Bridging the gap between teacher educator and teacher in a community of practice: A case of brokering

This study is a snapshot of a community of practice in operation. It reports a school-based professional development activity as a learning community with specific attention on one particular member, a ‘broker’, who, by mediating the process of negation, helped bridge a huge knowledge gap regarding subject matter and school context between the language teacher educators and teachers. Through a micro-analysis of the conversations among the participants, the study described and interpreted the patterns of brokering acts in the discourse context and the role the broker took in the decision-making process. Brokering is identified as a situational factor which contributes to learning in a multi-party learning community. It seems that the greater the knowledge gap among the participants, the more brokering is needed. The study is a response to the call for more detailed and in depth probing into the collective learning experiences in communities of practice (e.g., Stoll and Louis, 2007), especially in communities of language teacher education.