Wenger - Summary Communities of Practice PDF

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Communities of practice summary...

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Wenger’s Communities of Practice : Learning, Meaning, and Identity Communities of Practice The concept of communities of practice sits within a broader conceptual framework of social learning. Communities of practice are essentially informal – they do not align themselves with reified institutional structures though they are not totally independent of them – and as such are rarely noticed. Wenger makes them explicit, using a systematic approach to bring them into focus. The conceptual framework of commnities of practice has been applied to formal education and the workplace. Wenger (1998; 122) himself admits “calling every imaginable social configuration a community of practice would render the concept meaningless.” Some configurations (such as a social movement) are too large or too complex to be a single community of practice, and are better understood as ‘constellations of practices.’ These are defined by relations that tend to share members, artifacts, institutions, or historical and geographical roots. Communities of practice have become increasingly conceptualised through the use of developmental stages, such as those described by Wenger, McDermott et al. (2002); potential, coalescing, maturing, stewardship, transforming. Janson, Howard et als’ (2004) study on how PhD students found emotional and academic support through a collaborative peer community recommends an additional preliminary stage. Yet Bos-Ciussi, Augier et al. (2008) highlight the ‘paradox’ of learning communities of practice. Wenger (1998) stresses that whilst communities of practice can be recognised, encouraged, supported and nurtured, they cannot be created or designed, but rather emerge themselves. [Rolf: How do we know this? Is it too vague? Too abstract? How might we overcome it?] Yet learning communities need to have well defined pedagogical objectives. Its artificiality is therefore seen as problematic.

Dimensions of Practice A number of studies in interpreting Wenger’s concept of communities of practice have adopted his dimensions of practice as an analytical model with which to recognise and legitamise the emergence of a community of practice. They are descibed as the property of mutual engagemnt, joint enterprise and shared repertoire. Mutual Engagement Communities of practice are not self-contained around predefined groups, teams or networks, but rather evolve around participants acting in historical, social, cultural and institutional contexts. The mutual engagement of its members thrives on diversity, tension and competetiveness as much as homogeneity, agreement, conformity.

Joint Enterprise “An enterprise both engenders and directs social energy” (Wenger 1998; 82). In a community of practice, enterprise is complex and communally negotiated through instrumental, personal, interpersonal perspectives. It relies on developing a regime of ‘mutual accountability’, some aspects of which may be reified (such as rules and policies). Shared Repertoire The pursuit of joint enterprise creates shared histories of engagement through forms of participation and reification. This set of shared actions and artifacts including routines, tools, processes, concepts is accumulated over time to act as resources for further negotiating meaning.

Negotiation of Meaning In a community of practice, new meanings, established through experiences of everyday life, are negotiated (as in they are extended, reinterpreted, modified, confirmed, dismissed etc.). This dynamic and productive process relies on continuous interaction, and is essentially historical and contextual. Negotiation of meaning involves interaction of two processes – participation and reification – in the form of a duality, and establishes the level of discourse at which the concept of practice can be understood. Participation Participation is fundamental to social learning. It consists of the activity; the act of doing something or taking part, and the belonging; established through making a connection with others taking part. It is both personal and social (within communities), and based on a sense of mutuality (that is not necessarily equal). It works both ways, in that it defines the individual’s ability (or inability) to ‘shape’ the community, and how that community shapes the indiviual. Reification Reification can refer to both a process and its resulting form. As a process, it gives form to experience. In a community of practice, this process is ongoing and achieved collectively through multiple perspectives. Polin (2008) describes reification as ‘the freezing of knowledge in a concrete artefact’, and such forms including tools, symbols, stories, and concepts. Whilst Wenger stresses it is impossible to totally translate meaning into a concrete form, it can be an effective and useful process in producing representational devices that can clarify and explain meanings within a community of practice (to its individual members and outsiders). These can become important ‘points of focus’ around which meanings can be negotiated and established. (organised?) However, Wenger (1998; 61) warns us “the power of reification – its succinctness, its

portability, its potential physical persistence, its focusing effect – is also its danger.” He explains how it can ‘ossify activity.’ In this way, forms of reification can become almost autonomous, taking on identities of their own which are distinct from the original contexts and processes which created them. The Duality of Meaning As a duality, participation and reification are not mutually exclusive nor opposing, but distinct and complimentary. They both require and enable each other. It is the inherent ‘vitalizing tension’ (Polin, 2008) and complimentarity which gives richness and dynamism to a community of practice. It is useful to maintain a balancing act between the two (i.e. what is reified and what is participated), and how the production of meaning is distributed between the two dualistic components can be seen as a continually shifting series of ‘trade offs.’ In discussing the ‘vitalizing tension’ of the duality of meaning, Polin (2008; 282) puts this into practical terms: “There must be some solid core of domain knowledge that is captured and stable enough to be shared, but there must also be a dynamism that allows that knowledge base to continue to update, develop and innovate.”

Identity Wenger describes a profound connection between identity and practice. The formation of a community of practice does not only involve the negotiation of meanings, but also, and of equal importance, the negotiation of identities. Indeed, each of the key concepts critical to negotiation of meaning in practice has parallel concepts in negotiations of identity; community as membership, shared histories as trajectories, and boundary and landscape as nexus of multimembership. Identity in practice is defined socially through participation and reification in communities of practice, and constructed through negotiation of meaning. Learning is thefore not just an accumulation of skills and acquision of information, but a process of becoming defined through an identity of participation (incorporates a past and a future). Wenger (1998) argues students must find ways to coordinate multiple perspectives, not only by developing their skills but also their identity. Lave and Wenger’s (1991) original concepts of situated learning is founded on co-located environments where face-to-face interaction is a critical element in the distribution of tacit knowledge seen as crucial to the formation of communities of practice. As an increasing number of geographically distributed or virtual communities of practice emerge, the need for understanding how technology affects the notion of identity becomes apparent. By definition, face-to-face interaction is impossible in such communities, though one could argue increasingly sophisticated technologies provide novel alternatives.

Identification and Negotiability

Identity formation is a dual purpose of identification and negotiability. Processes of participation (‘identifying as’) and reification (‘identifying with’), provide the experiences and materials for building identities, individually and collectively. This forms how the individual member identifies with a community and how they are recognised as members by others. It can be positive and negative, and dependent on participation and non-participation. Negotiability determines the degree of individual control over these meanings of identity: “The ability, facility and legitimacy to contribute to, take responsibility for, and shape the meanings that matter within a social configuration” (Wenger, 1998; p.197) Both identification and negotiability are negotiated through processes of engagement, imagination and alignment.

Participation and Non-Participation As stated, we produce identities through practices we engage in, but also those we don’t. Non-participation can be seen as being enabling or disabling, and the difference is best understood in the context of trajectories and the distinction between peripherality and marginality. Wenger describes the ‘wisdom of peripherality’; a unique perspective only accessible those who are not yet full members. This enables the potential for newcomers to explore new ideas and concepts, but these can easily become marginalised within established regimes of competence – where members are denied the opportunity to become full participants, or experience – where experiences are repressed, despised or ignored.

Modes of Belonging Wenger (1998) presents three modes of belonging as a way of understanding identity formation: engagement, imagination and alignment. The three modes are not mutually exclusive, and are best conceptualised within their interelated combinations. For example, alignment ‘focuses’ imagination, whilst engagement ‘grounds’ it, allowing it to be negotiated in practice. Engagement Engagement is fundamental to forming communities of practice. It describes the active involvement in the mutual processes to negotiate meaning, enabling access to participation and reification. It is by necessity bounded in character – there is a limit to the number of activities and people we can engage with. Yet this ‘boundedness’ can be transforming. Communities of practice should allow engagement with others, the opportunity to contribute to enterprise and produce sharable artifacts. Formal education largely denies the exploration of social relationships and interests.

Imagination Is a personal and social activity Understanding each others experiences, shared enterprise Imagination gives us the ability to disengage, and view the community as an outsider, to take risks, explore new perspectives, and engage in new process of participation and reification. Alignment Coordinating imaginative energy and activities to fit broader structures and contribute to broader enterprises Wenger (1998) describes alignment as ‘socially organised action.’ It can coordinate perspectives and activities, produce artifacts, and direct them towards common purposes and broader discourses (scientific, artistic, moral etc). Alignment can also be equally disempowering. Members can gain understanding through engagement and imagination, but not be able to take charge of their destiny.

Trajectories Identity is neither fixed nor linear, but always in a state of complex transformation constructed in social contexts. Wenger (1998) uses the term trajectories to describe identity as a social form of temporality. Trajectories provide a concrete formation of how identities are negotiated through engagement in practice. Member trajectories form an interlocked set of models in a community to describe participation and identity over time. New members can choose to accept, modify or reject existing or ‘paradigmatic’ trajectories to establish their own. Unlike training which encourages an inbound learning trajectory, with its focus on competence within a specific practice, education encourages an outbound trajectory, as a mutual development process between communities and individuals encompassing a broad field of identities. Wenger (1998) argues formal learning does not allow new trajectories of participation to develop outside of it. The detachment of institutional learning environments and the uniformity of curricula limit access to meaningful forms of identification. This can lead to marginalised learners identifying only with the informational structure of formal education, and subsequently work that “merely extends the trajectory and institutional identity that schooling has offered them” (p.270). Identity combines multiple forms of membership through a process of reconciliing boundaries of practice in a nexus of multiple trajectories.

The Landscape of Practice Member participation (as well as reified artifacts) can and do exist in more than one community of practice, which tend to be interconnected in complex ways.

The duality of participation (in the form of ‘brokers’) and reification (in the form of ‘boundary objects’) provide the distinct channels of connectivity between these different communities of practice. Brokers are individuals who galvanise their multi-membership to transfer elements of one practice to another. It requires them to finely balance their legitimacy (i.e. their level of membership) within each community of practice. Boundary objects (a concept introduced by sociologist Leigh Star, 1989) play an important part in defining a community of practice to outsiders: “In everyday life we constantly deal with artifacts that connect us in various ways to communities of practice to which we do not belong” (Wenger, 1998; 107) Wenger (1998) describes several types of ‘boundary encounters’; one-to-one, immersion, and delegation. Increased brokering and the use of boundary objects can become so established and sustainable that they form their own distinct ‘boundary practice’ which can even lead to the emergence of a community of practice in its own right. Indeed examples of established communities of practice (such as those around new academic disciplines) have their origins in boundary practice. Wenger (1998: 118) describes a “complex social landscape of shared practices, boundaries, peripheries, overlaps, connections and encounters.” Whilst both refer to ‘edges’ of communities of practice, Wenger (1998) makes the distinction between boundaries – which define membership and non-membership, inclusion and exclusion – and peripheries – which describe areas of overlap.

Learning Design Wenger situates learning through social interaction, as experience and practice through negotiation of meaning. He adopts the specific historical and cultural forms of apprenticeships (explored in Lave and Wenger, 1991) to use them metaphorically in his study of situated learning and education. In a process of legitimate peripherality, newcomers move towards full participation in the social and cultural practices of the community. In a community of practice, learning is a process of participation, which is initially peripheral, but gradually increases in engagement and complexity. Traditional educational design activity is concerned wth forms of localism (e.g. classroom) and abstract information in self-contained forms (e.g. curriculum). Wenger argues formal education reinforces generational separation, and he challenges the dominance and causality between teaching and learning. In viewing learning as emergent and ongoing, linked in practice through resources and negotiation, teaching is reconfigured as one of several contexts and resources in which learning occurs. The codification of knowledge into reified, decontextualised or proceduralised forms (such as the textbook or the curriculum) creates an intermediary stage between practices and learners that can be seen as both constructive and obstructive. A dependence on reified forms can distance the learner from practice at the expense of participation. Wenger acknowledges the importance of what he calls the ‘mechanics of learning’ (i.e. cognitive processes, knowledge acquisition and skill development), but argues in a learning model as a negotiation of meaning, identities and modes of belonging are

primary. It sees learning as informal and lifelong, and not only an initial period of socialization into the culture of institutional education (i.e. the schooling system). Educational design is therefore not a self-enclosed unit of learning, existing in isolation, but should be a learning community as a social reconfiguring of identification and negotiability, both internally (within its own structure) and externaly (across wider configurations). “Educational design must engage learning communities in activities that have consequences beyond their boundaries, so that students may learn what it takes to become effective in the world” (p.274) He describes learning communities of practice as a ‘privileged locus’ for the acquisition of knowledge – enabling students to access competence and opportunity, and the creation of knowledge – enabling students to explore new perspectives and insights within a supportive communal environemnt....