CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION
3.3 Communities of Practice
Lave and Wenger (1992, p. 98) describe a community of practice as “a system of relationships between people, activities, and the world, developing with time, and in relation to other tangential and overlapping communities of practice”. For learning to effectively take place the above items must be in place. To ensure that the CoPs are understood in a context, because not all joint enterprise should be seen as CoP, Wenger suggested elements that characterise a CoP:
● “Sustained mutual relationships – harmonious or conflictual;
● Shared ways of ongoing in doing things together;
● The rapid flow of information and propagation of innovation;
● Absence of introductory preambles, as if conversations and interactions were merely the continuation of an on-going process;
● Very quick set-up of a problem to be discussed;
● Substantial overlap in participants’ descriptions of who belongs;
● Knowing what others know, what they can do and how they contribute to an enterprise;
● Mutual defining identities;
● The ability to assess the appropriateness of actions and products;
● Specific tools, representation and other artefacts;
● Local lore, shared stories, inside jokes, knowing laughter;
● Jargon and shortcuts to communication as well as the ease of producing the new one;
● Certain styles recognised as displaying membership;
● A shared discourse reflecting a certain perspective on the world” (Wenger, 1998, pp. 125-126).
Wenger’s CoP concept consists of four interdependent components, namely, community, practice, meaning and identity. The diagram below shows how these components are linked together with learning in the centre. The discussion below the diagram explains in detail how the four elements link with learning.
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Figure 4 Components of social theory of learning: an initial inventory (Wenger, 1998, p. 5)
3.3.1 Learning as community
From the perspective of social learning theory, learning is generated when participants interact (Cuddapah, 2016). “Learning is located in the process of co- participation and not in the head of individuals. It is located in increased access of learners to participation rather than in the acquisition of structure” (Maistry, 2005, p.
75). One needs to engage with other people, share what they know, learn about what they were not aware of and new knowledge is recreated in all the elements learning cuts across.
A Community of Practice is described as:
Learning
Learning as belonging
Community
Learning as becoming
Identity
Learning as Experience
Meaning
Learning as doing
Practise
70 a set of relations among persons, activity and world over time and in relation with other tangential and overlapping Communities of Practice. A Community of Practice is an intrinsic condition for the existence of knowledge not least because it provides the interpretative support necessary for making sense of its heritage. (Wenger &
Lave, 1991, p. 98)
Communities of Practice have a character that distinguishes them from the
conventional structures found in various organisations. The practice in Communities of Practice is characterised by shared vision and values and member
interdependency, among others. Members address issues that impede or facilitate the flow of knowledge, which keep together the interactions. Wenger defines communities of practice in the following way:
A Community of Practice defines itself in the doing, as members develop among themselves their own understanding of what their practice is about.
In a community of practice, shared learning and interests of its members are what keep them going. It is defined by knowledge rather than by task and exists because participation has value to its members. Unlike a network, a Community of Practice has an identity as community and this shapes the identity of its members. (Wenger, 1998, p. 78)
From this perspective, the organisation’s knowledge can be managed through the Communities of Practice. The organisational strategic objectives can be easily achieved because the participants have an interest in what they are doing as a collective. Through the area of focus, the communities of practice are able to create an identity for themselves.
There are communities that Wenger (1998) talks about: the residential community, where there is generic community and the Community of Practice whose membership is identified through the practice the members are part of. He then mentions two activities that happen as a result of association with the Community of Practice. First, it has a character of being easy to control the practice that takes place by distinguishing from the structures that are less controllable and second it distinguishes the special type of a Community of Practice which makes it stand out
71 from other CoPs.
As a community the LS cluster has been established to ensure that as teachers strive towards completion of the syllabus, they also learn from each other ways and means of enhancing their teaching methods in their various workplaces. Learning is generated as they engage with each other. In the LS cluster, the community is utilised as a platform to help novice teachers, under-performing schools and those that are struggling with teaching certain topics in the syllabus.
3.3.2 Learning as practice
Figure 4 shows that learning as practice (learning as doing) is a key aspect of a community of practice. Lave and Wenger (1991) in describing practice stress the importance of what entails a community of practice: the members and how they relate with each other as they learn and the context in which the activities are carried out for everyone to learn. Learning is maximised by extending participation to other communities and embracing overlapping through multi-membership. “The social structure of this practice, its power relations and its conditions for legitimacy define possibilities for learning” (Lave & Wenger, 1991, p. 98). In essence, Lave and
Wenger are bringing to our attention what is entailed in the activities and interactions as members negotiate the meaning of practice.
According to Wenger (1998, p. 5), practice refers to “a way of talking about the shared historical and social resources, frameworks, and perspectives that can sustain mutual engagement in action”, and how to use them to benefit the participants as they engage in learning. What is important is for the members to understand the importance of the practice that brought them together and how working with people of a similar practice within and outside the community through networks and learning together will benefit them. Through practice “we can
experience the world and our engagement with it as meaningful” (Wenger, 1998, p.
51). According to Wenger (1998, p. 95), learning as practice entails “engaging in practice” while you are doing your job. For the purposes of this study, the cluster members are learning while they are doing their job. Their job is teaching the learners the Life Sciences. These teachers then engage in developmental training
72 which comes in the form of workshops and/or formal training. The teachers are learning while they are working. “What they learn is not static subject matter, but the very process of being engaged in, and participating in developing an ongoing
practice (Wenger, 1998). Learning in practice entails:
• “Enhancing forms of mutual engagement: discovering how to engage, what helps and what hinders; developing mutual relationships; defining identities;
establishing who is who; who is good at what; who knows what, who is easy or hard to get along with.
• Understanding and turning their enterprise: aligning their engagement with it, and learning to become and hold each other accountable to it; struggling to define the enterprise and reconciling conflicting interpretations of what the enterprise is about.
• Developing their repertoire, styles and discourses: renegotiating the representations; recording and recalling events; inventing new terms and redefining or abandoning old ones; telling and retelling stories; creating and breaking routines.”( ibid, p. 95)
This kind of learning focuses on the development of the skills of the participants’
practices and in the process those who experience this are transformed and will perform their duties differently from before they engaged in their learning.
3.3.3 Learning as meaning
A second aspect of learning is meaning or learning through experience. Wenger (1998, p. 5) describes meaning as “an individual and collective ability to experience our life and world as meaningful”. Wenger’s point is that learning can be experienced by an individual or individuals in a community as they engage to negotiate meaning. When participating in a community that has to be done meaningfully, so that there will be a lesson learnt when you leave the setting. For us to experience that, we have to be actively involved so that we learn by experience.
The ways we interact in the communities will determine the extent of the meaning we derive from the activity or interaction. As participants, members engage in the learning. They need to understand that the meaning should be the end product that
73 should be achieved in those discussion. It could entail various models of relationships that can be characterised by arguments as well as warm relations, close knit as well as those with political influence; aggressive as well as harmonious.
Two constituent processes converge because they want to negotiate meaning and those, according to Wenger (1998), are referred to as participation and reification.
“Participation refers to the process of taking part and also to the relations with others that reflect this process. It suggests both action and connection” (Wenger, 1998, p.
55). Participation and reification complement each other and should not be seen as separate entities (Wenger, 1998). Use of the term ‘participation’ by Wenger is informed by the following:
● “Participation in social communities shapes our experience and it also shapes those communities. The transformative potential goes both ways.
● Participation places the negotiation of meaning in the context of our forms of membership in various communities and, therefore, is not something you can put on and off.
● Participation goes beyond direct engagement in specific activities with specific people, and places the negotiation of meaning in the context of our forms of membership in various communities”. (Wenger, 1998, pp. 56-57)
According to Wenger (1998, p. 58), “reification as a constituent of meaning is always incomplete, on-going, potentially enriching and potentially misleading”. Wenger (1998) describes reification as a “process of giving from our experience by producing objects that congeal this experience into thingness”. The participants decide on a point of discussion to focus on and then create meaning around that.
Participation and reification complement each other and cannot be viewed as existing in isolation from each other. The two take place simultaneously: “they are
74 two constituents intrinsic to the process of negotiation of meaning and their complementarity reflects the inherent duality of this process” (Wenger, 1998, p. 66).
For each to make sense, they need each other. For the tasks to be implemented and take meaning in the classroom and the delivery of the curriculum, the Life Sciences teachers would need to interact with them in their cluster meetings. In that way coordinated meaning will be created.
Focal points are created, discussed by the participants and then are organised into something tangible. An example is the process of the clusters creating procedures about what to consider when conducting quarterly and annual moderation and to design moderation tools. As Life Sciences teachers they then negotiate the meaning by discussing how they are going to implement the tools (products of reification).
“With the term ‘reification’, I mean to cover a wide range of processes that include making, designing, representing, naming, encoding and describing, as well as perceiving, interpreting, using , reusing, decoding and recasting” (Wenger, 1998, p.
59). It is a process from abstract to an output, with participants being responsible for the activities taking place to ensure that there is a finished product.
3.3.4 Learning as identity
A third aspect of a community of practice is learning as identity. According to
Wenger (1998, p. 151), this is a “layering of events of participation and reification by which our experience and its social interpretation inform each other….These layers build upon each other to produce our identity as a very complex interweaving of participative experience and reificative projections”. Wenger (1998, p. 145) further suggests that the identity element cannot be separated from the activities of the community practice and meaning. For the identity element to be understood the following should be borne in mind” “It narrows the focus onto the person, but from a social perspective; It expands focus beyond communities of practice, calling
attention to broader processes of identification and social structures” (p. 145).
The above points are summarised by Wenger (1998) into collective and individual identity. Much as the independence of the individual is to be recognised, there is
75 also an element of interdependence where individual participants exist as a
collective. The two mutually exist and cannot be viewed separately from each other.
The establishment of a community is as a result of negotiations of identities. In addition to the above points about identity, our identities talk to what we are capable of doing, and to what we are not capable of doing. How we shape the meetings is also dependent on our capabilities. The identities of the communities that we shape are also dependent on what we are capable of doing.
In explaining identity in practice, Wenger (1998) refers to a strong connection between an individual and a community where each participant views the other participant as an equal contributor to the community. As a result of this negotiated meaning by the individual, the community ends up with a “practice that is
characterised by the negotiated ways of being a person in a context. In a nutshell, the formation of Communities of Practice is also the negotiation of identities”
Wenger, 1998, p. 148). Below is the characterisation of the identity element:
● “Identity as negotiated experience, which entails individuals experiencing themselves through participation and how we identify ourselves;
● Identity as community membership, which focuses on individuals defining who they are through familiar and unfamiliar environments;
● Identity as learning trajectory, which entails looking at your journey from where you were to where you are headed;
● Identity as news for multi-membership: who we are defines how various forms of membership create one identity;
● Identity as a relation between the local and the global, which entails understanding who we are and how we negotiate local ways of global participation” (Wenger, 1998, p. 149).
The section above was focused on discussing the four elements of the CoP concept. In learning as meaning the focus was on how individuals experience learning and how collectively they experience learning. They achieve this through mutually engaging to negotiate meaning. The second element looks at learning as practice: the focus is on learning on the job. The participants learn while they are working. This results in participants acquiring skills to execute their jobs better than
76 before they went through learning. In achieving this, participants use frameworks that guide their actions in mutual engagement. The third element is the relation between learning and identity which looks at the changes that are brought about in an individual by learning. People assume different identities as a result of the learning that they went through: this happens within a context. Individuals
experience this as they participate in their different communities. The last element looks at learning as belonging to a community. Individuals’ abilities are recognised as they participate in communities. They are recognised as they mutually contribute, as they negotiate meaning. The learning is generated as the participants engage, each one coming as an expert and knowledgeable in the field but, at the same time, learning from the others. In this element, learning takes place through the three dimensions, namely, Mutual Engagement, Joint Enterprise and Joint Repertoire.
The three dimensions are discussed below.