177 Professional Learning Communities as Complex Learning Phenomena WENDY S. NIELSEN & VALERIE TRIGGS Proceedings of the 2007 Complexity Science and Educational Research Conference Feb 18–20 • Vancouver, British Columbia • pp. 177–190 • www.complexityandeducation.ca Professional Learning Communities as Complex Emergent Phenomena WENDY S. NIELSEN & VALERIE TRIGGS University of British Columbia, Canada Abstract We have been involved with two different teacher learning communities, each devoted to engaging practicing teachers with personally meaningful professional learning. Teachers in these two communities self-selected participation in their respective communities, one at a high school in the Lower Mainland of British Columbia, and the other, an on-line learning community of mathematics teachers in the southwest region of Saskatchewan. Through building relationships and interconnections both in person and on-line, the two communities have offered a space for collective mean- ing-making, where, together, teachers explore the spaces of their own working lives, the situated perspectives of their own schools and the nature of a collective enterprise that sought to support these explorations. Our respective roles within these com- munities involved acting as facilitators. We developed opportunities for collective engagement, designed activities out of teachers’ identiied desires for mathematics concept exploration or aspects of students’ involvement with the learning process, participated in conversations and offered support for personal explorations. This paper uses complexity thinking to inform current conceptions of teacher professional learning communities. These are on-going explorations and issues of importance for the two communities. Introduction The purpose of our paper is to describe and share the experience of the two learning communities that we have been working with, but not just to explore how current conceptions of teacher learning communities cohere to complexity thinking (or not). More than that, our intent is to share the case studies of two speciic communities in an effort to expand the deinition of a learning community to one that resists deini- tion beyond being a situation where people associate in something together. In his analysis of the idea of community in American urban sociology, Lyon (in Schutz, 2006) contends that community’s immanent impreciseness is exactly what makes