“If Others Are Doing It, So Can I”: Leveraging Communities of Practice to Introduce Connected Learning into Small and Rural Libraries

We report on a case study investigating how library staff serving small and rural communities engaged with connected learning (CL) ideas during a two-year researcher-practitioner community of practice (CoP) that focused on revising a CL-focused professional development toolkit. We found that library staff engaged in a process of collective sensemaking that scaffolded their emerging understanding of CL and helped them to develop CL-based teen programming. However, this collective sensemaking remained in tension with entrenched mind-sets about library-based teen services that persisted among library staff and their respective leadership. Although the change we documented was incremental rather than transformative, it was meaningful. Our analysis demonstrated how a consistent, long-term process of collective sensemaking helped library staff shift their thinking about approaches to teen services and built confidence to articulate the value of CL. This case study represents one approach for leveraging CoPs to facilitate change in teen services in public libraries.