Inquiry that Resituates Communities of Practice: A Relational View of Organizing, Power, and Possibilities in Situated Learning (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.
Learning Groups: The Case of Communities of Practice
From the literature, we can find several views and trends about organizational learning, knowledge management and related concepts. The diversity of existing positions and theories prevent us from distinguishing clearly all these views. However, it is possible to distinguish them in some ways. For example, we can find" technical" and" social" views of organizational learning (Easterby-Smith 1999, 3). We can also find knowledge seen as an" object"," embedded in people", and" embedded in a community"(Wasko 2000, 156).
Three Decades of Communities of Practice Conceptualization
International Journal for Innovation Education and Research
This article aims to identify the key authors and the theoretical foundations’ delineation of Lave and Wenger’s concept of Communities of Practice (CoPs) and its relationship with the learning theory. This exploratory and descriptive study applied a qualitative approach and bibliographic research based on Lave and Wenger’s (1991) publication “Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation”. All 48 references indicated in their research and the perceived relevance the authors have in academia. Data analysis was conducted using bibliometric and content analysis techniques with the aid of the NVivo software. The results showed the relevance of the key authors to the academy based on their number of publications, citation analysis, h-index, fields of study and contributions to those fields. We also identified that the concept of Communities of Practice is interdisciplinarity amongst anthropology, sociology, and psychology.
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 (
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...
Community of Practice versus Practice of the Community: Knowing in collaborative work
How do software developers, field service technicians, and medieval cathedral builders accomplish collaborative work? This paper looks at how they learn from each other by building and sharing knowledge across time and space. To illustrate this, we first present Community of Practice (CoP) as a way of understanding collaborative work which puts focus on the community and its social interaction. CoP, introduced by Lave and Wenger (1991), is based on the fundamental belief that dividing theory from practice is unsound. Hence CoP contradicted traditional theories of learning, where learning and working often are conceived as separate processes. Using Orr's (1996) rendition of service technician's work, it is shown that stories act as repositories of accumulated wisdom in keeping track of facts, sequences and their context. Representations made by a CoP to aid their work, are termed Reifications which can be stories, tools, artefacts etc. Practice is seen as a duality of Participation and Reification which both require and enable each other. We find however, that CoP based analyses tend to focus on the human actors in that you start out by looking for the communities and what defines them. We also present examples of alternative approaches that illuminate the technology and artefacts that are present in collaboration. Berg(1997) uses Actor-Network Theory (ANT) to illustrate the responsibility awarded to artefacts in the process of documenting a hospital-patient's fluid balance. Hutchins(1995) describes navigation as a joint accomplishment of artefacts and people. Turnbull(1993) sees a wooden template as a chief enabler of building gothic cathedrals without use of structural mathematics. Facets of knowledge/knowing is discussed, their accumulation and transfer by stressing the value of both the social and the technical approach.