Community of Practice Theory and Transformative Teacher Learning in Nigerian Rural Secondary Schools

This study applies and extends Wenger's community of practice theory to examine transformative teacher learning processes in rural secondary schools in Nigeria, developing an original Transformative Rural Teacher Learning Model grounded in empirical findings from a three-year longitudinal ethnographic study. Community of practice theory conceptualises learning as social participation in shared practice communities defined by joint enterprise, mutual engagement, and shared repertoire. While widely applied in teacher professional development literature, its application to the specific conditions of rural Nigerian schools, where isolation, resource scarcity, and limited professional support are characteristic, has not been systematically explored. This study employs a longitudinal ethnographic design, conducting immersive observation in five rural secondary schools in Benue, Kebbi, and Anambra States over three years. Data sources include 300 hours of observation, 90 teacher interviews across three waves, document review, and teacher professional learning journals. Wenger's theoretical framework is applied and extended through grounded theory analytic procedures to generate new conceptual contributions from the Nigerian rural context. Results reveal that communities of practice in rural Nigerian schools are structurally constrained by small staff sizes and high turnover, but where they emerge, they produce transformative learning through boundary-crossing networks that connect isolated rural schools to urban teacher communities through mobile technology. The study generates an original Networked Rural Community of Practice concept extending Wenger's theory for low-connectivity contexts. It recommends investment in teacher professional networks using mobile platforms as a strategy for building transformative learning communities in isolated rural schools.

Keywords: community of practice, teacher learning, rural schools, transformative learning, Nigeria.