**4. Creating communities of practice**

Communities of practice are groups of people informally bound by shared expertise and passion for the same practice and these communities can be workrelated or oriented to other parts of our lives [33]. Building a community of practice requires members to negotiate a balance between disagreement and agreement. The participants need to have enough areas of agreement to see it as important for them to commit to the community. At the same time, there has to be sufficient disagreement within the community so that the practices they share do not stagnate. The tensions between different perspectives within a community push the participants to negotiate, and through the negotiation lies the potential for new discoveries and the development of new practices. Communities of practice can be a useful concept to understand the collective learning processes that can emerge in Open Kindergartens. Communities of practice can be formed by professionals or parents and when these communities overlap, they create boundary communities [34] where professionals and parents develop practices together drawing on their collective experience and different perspectives.

#### **4.1 Community of professionals**

The professionals working in, and connected to, the Open Kindergartens participate in their own communities of practice. These communities are informal; the members communicate over cups of coffee in the kitchen and interact in hallways on their way to work tasks. However, the ideas that are developed through these conversations are brought to formal settings, including staff meetings, interdisciplinary team meetings, and management meetings. The communities of practice are not the same as formal interdisciplinary teams, rather they are the product of informal alliances entered into by professionals that find low threshold settings interesting and want to develop practices in these settings.

The professional's role in the Open Kindergarten is different from the professional's role in traditional services. Their work is more about facilitating interaction between families than answering questions or providing advice. This requires a different way of working, and professionals visiting from other services often find this practice challenging. When observing the professionals connected to the Open Kindergarten, some were insiders and knew the code while others did not and remained outsiders. This might be explained by Wenger's concept of communities of practice. In communities of practice, the negotiation of what it means to be competent is a collective activity [20]. The participants engage in developing ways to solve issues, as well as considering how they think about issues and approach their practice. The professionals that did not participate in the conversations about the setting, the parent's situation and the professional role did not act as insiders; professionals within the community of practice in the Open Kindergarten. Their professional identity was instead dominantly shaped by a different context, for instance, the children's health care service [19]. Such professionals become outsiders in the meeting place, as they belonged to a different community of practice and they enacted a different professional identity [35].

Working in settings like the Open Kindergarten meant taking on a different role as a professional. Instead of working with one family at a time, there might be six parents around a table taking part in a conversation. It was a challenge to work with a group of families at the same time, and it was the families that set the agenda for such conversations. This meant that if one of the parents asked a question there were often a group of parents that heard the answer. Most of the time parents started talking and thereby set the topic of conversation. This meant that professionals could not prepare for the topics that would be discussed and instead had to

#### *Creating Communities of Parents DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.101754*

draw on their existing knowledge and admit their shortcomings for topics they did not feel they were competent to discuss or provide advice about. Working in the Open Kindergarten required flexibility and a feel for when to let the parents talk among themselves and when to take an active part in the conversation [19].

Communities of practice are established, developed, and driven by the engagement of the participants. However, how managers tend to them is also important. "Like gardens, they respond to attention that respect their nature" [33]. The communities of practice connected to the Open Kindergarten were affected by management priorities. When the spotlight [36] was focused on the Open Kindergarten the communities grew and the opposite was also true. In the family centers, where the Open Kindergartens were under constant risk of being shut down due to budget cuts the communities of practice shrunk; professionals re-prioritized where they invested their energy. All three family centers had staff that were interested in contributing to developing new ways to support families. Moreover, they believed that there was significant potential in creating spaces where families could meet and interact with professionals in ways that were not predetermined by protocols and manuals. However, when the Open Kindergartens were under constant danger of being closed, the communities of practice connected to these spaces lost members. In such contexts, it was not prudent for professionals to invest their energy in the development and instead they sought the opportunity to make a difference somewhere else, where the spotlight was directed; a context where they were more likely to get the resources they needed to put ideas into practice.

### **4.2 Community of parents**

Some of the families that attended an Open Kindergarten had several characteristics that within a deficit model could be defined as risk factors [37, 38]: young single parents, low income, poor living conditions, mental health issues, unemployment, or limited Norwegian language skills. Professionals often struggle to build a relationship with families that fall into these categories [39]. Parents' prior experience with the service system may undermine their trust in professionals and be a reason for the difficulty in negotiating a relationship that can help [40]. Making a formal request for support can be seen as risky by parents who may be concerned about how the "system" will use such information. The Open Kindergartens represented a totally different way of creating a space where parents could tell their stories, share their experiences, and seek advice. Talking with other parents over a cup of coffee while their children were playing on the floor provided a social setting that enabled many of the parents to talk about both the joys and challenges of parenthood; it provided a holistic experience not explicitly focusing on the most difficult aspects of parenting. However, the conversations in the Open Kindergartens were surprisingly revealing and honest. People from different parts of the community shared experiences and listened with interest to the stories that were shared. The conversations about parenting occurred in the middle of enacting parenting; the children shared the space with the parents.

A group of parents can also be understood as a *community of practice* [20, 35]. They engaged in negotiations about what it meant to be competent in the practice they shared, parenting. Wenger emphasizes that participants in a community of practice are not necessarily in agreement. Rather, Wenger suggests, the tensions between different ways of solving an issue drive the development of new practices and shape the learning process. The parents coming to the Open Kindergarten practice parenting in different ways. Through participating in the setting, children and adults together, the practices of parenting changed from being individual to becoming connected practices that adjusted and changed in relation to each other.

Participating in everyday activities shifted the dynamics of power in the group. The familiarity of the activities ensured that all the parents had some competence they could demonstrate. Even when aspects of parenting within the Open Kindergarten were challenging it was not always predictable who would cope best with the situation. For instance, parents with higher socioeconomic status did not necessarily cope better with a child's tantrum [19]. When faced with real situations parents started to discuss alternative strategies and acknowledge each other's resources as well as identify new approaches that none of them had previously considered. The Open Kindergartens were not normative settings that sought to promote one right answer, rather the parents negotiated a set of different practices and ways to parent. This created the opportunity to change their parenting approach or to gain confidence that their existing practice was acceptable.

#### **4.3 Boundary communities**

According to Mørck [19, 34], different communities of practice overlap and in the intersections, boundary communities are created. The boundary communities connect two or more communities of practice and create the possibility of interaction and the re-negotiation of positions and practices [34]. In the space shared by two communities of practice, the participants can negotiate their position from a different perspective than when standing alone. The membership in a community provides them with a sense of competence and established practice that is not dependent on them individually but rather on a collective sense of how things should be done. This does not mean that the practices are fixed, but on the contrary, that collective experience frames an understanding and provides a starting point; a position from where it is possible to negotiate and alter practices if it is appropriate.

Over kitchen tables and on play mats in the Open Kindergartens, communities of parents and professionals overlapped. In the boundary communities, the participants negotiated knowledge and positions. People that would not normally interact connected in the Open Kindergartens. In these boundary communities, parenting practices were negotiated through a collaborative learning process [20] where everyone brought relevant competence to the table. In such conversations, the experience was highly valued and both professionals and parents shared their own stories. Instead of positioning themselves as experts, the professionals exposed aspects of their own experience, revealed shortcomings, and identified strong points.

If we understand both the group of parents and the set of professionals in the Open Kindergartens as communities of practice then both communities are created around the participant's common competence and their commitment to negotiate what it means to be competent. By defining them as communities, we can also describe their boundaries and where the communities overlap. Through the conversations about everyday life, as parents and professionals, the two fields of competence overlapped. The actors shared a common interest in how parenting was practiced and through conversations mapped alternative strategies to meet the identified challenges. Professional competence and the competence produced by experience met in these boundary communities and provided the parents with the opportunity to renegotiate the ways that they thought about parenting. In the boundary communities, cultural practices and different ways of practicing parenting were presented and negotiated in a way that enabled the participants to renegotiate marginalized positions [34] and to create new ways of perceiving themselves and each other. The boundary communities validated both existing practices and acknowledged their expertise, making parents more confident, but also provided opportunities for reflection and the development of new thinking and new ways to enact parenting.
