Harnessing Partnerships and Open Educational Resources to Cultivate Teacher Communities of Practice for Inclusive Education in Kenya

This chapter describes and analyses a project initiated by the Commonwealth of Learning (COL), working in partnership with the Open University, UK (OU UK) and Kenya Institute of Special Education (KISE). It examines an approach to teacher professional development (TPD) that draws on open educational resources (OER) and seeks to create communities of practice (CoPs) within education institutions that will support improvements in teaching in a sustainable way. It draws on teacher education experts’ knowledge and experience of working with OER in the context of teacher education to develop two massive open online courses (MOOCs) specifically designed to support teachers and teacher educators in developing their pedagogy. The courses ran twice, on a different platform each time. They were co-designed in context and adopted a novel approach to course facilitation, which contributed to their success. We explain the Kenyan context and the need for professional development in inclusive education, and situate this work in the context of ideas about teacher learning, CoPs and the challenges and opportunities presented by OER. We explain the rationale for the course design and the co-design process and present some of the evidence that shows the course encouraged changes in practice. We conclude by assessing the extent to which courses like this can support the formation of CoPs and make some recommendations to help others who are seeking to establish a CoP in their professional setting.