OU H818 PROJECT OUTPUT
Facebook communities of practice: analyzing Rob Greenfield “sustainability activist’s” following
ABSTRACT
Environmental activism is beginning to receive the attention it deserves as a result of the appearance of charismatic figures such as Greta Thunberg coinciding with ever more obvious warning signs of Global Change. Rob Greenfield has dedicated much of his adult life to making a difference. Since he set up his Facebook page in early 2013 he has become increasingly influential in the zero waste living movement. (Schmitt, 2019)
Greenfield’s work focuses on how humans can produce their own food freely without producing waste other than the degradable leftovers of the foodstuff itself. The solutions he and the online community he has created have come up with have wide-reaching implications not just for us living in industrialized societies, but also for communities dependent on subsistence farming.
This project aimed to:
investigate whether Greenfield’s Facebook page constitutes a community of practice (CoP). (According to Wenger-Trayner (2020) a CoP is a community where members are brought together by a learning need they share, their collective learning becomes a bond among them over time and their interactions produce resources that affect their practice.)
identify good practice*
and potential areas for improvement.*
*within the context of an actual or potential CoP.
The project relied on the following sources:
asynchronous interactions on Greenfield´s page from 2019
Greenfield’s own 2019 personal account
other followers’ 2019 personal accounts obtained through unconstructed interviews carried out on the Facebook platform asynchronously
relevant literature such as Wenger’s research on CoP and Carrie Peachter’s work on the role of CoP in learning femininities and masculinities
According to Ville (2011) cited in Baan (2019) macro innovations (such as the Internet and social media in general) are followed by ‘micro inventions that transform the efficiency and impact of the original innovation.’ This suggests that the potential of social media is yet to be depleted through innovative ideas that might turn social media platforms into widely accepted formal educational tools in the future.
This project is a precursor for a larger scale research project culminating in the development of a framework of good practice for social media (e.g. Facebook) based CoP. According to Akhavan et al. (2015) CoP ‘absorb information and transform it into knowledge by blending this knowledge with experiences, values and internal rules to obtain a basis for their actions’, thus merging explicit and implicit knowledge. ‘CoP have the potential to transform modern education entirely, innovating a new era where terms such as lecturing, memorizing, reciting, and even teaching might fade into pre-21st century history’ (Baan, 2019).
REFLECTION
As with most research projects involving reflection and soul-searching, there has been some hurdles to my intentions outlined in the abstract, as well as certain changes I had to make along the way as the project’s progress revealed miscalculations and bias. When I set out to analyse Greenfield’s community, I had the genuine intention to obtain much of my understanding through unconstructed asynchronous interviews with a diverse voluntary sample of his followers. In early November 2019, as I was to begin recruiting volunteers, I had to face the reality of the challenges involved. To begin with, the response rate to my various posts on Greenfield’s page was zero. This might have been due to wariness, or perhaps a lack of interest, or time available. I was soon forced to changed my tactics and send private messages to so-called “top fans” whose Facebook contact details were publicly displayed on Greenfield’s page. While this approach resulted in a low, albeit above zero, response rate, I was soon to face another miscalculation in my original plans. Ten “top fans” – followers with the most online activity on the page – were asked to summarize their experiences of Greenfield’s page. In spite of their relatively high online activity the volunteers I interviewed demonstrated little to no awareness of their experiences of learning on, or via the page. In order to obtain answers to my inquiry I was eventually prompted to ask largely the same sample of volunteers a semi-constructed interview question: Have you learnt anything through participating in Rob Greenfield Facebook community? If yes, what, when, and, if you can recall, how?
RESULTS
According to Wenger-Trayner’s (2020) three criteria, namely a shared interest (ie. the domain), community engagement (ie. collective learning), and the interpretation of resources that affect members’ practice (ie. shared practice), can serve the purpose of determining whether a community constitutes a CoP.
I found plenty of proof for a shared domain of interest, ranging for brief acknowledgements of mutuality to more detailed discourses on followers’ commitment to sustainability and reuse. One fan, for instance, discusses how they reuse as fertilizer the corpses of invasive carp in Australia in order to avoid their bodies going to waste rotting on the riverbank. Another follower credits Greenfield for inspiring them to use chili and garlic spray against pets, thus avoiding the use of synthetic alternatives. Yet another exclaims they want to grow their own food like Greenfield does.
Instances of collective learning were easy to come by, too. Greenfield’s followers engage in openly sharing their experiences with one another, whether they are directly related to sustainable farming or not:
“I am curious how did you start a bee hive house? I’m thinking of doing that in my farm so I can have fresh honey”
RE: “You can purchase bee hive from local farmer or set up empty hive as a trap for wild bees.”
When I looked at shared practice I realized how Greenfield’s page was peculiar: none of the offline practice that one would relate to sustainable farming could be translated to and practiced within the framework of the virtual world of his online space. This division essentially created two “practices”: one of “doing doing” and another of “doing discussing”. Wenger-Trayner (2011) address the different levels of members’ participation using a layered diagram depicting participation measured in engagement and authority within the community. While this diagram can address practice within one space at a time, applying it to two parallel “practices” in two spaces appears problematic. Furthermore, Wenger-Trayner (2020) argue that active participants are those who are recognized as practitioners and define the community, adding yet more confusion to the case of one community, two spaces, two practices. Peachter (2003) offers a solution by suggesting an alternative to Wenger’s view of practice as essentially local. By theorizing that masculinities and femininities are learnt through CoP in both physical and virtual spaces, she opens the door to the possibility of two parallel CoP constituted by the same members in two spaces with differing levels of engagement.
I think of Greenfield’s community as an “inverted tower”, a peculiar CoP that has two cores, one at the bottom and another at the top of the tower, and Greenfield occupies both. His offline practice “in the depth of the inverted tower” is invisible online unless he demonstrates it by making himself visible within his Facebook community “on the surface of the tower”. His followers stand on different steps of the long winding staircase connecting the bottom of the tower, ie. offline practice, and the top of the tower, ie. online practice. There is certainly movement between the two cores and there is proof for members being active both offline and online. Meanwhile, some members confined to the top or the bottom of the tower limit their activity to one of the two spaces of the same community. Furthest from the two cores are those stationary in the middle of the tower, they are the true peripherals.
Greenfield appears to have become an appreciated attraction while managing to stay genuine, committed to his cause and presenting his online space in an appealing manner. The popularity of his page, thus the number of his followers continues to grow steadily providing ever more opportunities for collective learning. Yet while his page is growing, the divide between online and offline practice appears vast, and perhaps increasing. With more members and comments he alone no longer appears to be enough to address everyone’s concerns and questions. I have witnessed several instances of followers’ legitimate questions left unanswered as Greenfield seems overwhelmed. Nevertheless, as of yet he has failed to rethink his top-down approach to running his community or his view of teaching & learning as transferring knowledge as a commodity. He rarely engages his community in co-constructing knowledge and I have seen no examples of him letting his followers direct discourse and fully capitalize on the opportunities for engagement – and learning – the synchronous and asynchronous features of the interconnected realm of Facebook provides.
Etienne Wenger argues that the online spaces we visit do not necessarily define who we are and “online tourism” is a real occurrence (A video with Etienne Wenger (Q4), 2011). The question arises whether some of Greenfield’s followers are “online tourists” disengaged with Greenfield’s advocacy offline, or whether numerous “top fan’s” apparent lack of offline engagement can be justified by approaching the two spaces of activity as justified in their own right, interconnected, yet legitimate practices even on their own.
CONCLUSION
Facebook CoP that seek to translate online activity into the offline are likely to achieve betters results by empowering members in the virtual space through connectivist-constructivist approaches to teaching and learning than by “running a community of followers”. The synchronous and asynchronous features of Facebook pages and groups resemble most modern VLEs and the pitfalls of using them as educational tools are similar, too. Tilted power relations within such communities can lead to administrators controlling discourse, which essentially becomes either a lecture, or an entertainment product. This ignores the potential of CoP to become autonomous, organic communities of knowledge co-construction.
References
1) Akhavan, P., Marzieh, B., Mirjafari, M. (2015) Identifying the success factors of Communities of Practice (CoPs): How do they affect on students to create knowledge? [Online], VINE (ISSN: 0305-5728), Available at https://www-emerald-com.libezproxy.open.ac.uk/insight/content/doi/10.1108/VINE-03-2014-0022/full/html (Accessed 03 January 2020).
2) A video with Etienne Wenger (Q4) (2011) YouTube video, added by 239MikeO [Online]. Available at https://youtu.be/Y6J2r-cyP4I (Accessed 23 February 2020).
3) Baan, M. (2019), TMA01, submitted to the Open University as part of H818 assessment.
4) Peachter, C. (2003) ‘Masculinities and femininities as communities of practice’, Women’s Studies International Forum, vol. 26, no. 1, pp. 69-77 [Online]. Available at https://doi.org/10.1016/S0277-5395(02)00356-4 (Accessed 23 February 2020).
5) Schmitt, K. A. (2019) ‘This man will eat only what he can grow or forage – here is why’, National Geographic, March 15 [Online]. Available at https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/03/rob-greenfield-of-orlando-florida-eats-only-what-he-grows-forages/ (Accessed 8 January 2020).
6) Wenger-Trayner (2011) Slide: Levels of Participation [Online]. Available at https://wenger-trayner.com/resources/slide-forms-of-participation/ (Accessed 23 February 2020).
7) Wenger-Trayner (2020) What is a community of practice? [Online]. Available at https://wenger-trayner.com/resources/what-is-a-community-of-practice/ (Accessed 03 January 2020).