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Seminar.net - International journal of media, technology and lifelong learning
Vol. 11 – Issue 3 – 2015
Examining value creation in a community of learning
practice: Methodological reflections on story-telling
and story-reading
Filitsa Dingyloudi
Department of Psychology
Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich
Email: Filitsa.Dingyloudi@psy.lmu.de
Jan-Willem Strijbos
Department of Psychology
Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich
Email: Jan-Willem.Strijbos@psy.lmu.de
Abstract
Despite the abundant research on communities in various shapes and
settings, examination of what community members gained from their
participation remains a thorny issue. For this purpose, we adopted and
refined the value creation framework developed by Wenger, Trayner and De
Laat (2011) to divulge experienced values by community members through
“scaffolded narratives” and categorization of the values reported through
their stories. However, in doing so two methodological issues emerged – in
particular in relation to “values”. This paper reports on our methodological
reflection on the challenging process of capturing community members’ value
creation within a community of learning practice. More specifically, we
reflect on the following questions: (1) To what extent can the values that the
participants originally intended to report be identified as such by the
researchers/analysts’ without bias due to the researchers/analysts’ own
perspectives? and (2) To what extent does a theoretically-driven pre-defined
typology of values confine or enrich the range of possible values that can be
identified? What adds to this challenging research endeavour is the concept
of value in theoretical terms and its associated typologies. Hence, these
methodological questions need to be discussed in order to comprehend both
the phenomenon of value (creation) per se as well as how it is examined – as
close to the participants’ reality as possible – since value creation is the
driving force for the sustainability of a community.
Keywords: Community of learning practice, value creation, situated
multilevel typology of values
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The “value” of value
The concept of value is rich, complex and appealing, but often causes
conceptual fuzziness among philosophers, sociologists, psychologists and
anthropologists due to its either narrow or broad treatment – which in turn
resulted in the development of several typologies of theories of value over the
last three centuries (Kluckhohn, 1951; Rescher, 1969; Rokeach, 1973, 1979;
Schwartz, 1992; Williams, 1968). The concept of value might be interpreted as
(a) the value of an object (associated with objectivism in value theory) or (b)
the process of a subject attributing value to an object based on a set of criteria
or standards (associated with subjectivism in value theory; i.e. valuation).
However, this axiological division seems contradictory since the criteria or
standards lead to the assignment of value to an object and the value to an
object requires the existence of standards or criteria set by the subject (Pauls,
1990).
Fronzini (1971) adopts a critical view towards the objectivism-subjectivism
division and claims that value is a relational construct with the existence of
both the subject and the object being prerequisites. The relational nature of
value is reflected in Rokeach’s (1973, 1979) definition of value as “(…) an
enduring belief that a specific mode of conduct or end-state of existence is
personally or socially preferable to an opposite or converse mode of conduct or
end-state of existence” (Rokeach, 1973, p. 5). Rokeach (1979) further
emphasized that values imply the presence of criteria or standards of
preference for any selective orientation and constitute both guiding factors of
expected and goal-oriented behaviour and justification/explanatory factors of
past behaviour.
In the context of organizational management, but with a specific focus on
communities of practice, Wenger, McDermott and Snyder (2002), proposed a
typology of values for community members and organizations, including (a)
short-term and long term values, (b) tangible and intangible values, and (c)
strategy-implementing and strategy-making values. Their typology was
further developed by integrating the idea of the value creation process, a
notion which has been mostly associated with financial, organizational and
strategic management (see Seth, 1990).
From a community and network perspective, Wenger et al. (2011)
conceptualize value creation as “(…) the value of learning enabled by
community involvement and networking” (p. 7) with communities or networks
to serve as social settings for social learning activities (e.g., sharing ideas, co-
constructing knowledge, exchanging experiences). The spectrum of value
creation consists of five cycles of value, which do not necessarily need to be all
covered or follow a linear sequence: (a) Immediate Value, (indicated by
meaningful activities), (b) Potential Value (indicated by robust resources), (c)
Applied Value (indicated by implementation of practices), (d) Realised Value
(indicated by return on investment), and (e) Reframing Value (indicated by
reconsidering ideas and frameworks). Within a community setting members
might be involved in sharing of expertise, learning from each other’s
experiences, and helping each other with challenges. These activities might be
related to the values individuals attribute to a community or derive from it
(Wenger et al., 2011). The value of learning in a community derives from
members’ ability to develop a shared intention to enhance learning in a
common domain. The shared domain of interest, shared practice (developed
through a joint history of learning) and the shared repertoire (consisting of
shared perspectives, strategies, and stories), all constitute learning resources
for the community members (Wenger et al., 2011, p. 10).
Despite the abundant research on communities in various shapes and settings,
examination of what community members gained from their participation
remains a thorny issue. Notwithstanding the conceptual advancement by
Wenger et al.’s (2011) value creation framework as “a means to appreciate
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value created in communities and networks” (De Laat, Schreurs, & Nijland,
2015, p. 254), methodological approaches to appropriately, precisely and
authentically capture any reported value creation did not emerge concurrently.
This gap between theory and method motivated our quest for an analytical
discussion of methodological tensions when examining experienced values of
participation as reported by members of community.
The main questions that we discuss in this paper are: (1) To what extent can
the values that the participants originally intended to report be identified as
such by the researchers/analysts’ without bias due to the researchers/analysts’
own perspectives? and (2) To what extent does a theoretically-driven pre-
defined typology of values confine or enrich the range of possible values that
can be identified? By addressing these questions we aim to depict the
complexity of the methodological endeavour of capturing members’ self-
reported experienced values of community participation (i.e., story-telling) by
researchers “from outside the box” and “labelling” participants’ experienced
values with pre-defined typologies (i.e., story-reading). Unravelling this
methodological complexity can act as both “warning” and “support” for future
researchers of communities and value creation therein.
Where we looked at: Communities of learning practice
Our methodological reflection emerged from our aim to examine the
phenomenon of value creation in a Community of Learning Practice (CoLP).
CoLP refers to a recombinant community model positioning itself in-between
and beyond the existing community models of Communities of Practice (CoP)
and Communities of Learners (CoL) (Dingyloudi & Strijbos, 2014). CoLPs are
extra-curricular entities that derive from and operate in educational settings,
in parallel with the curriculum – but not integrated into it – and with no pre-
determined pedagogical objectives. CoLPs emerge from students’ common
needs and are not used as an instructional approach by educators, researchers
or stakeholders to enhance curricular learning objectives. Participants of
CoLPs are fellow students who gather together as peers to address commonly
identified needs that derive from the broader educational setting (e.g.,
academic challenges) through the sharing mechanism of peer feedback. Peers
voluntarily participate in the CoLP and are free to withdraw whenever they
sense that their participation is no longer of value to them. Any student can
join the community as a plain peer willing to share, negotiate and co-construct
learning experiences (Dingyloudi & Strijbos, 2014).
While taking into consideration the sociocultural claim that the individual, the
group and the surrounding context cannot be studied in isolation due to their
interrelation (Hatano & Wertsch, 2000; Sawyer, 2002), we identify the
relevance and importance of examining personal, social, skill-related, study-
related and contextual values within different cycles of value creation. Thus we
aim to provide a variegated picture of the values that are associated with this
interrelation among the individual, the immediate social (group) setting and
the surrounding educational context.
Participants
The participants were eighteen international graduate students (Mage = 25.90,
SD = 2.37, Agerange: 23-31) enrolled in a two-year research oriented Learning
Sciences master’s program. The 18 students were part of the same cohort of
students (31 students) and part of one CoLP (22 students) in parallel to the
master’s program. Participation in the community was voluntary and
participants were free to join or withdraw from any community meeting.
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Design
The students voluntarily participated in seven community events (i.e.,
informal face-to-face community meetings), lasting approximately three hours
each and taking place upon community members’ request (weekly or biweekly
basis). The community events were co-organized and co-structured among the
community members and a participatory non-peer facilitator (who was also
the lead researcher of the present study. The facilitator was present at every
community event in order to support the members’ interactions and
community activities. Face-to-face peer feedback on “work-in progress for
future delivery within the study programme” was one of the main sharing
mechanisms in the community events and coordinated by the facilitator. The
lifespan of the community was one semester at the beginning of their study
programme. All community events were video-recorded with consent by the
participants. The values experienced by the participants were collected with
the help of narratives, more specifically their “value creation stories”.
What we looked for: A situated multilevel typology of
values
We employed a Situated Multilevel Typology of Values (SMTV) to study value
creation in the CoLP. The premises of a situated perspective to values are (a)
Fronzini’s (1971) value contextualism theory which implies that the existence
and meaning of values is situation-defined and situation-dependent, and (b)
Lave and Wenger’s (1991) situated approach to learning which implies that
learning is a socially situated practice. Although the employed typology relies
heavily on the idea of cycles of value creation as developed by Wenger et al.
(2011), we extended their framework by including the pre-formation cycle of
Expected value (i.e., reasons for participation, needs and expectations) which
corresponds to the values that prompt the participants to partake in
community formation in the first place (see Figure 1). This extension is based
on the following premises (a) needs can act as prerequisites for the
development of values (Pauls, 1990, p. 26) and (b) values themselves
constitute guiding factors of future behaviour (Rokeach, 1979). Along with this
theoretical alignment, the integration of Expected values as a pre-formation
cycle is also in alignment with the first stage of community development as
described by Wenger et al. (2002), during which a network of people identify
the potential for a community to emerge through the identification of common
interests and needs.
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Cycle 1:
Immediate
value
Cycle 2:
Potential
value
Cycle 3:
Applied
value
Cycle 4:
Realized
value
Cycle 5:
Reframing
value
Pre-cycle:
Expected
value
Skill-development
Reasons for
participation and
expectations
Productive
activities Robust
resources Promising
practices Return on
investment New
framework
Skills acquired
Networking Implementation of
insights Personal
performance Community
aspirations
Networking
Professional
development
Value of
connections
Collaboration
Change in
perspectives
New views of
learning
Innovation in doing
things
Use of social
connections
Educational
performances
Knowledge
products as
performance
Assessment
New frameworks
Figure 1. Cycles of value creation in networks and communities. Adapted from
Wenger, Trayner and De Laat (2011, p. 34). The pre-formation cycle of
Expected values has been added.
The SMTV further extends the Wenger et al. (2011) framework by
differentiating five types of values within each cycle of value creation (see
Figure 2). Personal values refer to any values that draw a direct link to one’s
development as a person, self, or identity. Social values refer to any values
associated with one’s network, social relationships, and membership
development. Skill-related values refer to any values associated with one’s
development of academic skills. Study-related values refer to any values
associated with one’s understanding of – or contribution to –her/his studies
(in parallel to the study programme alongside which the community operated).
Context-related values refer to the usefulness and/or importance of
community atmosphere and setting, the overall facilitation, and any general
activities, tasks and/or tools therein.
Expected
values
context-related
skill-related
study-related
personal
social
context-related
skill-related
study-related
personal
social
context-related
skill-related
study-related
personal
social
Immediate
values Potential
values Applied
values
context-related
skill-related
study-related
personal
social
Realized
values
context-related
skill-related
study-related
personal
social
Reframing
values
context-related
skill-related
study-related
personal
social
Figure 2. Situated Multilevel Typology of Values (SMTV). Five types of values are
distinguished within each cycle.
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These five types of value have been included in the SMTV due to their
relevance to the social setting of CoLPs being examined (Dingyloudi & Strijbos,
2014), which in turn adds the situated nature of this typology. Although we
developed the SMTV to study value creation from a situated perspective in the
specific context of CoLPs, it also contributes to the theoretical and analytical
development of Wenger et al.’s (2011) value creation framework for (online)
communities in general – for example CoPs and CoLs often serve members’
needs to develop a certain skill in relation to a practice, organization or study
programme. However, even if the SMTV can be applied in structure (for the
most part), the situatedness of participants’ expression of their experienced
value will necessitate that the typology is recalibrated (in terms of the
description of codes and examples) to the observed setting.
How we looked for it: Narratives and value creation
stories
People are storytellers who, individually and collectively, engage in
experiencing, imagining, telling, retelling, re-experiencing, and re-imagining
stories of their lived-in worlds (Conelly & Clandinin, 1990; Denscombe, 2010;
Riessman, 2005). A story can be expressed through different media, such as
written text and/or interviews (Denscombe, 2010). Stories can be treated as
narratives when written or told with a particular purpose in mind (e.g., an
account of personal experience), when drawing a link between the past and the
present to reveal any developments or changes over time, or when including
feelings and experiences emerging from social activities and interaction
(Denscombe, 2010). From a narrative point of view, stories can be analyzed in
terms of how individuals construct their personal or surrounding world.
Narrative inquiry or narrative analysis is increasingly used in educational
research with the claim that “(…) education is the construction and
reconstruction of personal and social stories; learners, teachers and
researchers are storytellers and characters in their own and other’s stories”
(Conelly & Clandinin, 1990, p. 2). From a social research perspective,
Riessman (2005) argues that narratives are not self-evident non-analyzable
data, but they require interpretation. In the present study, although influenced
by narrative analysis, we employed a systematic thematic analysis following
the principles of content analysis, in order to identify common thematic
elements across participants’ experiences (Riessman, 2005). According to
Riessman (2005, p. 6), “narratives do not mirror, they refract the past”,
meaning that storytellers do not just reproduce a past experience but they re-
think their experience based on their current interpretation, interests and
strategies of sense-making to themselves and others, while drawing parallels
among past, present and future. Voice is a fundamental element of stories,
since it is through voice that individuals are enabled to participate in a
community and convey their meanings to others (Britzman, 2003). Voice
aimed at the social process of understanding relationships between the
individual, her/his experience and the other (Britzman, 2003).
While considering the importance and richness of participants’ stories and
voices as devices of capturing in-depth, non-observable participants’
experiences of value creation in a CoLP, we invited the participants to write
their own value creation stories after their participation in the community
events. Therefore, these stories have a retrospective orientation with a direct
focus on linking expected, experienced and realized values of the past, with
applied values of the present, and potential and reframing values for the
future. The following sections describe in more detail how participants’ value
creation stories were collected.
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Value creation stories
Wenger et al. (2002) provide a framework for collecting community members’
value creation stories within organizations and their importance to the
members, the community and the organization within which the communities
arise. In line with Denscombe (2010) and Riessman (2005), Wenger et al.
(2002) state that the realization of values cannot derive from mere identifiable
static measurements, but from stories that depict the complex relations
between activities, resources and outcomes, while revealing the contextual
aspects that frame those relations. The stories themselves – apart from
providing evidence of community members’ co-construction, exchange and
application of gained knowledge – also foster a sharing culture through the
visibility of one’s practice within their context. According to Wenger et al.
(2002), three main components should be incorporated in one’s story to foster
its systematicity in describing how community resources actually emerged and
applied into practice creating value: (1) the initial activity, (2) the knowledge
resource generated by this activity, and (3) the way the resource was applied to
create value.
Scaffolding value creation stories
We adopted Wenger et al.’s (2011) value creation story scaffolding template as
a systematic approach to collect value creation stories. The template by
Wenger et al. (2011) was adapted to the setting of a CoLP. It includes open-
ended questions to scaffold participants in reporting and describing expected,
emergent, applied, potential, realized and reframing values through overall
and specific value creation stories. The template consists of two scaffolds that
support participants in (a) depicting aspects of their overall experience of
participation and (b) depicting how a specific story led to value creation.
Personal value
narrative
How
participation
is changing
me
How
participation is
affecting my
social
connections
How
participation
is helping my
practice
How
participation is
changing my
ability to
influence my
studies
Reasons for
participation
Activities,
outputs,
events,
networking
Value to me
Figure 3. Scaffold for overall value creation narrative (adapted from Wenger
et al., 2011, p. 45).
The first scaffold aims to capture the overall experience of participation and
suggests various ways of talking about it (see Figure 3). It includes several
stages of the experienced participation (rows) and several aspects of the
participant’s experienced values (columns). A variety of types and cycles of
values can be identified from the overall personal value narrative, including
the Expected values.
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Specific value creation story
Typical cycles Your story:
1. Activity:
Describe a meaningful activity you
participated in and your experience of it.
2. Output:
Describe a specific resource this activity
produced for you and why you thought it
might be useful.
3. Application:
Say how you used this resource in your
practice and what it enabled that would
not have happened otherwise.
4. Outcome:
a. Personal: Explain how it affected
your success.
b. Educational: Has your
participation contributed to the
success of your seminars?
5. New definition of success:
Sometimes, such a story changes your
understanding of what success is. If this is
the case include it here.
Figure 4. Scaffold for specific value creation story (adapted from Wenger et al.,
2011, p. 46).
The second scaffold guides the telling of specific stories/examples of how
participation created value to the participants (see Figure 4). Some storytelling
aspects are included as guiding prompts: (a) describe a meaningful activity
they participated in and how they experienced it (Immediate values), (b)
describe the resources the activity produced and their usefulness (Potential
values), (c) describe the application of the resources into practice (Applied
values), (d) describe the personal and educational outcomes of this experience
(Realized values), (e) describe the reconsideration, if applicable, of what
success is (Reframing values). Although the scaffolds of the template implied
a different level of specificity, both aimed at contributing to the depiction of
each participant’s value creation story of their experiences within their CoLP.
What we found: Analysis and results
Out of 22 students that were members of the CoLP, 18 wrote a value creation
story. We conducted content analysis of these eighteen stories to identify their
experienced values of community participation. A coding scheme was
developed on the basis of the SMTV. The coding scheme thus included six
cycles of values (expected, immediate, potential, applied, realized, and
reframing), each with five types of values (personal, social, skill-related, study-
related and context-related); in all 30 codes. We extracted 361 segments from
the 18 stories, out of which 340 were codable and 21 were non-codable. Based
on the segmentation procedure, a segment was considered as meaningful by
the coders when indicative of members’ attribution of positive, neutral, or
negative oriented values to any aspect of his/her CoLP participation. Any
statement whose meaning was not clear to the coders, or was not explicitly
related to the CoLP participation, was considered non-codable (e.g., When I
was asked what motivates me in general, I answered improving something
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with meaning for a system / society / community). The coding was performed
by two independent coders (i.e., an external observer and the participatory
researcher) who identified 21 out of 30 possible values with satisfactory
reliability (Cohen’s kappa = .72).
Identified
values f % Authentic example
Realized-Skill 140 24.1 I have a clearer idea on an effective presentation
Realized-Social 089 15.3 I felt far closer and open to all participants
Realized-
Context 082 14.1 I really liked that I had the chance to receive
feedback
Realized-
Personal 042 07.2 I am much more confident
Expected-Social 041 07.1 To get more in touch with students I did not
have close contact with
Expected-Skill 036 06.2 I wanted to improve my ability to give
presentations especially in another language
Potential-Skill 031 05.3 It helps me to evaluate the quality of a
presentation
Applied-Skill 023 04.0 I implemented the above suggestions in my
subsequent presentations
Realized-Study 021 03.6 …of course that influenced how I behave in class
Reframing-
Social 014 02.4 My initial perceptions about certain people have
altered in a positive manner
Reframing-
Personal 012 02.1 It is not bad to be wrong
Reframing-Skill 012 02.1 Now I see each hurdle in the process of
becoming a better presenter as a stepping stone
Expected-Study 012 02.1 To get more information about the programme
Expected-
Personal 009 01.6 I hoped to develop myself as a person
Expected-
Context 005 00.9 To be more familiar with classmates in a smaller
group (community)
Potential-
Personal 003 00.5 Be more reflective in thinking about what
questions I might get from the audience
Potential-Study 002 00.3 I’m sure that will affect my education as a whole
Applied-Study 002 00.3 I applied it during the seminars
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Reframing-
Study 002 00.3 Take into account your environment
Potential-Social 001 00.2 I hope that I also can help other students some
time
Applied-
Personal 001 00.2 In the first presentation…I was still struggling
with confidence but I worked on it
Total 580 100
Table 1. Identified values in value creation stories (N = 18)
The content analysis of the value creation stories (see Table 3) shows that a
wide range of values could be identified by the coders (21 out of 30 values)
with the most prominent ones being Realized skill-related values (24.1%),
followed by Realized social values (15.3%), Realized context-related (14.1%),
and Realized personal values (7.2%).
None of the coders identified nine of the theoretical value categories which
were included in the coding scheme. Four codes were not identified despite the
fact that they could have been identified and the remaining five were non-
identifiable due to the nature of the data source which had a retrospective
perspective (i.e., immediate values were not possible to be identified).
However, the immediate values were retained in the coding scheme for the
analysis of the video data, which enables capturing the actual participation of
members in the community events.
Although the SMTV enabled us to examine value creation in a CoLP –
necessary for understanding of the phenomenon – it also fostered our
reflection on the steps and approaches taken to unravel the value creation
phenomenon. The following section addresses the main questions as part of
methodological reflection and details our lessons learned.
What we have learned: Discussion
In order to examine value creation in a community setting we developed a
Situated Multilevel Typology of Values (SMVT), with the concept of value and
Wenger et al.’s (2011) value creation framework as our theoretical basis. The
SMVT and its application to the analysis of self-reported value creation of
members of a Community of Learning Practice (CoLP) prompted our
reflection on the following questions: (1) To what extent can the values that the
participants originally intended to report actually be identified as such by the
researchers/analysts’ without bias due to the researchers/analysts’ own
perspectives? and (2) To what extent does a pre-defined typology of values,
based on a theoretical framework, confine or enrich the range of possible
values that could be identified? Both questions are associated with the
axiological issues of objectivism (e.g., Hartmann, 1967), subjectivism (e.g.,
Perry, 1954), and value contextualism (Frondizi, 1971), along with the
ethnographic issues of realism and relativism with a main focus on the extent
to which an outsiders’ perspective can depict an insiders’ perspective when
the former use their own conceptual tools for discovering the latter
(Descombe, 2010).
By adopting the contextualism approach to values as described by Frondizi
(1971) – i.e. the uniqueness and high situatedness of participants’ stories and
therefore values reported and described through the stories – a researchers’
re-production and interpretation of others’ stories is a challenging process.
Values are generated within specific situations and circumstances and do not
necessarily need to be stable entities across situations (Frondizi, 1971). They
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can be intangible and therefore non-observable, need time to grow, are not
always immediately realized by the participants within a specific situation, and
even if they are realized it does not mean that these values can be
automatically communicated to others because the personal value of an
experience might be of relevance only to oneself. All these elements make the
identification of values within the participants’ stories even more challenging.
While reading the story as told by a participant, researchers might partially re-
produce or mis-produce participants’ value creation stories due to the
researchers’ own perspectives, theoretical frameworks applied for
interpretation, the situatedness of their interpretation and the constraints of
what can be told and what cannot be told (Britzman, 2003, p. 35).
While considering the situated nature of value creation, inviting researchers to
observe the context and participants’ interactional patterns and value
generation through video observation – prior to the analysis of value creation
stories – might allow the researchers to understand better the participants’
perspectives towards values and the ways they would convey them to others.
The closer to the phenomenon under study the less filters – that act as
obstacles to the observation and analysis of participants’ experienced reality –
are imposed by the researchers.
EO
V
PR
P
Figure 5. Pandora’s box as a metaphor for the “filters” that might hinder or
direct the identification of experienced values in communities (EO = external
observer, PR = participatory researcher, P = participant, and V = value as
experienced).
The metaphor of Pandora’s box (see Figure 5) illustrates that the seemingly
simple action of analyzing values experienced by participants in a community
is instead a highly complex process that may lead to an endless complication of
unravelling the “real”. Analyzing or reporting experiences related to constructs
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such as values, which are highly dependent on people’s own set of criteria
(Rokeach, 1979), includes multiple “filters” that may bias the participatory
researcher’s and external observer’s interpretation of participants’ experienced
reality. More specifically, such a bias of the values told or read in the stories is
effected by story tellers’ (i.e., participants) and story readers’ (i.e.,
participatory researchers or external observers) own value systems, and in the
case of story readers also their understanding of pre-defined typologies of
value creation. In sum, the filters represent added layers of subjective
interpretation. As such, any idea of an “absolute” or non-selective truth”
reported by the storytellers or understood by the story readers should be
discarded. A participant’s (P) own value system filters the reported values (V),
which in turn are even further filtered by the participatory researcher’s (PR)
value system and any biases deriving from the PR’s community participation.
The PR’s lens is reflected in and shaped the development of the SMTV, which
further filters what can be observed by an external observer (EO). In turn, the
EO’s understanding of the SMTV may further filter the reported “reality”. Our
reflection with the help of the metaphor of Pandora’s box emphasizes the
complex interplay between what the story was, what the story tells, how the
story is read and what any story reader further “story tells” that can lead to
bias or misinterpretation of the experienced phenomenon.
In our study, we involved two coders in the content analysis of the value
creation stories. Although these coders achieved satisfactory reliability, they
simultaneously differed in their personal perspectives towards values and their
interpretations of the stories as told by the participants, which in turn affects
the identification and interpretation of values. In the present study the first
coder was the participatory researcher (i.e., the non-peer facilitator) and the
second coder was an external observer. Although external, the observer was
invited to watch the video data of the actual community experience before
being involved in the analysis of the value creation stories in order to
familiarize herself with the participants, their observed attitudes towards their
participation, and their role in the community. Doing so might have brought
the observer closer to the phenomenon.
Regarding the theoretical framework by Wenger et al. (2011) that informed the
template and both storytelling scaffolds, we think that the template (and
scaffolds) both confined and enriched the possible range of values reported by
the participants. On the one hand the scaffolds facilitated the narrative story-
telling process by serving as stepping stones, but on the other hand they might
have directed the participants to attribute values to aspects that they normally
would not have attributed value to. However, when invited to tell/ write their
experienced stories retrospectively, participants might not be able to recall
important aspects if scaffolds are not available. Yet, with respect to the pre-
defined SMTV there is a danger of classifying values too broadly or too
holistically and thus and thus losing the particularities of the experienced
value. However, the typology provides researchers a framework to identify
actual written elements that imply attributed value by the participants.
Nevertheless, it should be highlighted that it is still unknown whether the
participants would have perceived the classification of their reported values in
similar ways to the participatory researcher and the external observer. Hence,
further analysis could be done by involving the participants themselves, for
example with the help of interviews around the analyzed stories and/or cued
retrospective recall of video-fragments to foster participants’ reflection.
Our reflections on the examination of the under-researched phenomenon of
value creation in communities signify that the analysis of value is highly
situated and that any analysis also needs to consider the degree to which the
outcome of such an analysis (story-reading) adequately represents
participants’ experiences (story-telling) in relation to the filters that colour the
researchers’ interpretation of the value creation stories. It also serves to inform
researchers who study the value creation process in face-to-face or online
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communities (whether CoLP, CoP or CoL) about the complexity of its analysis,
but that the SMTV is a first methodological stepping stone to address this
thorny issue.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Fernando Hernández-Hernández and Juana M.
Sancho for arousing our interest in reflecting and rethinking educational
research.
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