Centres for teaching and learning at postsecondary educational institutions in Canada seek to serve the professional development needs of faculty members throughout the college or university. Recognizing the limits of conventional frameworks for faculty development, such as one-time workshops, pedagogical conferences, and lunchtime discussion sessions, this interpretive inquiry explores learning communities as an additional framework for serving faculty development and cross-institutional professional development needs. The study asks: what does it mean for faculty, educational developers, support staff, and administrators to participate in a learning community at a college in Canada? Data collected through individual inquiry conversations (semi-structured interviews) and research memos were used to develop narrative descriptions representing the participants’ respective experiences of a learning community in a large, urban college context in Canada. These narrative descriptions offer portraits of the meaning that learning community members made of their own experience, revealing that the learning communities served not only as sites for professional development, but also formed microcultures within the institution, which, over time, influenced educational (academic) and organizational (administrative) change, both in policy and in practice.

中文翻译：

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高等教育中的新兴专业学习社区：整合加拿大大学的教师发展，教育创新和组织变革

加拿大大专院校的教学中心致力于满足整个学院或大学中教师的专业发展需求。认识到常规的教师发展框架的局限性，例如一次性讲习班，教学会议和午餐时间讨论会，这种解释性探究将学习社区作为满足教师发展和跨机构专业发展需求的附加框架进行了探索。该研究问：对于教职员工，教育开发人员，支持人员，和管理员参加加拿大一所大学的学习社区？通过个人询问对话（半结构化访谈）和研究备忘录收集的数据被用于发展叙述性描述，代表参与者在加拿大大型城市大学环境中学习社区的各自经历。这些叙述性描述提供了学习社区成员根据自己的经验得出的含义的画像，表明学习社区不仅充当专业发展的场所，而且还形成了机构内部的微观文化，随着时间的流逝，这些文化影响了教育（学术）以及政策和实践中的组织（行政）变更。