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Week 2 Review On Communities in
Week 2 Review On Communities in
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2 authors:
Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects:
Doctoral Thesis: Investigating the evolving nature of Grade R teacher-learning within an in-service
community of practice View project
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projects often tends to blame individual teachers for the lack of take-up of
new ideas.
In the Introduction Wenger explains the aims and achievements of
his earlier work with Lave but notes that the concepts of identity and
community of practice, while central to their work, “were not given the
spotlight and were left largely unanalysed” (p. 12). In this work Wenger
moves away from a focus on legitimate peripheral participation (it is
mentioned only twice in his book) to give a greater focus on the concepts
of communities of practice and identity. Referring to his 1998 work, he
writes: “In this book I have given these concepts centre stage, explored
them in detail, and used them as the main entry points into a social theory
of learning” (p. 12).
Wenger explains that communities of practice are everywhere and
because they are so informal and pervasive they are rarely focused on.
Focusing on them allows us to deepen, to expand and to rethink our intu-
itions. He relates communities of practice to the learning components of
meaning, practice, community and identity as follows:
On the one hand, a community of practice is a living context that can give newcomers
access to competence and also can invite a personal experience of engagement by which
to incorporate that competence into an identity of participation. On the other hand, a well
functioning community of practice is a good context to explore radically new insights
without becoming fools or stuck in some dead end. A history of mutual engagement around
a joint enterprise is an ideal context for this kind of leading-edge learning, which requires
a strong bond of communal competence along with a deep respect for the particularity of
experience. When these conditions are in place, communities of practice are a privileged
locus for the creation of knowledge (Wenger, 1998, p. 214).
As we have seen above, the work of Lave and Wenger (1991) moved
away from psychological and cognitive explanations of learning to a more
social and situated view of learning and a shift from a focus on the indi-
vidual as learner to learning as participation in the social world. So, too,
the work of Wenger (1998) is situated within this broader field. He notes
that his work is a social theory of learning that does not aim to replace
other theories of learning but does have its own set of assumptions and
its own focus. His work can be considered a theory in that it constitutes a
coherent level of analysis and yields a conceptual framework from which
to derive general principles for understanding and enabling learning.
In the Introduction, Wenger also goes to great lengths to explain the
‘intellectual context’ (p. 11) of his social theory of learning by placing it at
the intersection of two ‘axes’ of intellectual traditions. The vertical axis has
the two ends labelled ‘theories of social structure’ and ‘theories of situated
experience’. The former emphasises institutions, norms, cultural systems,
discourses and history while the latter emphasises agency and intentions.
In this sense ‘learning as participation’ is caught in the middle. He explains
BOOK REVIEW 187
It [learning] takes place through our engagement in actions and interactions, but it embeds
this engagement in culture and history. Through these local actions and interactions,
learning reproduces and transforms the social structure in which it takes place (p. 13).
However Wenger points out that the horizontal axis (the ends of which are
labelled ‘theories of social practice’ and ‘theories of identity’) is the axis
with which his work is mostly concerned but adds that this is “set against
the backdrop of the vertical one” (p. 13). At one end of the horizontal
axis, theories of social practice focus on the production and reproduction
of ways of engaging with the world while emphasising social systems of
shared resources. At the other end, theories of identity focus on the social
formation of the person, the creation of membership and the formation
of social categories. Wenger explains that on this horizontal axis learning
is again caught in the middle since it “is the vehicle for the evolution
of practices and the inclusion of newcomers while also (and through the
same process) being the vehicle for the development and transformation of
identities” (p. 13).
Wenger clarifies his intentions as follows:
The purpose of this book is not to propose a grandiose synthesis of these intellectual tradi-
tions or a resolution of the debates they reflect; my goal is much more modest. Nonetheless,
that each of these traditions has something crucial to contribute to what I call a social
theory of learning is in itself interesting. It shows that developing such a theory comes
close to developing a learning-based theory of the social order. In other words, learning is
so fundamental to the social order we live by that theorizing about one is tantamount to
theorizing about another (p. 15).
Wenger notes that the elements are “deeply interconnected and mutu-
ally defining” (p. 5) and points out that one could “switch any of the four
peripheral components with learning, place it in the centre as the primary
focus, and the figure would still make sense” (p. 5).
BOOK REVIEW 189
After the introduction, Wenger tells the story of Ariel in two vignettes,
a story of her participation in a workplace setting of claims processing in
a medical insurance office. The story is well written and ideally serves his
purpose, enabling these key ideas to emerge. The remainder of the book
elaborates the key terms we have defined, and he does this in two sections,
Practice and Identity. The final section focuses on design, prefaced by
the remark that “Learning cannot be designed” (p. 225)! Nevertheless,
after defining design as “systematic, planned, and reflexive colonization of
time and space in the service of an undertaking” (p. 228), he makes some
proposals for both organisations and education, emphasising the priority of
addressing identities and modes of becoming and only secondarily skills
and information.
Many acknowledge that Lave and Wenger’s (1991) perspective has not yet
been developed into a complete theory of learning and that there are many
difficulties that arise when applying such perspectives to learning math-
ematics or learning to teach mathematics (Adler, 1998; Watson, 1998).
Furthermore, there are few studies that focus on how learning is enabled
from such a perspective. What are the mechanisms that enable learning to
take place from a perspective of ‘learning as becoming’? Thus while math-
ematics teacher education researchers are creating contexts that enable
teacher learning and describe what teachers learn in social terms, little has
been done to explain how those contexts enable learning (Wilson & Berne,
1999).
Wenger’s vignettes, of course, present a story of participation in an
activity that is quite far from teaching. Further, Wenger continues the
theme from Lave and Wenger (1991, pp. 40/1) of separating teaching
from learning and focusing very firmly on the latter and they imply that in
addition to teaching not being necessary for learning, teaching is not partic-
ularly useful for learning. In this sense Lave and Wenger have reconstituted
learning but they have not fully reconstituted teaching. Their disregard for
teaching in relation to learning, although understandable in apprenticeship
contexts where teaching is more incidental than deliberate, is problematic
for us in the field of mathematics teacher education research. While we
agree that much learning takes place without intentional teaching and that
much teaching does not lead to intended forms of learning, in some cases
even the most didactic forms of teaching have led to successful learning in
terms of certain desired outcomes. It is likely that much of the learning of
readers of this journal occurred through such forms of teaching.
190 BOOK REVIEW
Lave tries to address the implications of their work for teaching in her
1996 paper:
Teaching, by this analysis, is a cross-context, facilitative effort to make high quality educa-
tional resources truly available for communities of learners. Great teaching in schools is
a process of facilitating the circulation of school knowledgeable skill into the changing
identities of students (p. 158).
which the researcher performed the dual role of both coordinator and
researcher of the in-service practice. As a relatively longitudinal study
the phenomenon of confidence, an independent and additional component
of learning, emerged in teachers’ descriptions and explanations of their
learning. The extension of Wenger’s theory to include the overarching
and interacting component of confidence was embedded in and derived
from data analysis of the learning of ten teachers, over a two-year period.
Graven (2002) identified seven different categories of confidence that the
ten inset teachers repeatedly referred to when describing and explaining
their learning at the end of their inset programme. These categories related
closely to Wenger’s four components of learning and included confidence
in relation to: classroom practice; access to knowledge resources; access to
support resources; increased status and recognition bestowed on them by
others; increased participation in broader educational activities; affective
factors and understanding one’s own limitations. While the first five
categories relate clearly to the components of practice, meaning, identity
and community, the latter two components could not be subsumed within
these components. This challenged Wenger’s four-component model as
being sufficient to explain learning in all contexts.
The research of Graven (2002, pp. 303–304) shows that “many teachers
(in the inset) changed their understanding of what it meant to be a
competent professional mathematics teacher and began to see learning
as an integral part of being a professional, irrespective of one’s level of
formal education”. It is highlighted that this “can be especially difficult for
teachers since they are usually constituted as ‘all knowing’. Teachers as
learners in an INSET context differ from other learners in other contexts
such as schools or apprenticeship contexts. . . . Teachers expressed confid-
ence in the acceptance that indeed one cannot know everything but one
can become a life-long learner within the profession of mathematics
teaching. This new approach to learning was both a result of confidence,
and provided teachers with increased confidence.”
CONCLUDING REMARKS
REFERENCES
B.S. Nelson (Eds.), Mathematics Teachers In Transition (pp. 155–192). New Jersey:
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Mahwah.
Watson, A. (1998). Situated cognition and the learning of mathematics. Centre for Math-
ematics Education Research. Oxford: University of Oxford Department of Educational
Studies.
Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice: learning, meaning, and identity. New York:
Cambridge University Press.
Wilson, S.M. & Berne, J. (1999). Teacher Learning and the Acquisition of Professional
Knowledge: An Examination of Research on Contemporary Professional Development.
Review of Research in Education, 24, 173–209.
Winbourne, P. & Watson, A. (1998). Learning mathematics in local communities of prac-
tice. In A. Olivier & K. Newstead (Eds.), Proceedings of the Twenty-Second Annual
Meeting of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education, Vol. 4
(pp. 177–184). Stellenbosch, South Africa.