Lately, international volunteering has emerged as an alternative learning opportunity to develop skills, such as foreign language proficiency and intercultural understanding. Therefore, this study’s purpose was to discuss the characteristics of the community of practice (Wenger, et. al., 2012) among the members of an international volunteer project on Zoom, a communications platform. The project members were two German and two Japanese college students who taught English online to children studying at a not-for-profit organization called Cambodian Children’s Destiny in Cambodia. This study analyzed the conversation data collected from six weekly meetings conducted by the project members on Zoom to discuss the teaching plans. Coding was performed in three steps using MaxQDA. First, descriptive coding was applied to each segment of the transcribed conversations. Next, the codes with similar meanings were grouped as sub-codes with more abstract names. Then, sub-categories were revisited and grouped into categories that described the characteristics of this community of practice. Consequently, the transcribed texts were coded into forty-two codes, twelve sub-codes, and three categories: “shared goal and passion” (domain), “becoming a member of the community” (community), and “engagement to the practice” (practice). Lastly, a model describing this community of practice was formulated to explain the relationships among emerged codes and categories. In this presentation, emerged codes and categories will be introduced with the raw data to discuss the learning process of the participants of this study through communication with each other to build a community of practice on Zoom.

Authors:
Tomomi Deguchi, Kindai University, Japan

About the Presenter(s)
Dr Tomomi Deguchi is a University Associate Professor/Senior Lecturer at Kindai University in Japan

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