Community of Practice

The idea of a ‘community of practice’ is derived from research on social learning, and may best be defined as follows:

Communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly. (Wenger-Trayner 2015)

The Wellcome PhD Programmes community of practice aims to be as inclusive as possible of people who shape the culture of PhD training. Academic and professional staff and students have equal voices. Participants in the community of practice will gain a better understanding of the different ways that research culture is experienced, how it is evaluated, and how to improve it.

Research culture is generally taken to cover things like equality and diversity, care for mental health, tackling bullying and harassment, nurturing respect and good scientific values, encouraging inter-disciplinarity and a wide range of post-PhD career paths. But all of these can mean different things to different people.

This is why we don’t expect research culture to be pre-defined, and we don’t expect there to be just one research culture. We aim, rather, to create a climate in which positive research cultures will emerge,

The ‘Emerging Research Cultures’ community of practice will allow for the sharing and understanding practices among the PhD programmes. There is no ‘best practice’ as such, as different practices have different effects in different contexts. But together, we can gain a better understanding of practices, and how they play out in different institutions and for different people.

Reflective study

The project also has a research component, which it will conduct through participant action research. This means that we in the project participate in the activities of the community of practice with other members, while also harvesting the lessons learned, through keeping records and sharing analyses with others in the community, and finally publishing findings concerning best practices. This will ensure that the understandings of best practice for the enhancement of research culture alongside scientific excellence that emerge through these programmes will be available to other stakeholders in the broad field of PhD training.