Background: Research groups are social locations where teaching and learning merge among students and a principal investigator (PI). When joining, some students are able to contribute to groundbreaking research that addresses complex problems, under the direction of their PI. However, there are accounts of students having a wide range of negative…

Communities of practice (CoPs) can provide opportunities for diverse and inclusive groups to convene, share, collaborate, and support others. Using a self-study research approach combined with a visual research method, this study explores both scholarly and practice-based insights to describe the anticipated attributes of a high functioning CoP…

In this paper we address the obfuscation surrounding the concept of learning communities by operationalizing "community" according to four characteristics that serve as boundaries for defining a community: access, relationships, vision, and function. Although these community boundaries sometimes overlap, they represent distinctive…