The Journey to G.R.A.C.E: Creating an International Community of Practice

Abstract

Global Researchers Advancing Catholic Education (G.R.A.C.E) is a unique Community of Practice (CoP). The CoP methodology was applied within G.R.A.C.E for its capacity to connect multi-disciplinary and international academics and practitioners within Catholic Education. This paper presents key insights gathered from the G.R.A.C.E steering committee regarding their perspectives on the journey of initiating this unique CoP. A small qualitative research project framed within a phenomenological interpretivist theoretical perspective was employed to ascertain the participants’ hopes, experiences, impact as well as challenges and opportunities. A Qualtrics questionnaire was the selected data collection method. Findings suggest that the experience of G.R.A.C.E has been a positive one, affirming the CoP methodology adopted was effective in ensuring the hopes that members held for the CoP were actualised. Challenges and opportunities identified in the findings provide insight into the future direction of this truly global initiative.

Newcomers Learning Religious Ritual

“…7 The concept of community of practice has been highly influential in late-twentieth and early-twenty-first-century research on informal and workplace learning and adult education (Hughes, Jewson and Unwin 2007, 1-2). It has also been applied to investigating learning in a variety of religious and spiritual contexts: ritual magic users (Cejvan 2023;Merriam, Courteney and Baumgartner 2003), parish organs and small groups (Otero and Cottrell 2013;Anderson 2018;Regan 2016;Robinson, Cranley and O'Connell 2023), medieval monasteries (Long 2017;Long and Vanderputten 2019;Snijders 2019), extremist religious groups (Kenney 2017;Knott and Lee 2022), and faith-based collective housing (Murphy 2018), as well as among Jesus's disciples (Csinos 2010;Courduff 2018), meditation practitioners (Lomas et al 2016), Jain ritualists (Stausberg 2001), and Muslim commu nities (Olson 2017;Shanneik 2018). Only a minority of the studies target newcomers' experiences.…”