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Opportunities and limitations of communities of practice in graduate education in Croatia

Communities of practice present a potential alternative teaching approach for entrepreneurial education that has been underappreciated in graduate education. In the first part, the paper introduces communities of practice and cites the existing research. Besides that, it discusses their characteristics and the distinction from other similar structures. Apart from the positive outcomes of implementation of communities of practice in graduate education, this article explores the potential challenges confronting the implementation of communities of practice in graduate education in Croatia. In the discussion section of the paper, the field research investigates students’ learning through experience in communities of practice at the Department of Economics in Osijek. Purpose of the field research is to explore the impact of communities of practice on students learning in order to understand the extent to which such activities stimulate entrepreneurial learning. This initial study is qualitative in nature and involves semi-structured interviews with students and student feedback by e-mail as forms of data collection. The collected data is coded by using character counts. In the second phase of coding, the responses are explored in more detail. The paper concludes that social learning is important, and that community of practice approach (COPA) provides enhanced opportunities for learning through action and experience. Engagement in some form of communities of practice improves student confidence. Additionally, it contributes effectively to students’ professional development outside of the formal classroom setting. Despite the limitations, communities of practice provide a valuable and useful alternative to more traditional teaching methods which tend to focus on transfer of explicit and codified knowledge and place less emphasis on tacit knowledge which is less teachable and transferrable between teachers and students. Therefore, community of practice approach presents an excellent value to the modern HEI.

communities of practice ; graduate education ; competences ; alternative teaching tools ; experiential learning

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