Tool 4: Community of practice
What are we talking about here?
Community34. Just another buzzword? Here is a thinking tool that invites you to consider the educational context as a ‘community of practice’. A community of practice is defined by the joint activities in which its members are engaged35. Students are ‘newcomers’ to the community and they get inducted by participating in these joint activities36. Even though the newcomers are at the margins of the community they do need to be involved in ‘legitimate’ (i.e. meaningful) activities.The teachers (and more experienced peers) are the ‘oldtimers’ in the community and they interact with the newcomers and also model the activities in the community. As students advance in their ability to carry out the relevant activities they become full members of the community of practice.
This perspective might sound more appropriate to an apprenticeship context than a formal educational setting, but many education scholars have now started to apply these ideas to what can be termed a ‘knowledge community’37.The activities of the knowledge community comprise specialised ways of thinking, writing, talking, problem solving and so on.
What does this mean for engineering education?
This view on learning with a focus on ‘communities of practice’ has in fact always been implicitly present in engineering education. Our students spend periods in industry, they do practical investigations that get them to work with small scale versions of engineering equipment and our final year assessment is often in a design project which is supposed to model engineering practice.Taking on board ‘community of practice’ as an explicit thinking tool might help us to run these activities more effectively as learning experiences. In many engineering schools the practical and design courses receive less attention than the lecture-based theoretical courses, perhaps at least in part because these are not the courses that have high failure rates.We might be able to use these courses more effectively as key sites of learning which also energise and excite students.
But the ‘community of practice’ thinking tool can also be used to drive a more radical rethink of what we do. Perhaps we need to move ‘authentic’ activity to a more central place in our curriculum.This is what is being advocated by the Problem Based Learning (PBL) movement38. This involves fully taking on board the central importance of students’ active participation to ensure effective learning.
More recently there are a number of scholars who have productively applied this thinking tool to designing and researching online communities of practice39.
In what ways might this be a useful thinking tool?
What is the community of practice? Is it your classroom? Your department? The professional community of engineers? One can apply this thinking tool to communities at different levels. But if you consider your course or your programme then you need to think about what would be the appropriate activities that define your community of practice.You would also need to consider whether students are getting a chance to do meaningful activities and whether the classroom works as a community to support this learning.
Show me an example
Case, J. M. and Jawitz, J. (2004). Using situated cognition theory in researching student experience of the workplace. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 41 (5), 415-431.
Jenni Case and Jeff Jawitz used the idea of ‘community of practice’ to explore engineering students’ experiences of industrial vacation work.They sought to investigate whether students experienced ‘legitimate peripheral participation’ (meaningful activity) or not. Engineering vacation students are traditionally in a difficult place, being only part way through their programme and on a short assignment, and it is generally considered difficult for managers to find useful things for them to do. Also considering issues of race and gender and the inherent conservatism of many engineering workplaces it was likely that access to the community of practice might be further complicated.
The study shows that access to meaningful activity is indeed a central determinant of whether the students have a productive learning experience or not. It was noted that the engineer assigned as mentor to the student played a key role in facilitating this access. In many cases the mentoring engineer was able to act as an advocate for the student’s status as a legitimate participant in the workplace.
Where can I read further to learn more about this tool?
Wenger, E. (2000). Communities of practice and social learning systems. Organization, 7 (2), 225-246.
This paper is focused generally on organisational contexts (and not directly on formal educational settings) but in it Etienne Wenger lays out very clearly how he sees the concept of ‘communities of practice’ which he originally devised together with Jean Lave. He helps us answer the question posed above – what makes for a community of practice? And all along the way he provides good examples to illustrate his concepts.
In this paper he suggests that we can have different forms of belonging to a community of practice: engagement (doing things together), imagination (constructing an image of ourselves) or alignment (making sure our activities are aligned with those of others). He goes on to make some interesting points about the importance of focusing on the boundaries of communities and looking at ways to broker knowledge between different communities. He also gives a good summary of his way of thinking about identity (see thinking tool 5).
This is a very practical paper for anyone wanting to apply the idea of ‘community of practice’ to their own context. He gives lots of questions and useful organisational matrices for structuring your investigation.
- The learning theory that encompasses this thinking tool is called ‘situated cognition’ (Brown, Collins, and Duguid, 1989) or ‘situated learning’ (Lave and Wenger, 1991).
- (Wenger, 2000).
- This is termed ‘legitimate peripheral participation’ (Lave and Wenger, 1991).
- (Northedge, 2003b).
- For a valuable review of the suitability of PBL to engineering education see Perrenet et al. (2000).
- See Johnson (2001).
