The Use of Community of Practice for the innovation in educational sector

Knowledge, learning, and innovation is a triad of words that should be present in organizations in any sector of activity. In education, efforts have been made to implement practices that are more consistent with requirements of the contemporary world. Authors define Community of Practice (CoP) differently. In this paper a CoP is defined as a group of people focused on a collective learning process based on social interactions. Thus, it consists of a systematic literature review, with the main focus on identifying how CoPs have been applied for innovation in the education sector. Twenty-three complete articles from the Scopus and the Web of Science databases were analyzed in the current paper. The results showed that CoPs, although studied under different perspectives and domains, and in different educational segments, have common aspects, such as the perception of the collective and social approach of learning. Above all, a CoP is a fertile field for the proliferation of knowledge and identity formation of the group. In addition, there is a predominance of the use of CoPs for the innovation in pedagogical activities.