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more about the current state of higher education research in Malaysia, there is still
little dialogue between the Malaysian and international higher education research
communities in the current literature. This, we argue, is a severe obstacle to the
advancement of the field.
The next section describes an initiative to develop a community of practice as a
means of advancing the field, followed by a discussion of issues identified as imped-
iments to its advance, with sound suggestions for addressing them.
Community of Practice in Higher Education
In essence, following Wenger ( 2000 :229), communities of practice are the basic
building blocks of a social learning system because they are the social ‘containers’
of the competencies that make up such a system. A community of practice (CoP) is
a group of people who share a craft and/or a profession and share common interest
in a particular domain or area. It is through the process of sharing information and
experiences with the group that the members learn from each other and have an
opportunity to develop themselves personally and professionally (Wenger 2000 ).
Wenger further purported that the establishment of such a community requires a
combination of three elements of competencies. First, members are bound together
by their collectively developed understanding of what their community is about, and
they hold each other accountable to this sense of joint enterprise. To be competent
is to understand the enterprise well enough to be able to contribute to it. Second,
members build their community through mutual engagement. They interact with
one another, establishing norms and relationships of mutuality that reflect these
interactions. To be competent is to be able to engage with the community and be
trusted as a partner in these interactions. Third, communities of practice have pro-
duced a shared repertoire of communal resources—language, routines, sensibilities,
artefacts, tools, stories, styles, etc. To be competent is to have access to this reper-
toire and to be able to use it appropriately (Wenger 2000 p. 229).
The emergence of a community of practice in higher education (PenDaPaT) in
Malaysia is a planned move to seriously develop higher education as a field of study
and research. This initiative started in early 2014 when a group of ten university
academics and researchers in various fields were recruited to undergo specifically
tailored training in Research on Higher Education, Development and Innovation
(RHEDI) Executive Leadership Programme in Durban, South Africa, conducted by
the LH Martin Leadership Institute, University of Melbourne, Australia. From
Malaysia’s perspective, this programme met its objective of creating a pool of
policy- relevant researchers with adequate academic understanding of what higher
education as a field of study/research is about. On their return to Malaysia, it was
decided to capitalize on their knowledge and skills to create an awareness of higher
education as a field of study, and for this a plan was put in place to establish a
Malaysian society of higher education researchers. A sponsoring committee was
N. Azman and M. Sirat