegiality as an expectation, it can also be situated as an achievement that required cultivation by facilitators and participants. From a relational perspective, personal cultivation emerges through engagement with others and requires attention, commitment and reciprocity. It does not simply happen: it requires a willingness to commit time and effort.

Extensive implications of learning communities

Personal cultivation, from a relational perspective, has an extensive impact. As mentioned earlier, to cultivate oneself through one’s relationships to others not only affects a person but also those with whom a person interacts. When people are considered interdependent, enriching relationships through the development of quality interactions can impact a community in unpredictable ways. For faculty learning communities, an emphasis on the development of collegiality through collaborative learning can influence participants’ actions beyond the contexts of the communities. For example, the authors of the articles allude to how collegial relationships fostered new courses, promoted engagement beyond the group and developed collegial networks.

Friedman et al. (2010) imply the importance of collegiality when they describe how some participants – faculty from the fields of journalism, philosophy, and public health – developed a new course outside the context of the faculty learning community. The collegiality developed through participation in the learning community, the article implies, contributed to the collaborative construction of a new course that otherwise would not have existed.

Ward and Selvester (2012) note the influence of collegiality when they remark, almost in an off-hand manner, that all the participants to whom they sent their post-faculty learning community surveys responded, and muse about why this was the case: ‘We believe this was due to the collegiality that had grown over the time we worked together’ (Ward and Selvester, 2012: 118). While the authors do not dwell on the remarkable notion that everyone responded to their survey, they provide a glimpse of the strength of collegiality to encourage activity outside of the specific context of a faculty learning community in ways that can be unpredictable.

The development of collegiality can also build collegial networks. As mentioned at the beginning of this article, Ward and Selvester (2012) distributed a survey to the participants of a faculty learning community focused on universal design for learning. They asked questions aimed at evaluating how participation in the community affected participants’ teaching practice and, in particular, their use of universal design for learning. While most responses they noted involved appreciation for the chance to practice and learn about technology and particular computer programs as part of a universal design approach, they also included one faculty comment about developing a ‘community of peers to troubleshoot with’ (Ward and Selvester, 2012: 118). This comment indicates how participants may continue to converse and collaborate beyond the context of the learning community itself and the researchers’ noted outcomes and interests. It reminds researchers and educators that the development of collegiality generates the potential for future interactions in unpredictable ways.

While the authors of the articles do not linger on the influence of collegial relationships beyond the contexts of the learning communities, a relational perspective strongly suggests the potential value of these unpredictable occurences. It situates the development of collegiality as personal cultivation that impacts not only the participants of faculty learning communities but also potentially the broader communities of which they are a part.

Envisioning potential value

My point here is not to de-emphasize the success of faculty learning communities attempting to introduce teaching innovations or to critique the articles themselves: from my perspective, the authors have achieved what they set out to do. The articles make a convincing case for how university-affiliated faculty learning communities can be effective methods for introducing teaching approaches to faculty in higher education institutions. The authors suggest that, in particular, the development of collegiality fosters a dynamic that encourages collaborative learning, engaged conversation and reflection that supports the craft of teaching. In fact, the implications of these articles, when considered together, should compel those university administrators interested in exploring ways to support this form of instructional development to take heed of their effectiveness. My focus, rather, is to consider, from a relational view, how learning communities, and the development of collegiality in particular, have a more extensive value to university communities than these articles might explicitly indicate. To engage relationality in order to consider research about faculty learning communities suggests that existing scholarship already includes a significant amount of discussion about the development of collegiality that could conceivably warrant more attention than it receives situated as methods; a relational view emphasizes those existing processual aspects of the development of collegiality in the research.

To read the articles from a Confucian relational view more broadly situates how learning communities may enrich collegial relationships in ways that affect institutions beyond the context of particular learning communities and what may be imagined at any particular moment. The development of collegiality that emerges from participation in learning communities, from a relational perspective, is a valuable form of personal cultivation, requiring time and commitment to develop. When personal cultivation is viewed as a process that influences how people engage with others, then improving the quality of engagement has a direct impact on how people live and conduct themselves more generally in varied contexts. In faculty learning communities, enriched collegial relationships can contribute to the development of, for example, new collaborative projects and collegial networks. A relational framework suggests that the value of participation in faculty learning communities cannot be objectively fixed, but instead can be interpreted in multiple ways by different people at different times.

To use relationality to consider research about faculty learning communities suggests that the process of the cultivation of relationships is just as important as the perceived outcomes of learning about particular teaching innovations. In fact, it is more important than perceived outcomes because products necessarily emerge from processes – they do not and cannot exist in isolated ways. This may seem like a minor distinction, but it has clear ramifications for how educators and researchers perceive value. A relational framework provides an opportunity and approach to assist in a reevaluation of the processes of the development of collegiality described in faculty learning communities’ research. It suggests the broad influence of cultivating collegiality within higher education institutional contexts.