What are communities of practice?
There is a large and diverse body of knowledge available, so here I summarise some
of the salient issues. Communities of practice is a concept which is widely used in
educational settings and learning contexts. Wenger, McDermott, and Snyder define
communities of practice as ‘groups of people who share a concern, a set of problems,
or a passion about a topic, and who deepen their knowledge and expertise in
this area by interacting on an ongoing basis’ (2002, 4). To understand the significance
of this approach, I need to elucidate how learning is considered in other
approaches. Traditional theories of learning have positioned cognitive processes
within the individual – what may be called intra-individual, at times attributing
learning as an individual product. Here, individuals are mapped to learning styles,
and types of learners are identified as different (i.e. gifted and talented or with learning
needs). However, theorists within the communities of practice literature (Wenger
1998) invoke a rather different approach to learning. Here, knowing becomes more
than an individual cerebral process and is conceptualised as situated in social
resources (relationships, contexts and society). Hanks (1991) notes that within this
approach, situating learning in social contexts allows the exploration of ways in
which different forms of social co-participation enable contexts for learning to
occur. In this account, learning is not the acquisition of knowledge per se but rather
the access of learners to participating roles in expert performances. Here, learning is
seen as a trajectory or journey which typically involves others along the way. This
approach to learning which readily embraces the social context and relational
aspects is derived from early work in distributed cognition, and taken up by Lave
and Wenger (1991). The roots of this approach see learning as more than an acquisition
of knowledge but in the social participation of learners. A community of
practice may be defined as