Three Decades of Communities of Practice Conceptualization (original) (raw)
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The concept of "communities of practice" is of relatively recent date. The concept gained momentum with Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger's book from 1991, Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. Since then, the notion of ‘communities of practice’ has been a focus of attention, not least in debates about learning, teaching and education, but also in debates about organizational theory, knowledge management and work-life studies. The latter development accelerated with Wenger's later book Communities of Practice (Wenger, 1998), but also picked up fuel from neighboring texts by – amongst others - Paul Duguid & John Seely Brown (Brown & Duguid 1991) and Julian Orr (Orr, 1996). The concept of communities of practice offers a dynamic and non-individualistic framing of learning as a social and situated activity oriented towards participation in social practice. From this also springs a number of interesting observations about human agency, cooperation, organization and communities.
Book Review: Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity
Australian Journal of Education, 2000
Wenger's recent book 'Communities or Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity' addresses a topic that is of crucial importance to a range of contemporary concerns in fields as diverse as education, learning organization, the management of change, and the analysis and administration of policy. Of particular significance, is the idea that learning is primarily a social rather than an individual phenomenon, and that knowledge is a matter of practical competence gained through participation and engagement in the social enterprises of particular communities of practice. The key to learning in such contexts hinges on the negotiation of interpersonal meanings, and the formation of personal and social identity therefrom. Thus, on this view, learning is an integral part of everyday life, and is more than a matter of merely acquiring and storing explicit information. Rather, learning has a much broader and more dynamic conceptualization, in that it manifests itself in and through engagement in social activities as a way of being-in-the-world, which has a unique, but shared, temporal and historical trajectory, depending on the social context in question. Practice then constitutes the following: first, it provides resolutions or solutions to local social problems; second, it constitutes a communal memory; third, it provides a context for the socialization of new community members; and last, it is a setting where new perspective and meanings are created, and where a particular social atmosphere is generated around what
What are communities of practice? A comparative review of four seminal works
Journal of Information Science, 2005
This paper is a comparative review of four seminal works on communities of practice. It is argued that the ambiguities of the terms community and practice are a source of the concept's reusability allowing it to be reappropriated for different purposes, academic and practical. However, it is potentially confusing that the works differ so markedly in their conceptualizations of community, learning, power and change, diversity and informality. The three earlier works are underpinned by a common epistemological view, but Lave and Wenger's 1991 short monograph is often read as primarily about the socialization of newcomers into knowledge by a form of apprenticeship, while the focus in Brown and Duguid's article of the same year is, in contrast, on improvising new knowledge in an interstitial group that forms in resistance to management. Wenger's 1998 book treats communities of practice as the informal relations and understandings that develop in mutual engagement on an a...
Revisiting and Rethinking the Structural Elements of Communities of Practice
2019
Communities of Practice have existed for as long as people have been learning and sharing their experiences. However, it was not until the early 1990's before the study of these communities gained attention from the research community. Since then, these communities have been studied in many research domains, yet, the core structural elements, which are critical to these communities remain constant-Domain, Community and Practice. In this paper we reexamine the structural elements of Communities of Practice and argue for the extension of these to include aspects on Participation, Learning and Knowledge. We also take a first step in validating these new structural elements by presenting a study that explores how they appear in a known Communities of Practice (the CoderDojo movement). Our research informs the future study of COP from both a theoretical and organizational perspective.
Wenger, E.(1998). Communities of practice: Learning, meaning and identity
2003
Wenger's book is stimulating, insightful, and challenging. In it, he develops substantially some of the themes from his earlier work with Jean Lave (Lave & Wenger, 1991) which itself was a move on for many of the key ideas of situated cognition in Lave's (1988) book. Many researchers in education generally (Kirshner & Whitson, 1997) and in mathematics education in particular (for example, Stein & Brown, 1997; Lerman, 2001; Graven, 2002), have found that psychological cognitivist paradigms were limited in exploring learning as part of a socially constructed world. A situated cognition perspective is appealing since it seems to provide a bridge between cognitivist perspectives and sociological perspectives. Lave and Wenger (1991) explain: The notion of situated learning now appears to be a transitory concept, a bridge, between a view according to which cognitive processes (and thus learning) are primary and a view according to which social practice is the primary, generative phenomenon, and learning is one of its characteristics (p. 34). The work of Lave and Wenger (1991) is increasingly being drawn on to describe and explain student and teacher learning in the field of mathematics (
Journal of Management Studies, 2006
Situated learning theory offers a radical critique of cognitivist theories of learning, emphasizing the relational aspects of learning within communities of practice in contrast to the individualist assumptions of conventional theories. However, although many researchers have embraced the theoretical strength of situated learning theory, conceptual issues remain undeveloped in the literature. Roberts, for example, argues in this issue that the notion of 'communities of practice'-a core concept in situated learning theory-is itself problematic. To complement her discussion, this paper explores the communities of practice concept from several perspectives. Firstly, we consider the perspective of the individual learner, and examine the processes which constitute 'situated learning'. Secondly, we consider the broader socio-cultural context in which communities of practice are embedded. We argue that the cultural richness of this broader context generates a fluidity and heterogeneity within and beyond communities. Finally, we argue that it is sometimes difficult to distinguish conceptually between the terms 'participation' and 'practice' because of occasional duplication of meaning. We propose, instead, a refinement of the definition to allow for greater conceptual clarity.
“Communities of Practice” as an Analytical Construct: Implications for Theory and Practice
International Journal of Public Administration, 2009
The "community of practice" (CoP) has emerged as a potentially powerful unit of analysis linking the individual and the collective because it situates the role of learning, knowledge transfer, and participation among people as the central enterprise of collective action. The authors' surface tensions and highlight unanswered questions regarding CoP theory, concluding that it relies on a largely normative and underoperationalized set of premises. Avenues for theory development and the empirical testing of assertions are provided.