Learning in Landscapes of Practice

Boundaries, identity, and knowledgeability in practice-based learning

Etienne Wenger-Trayner, Mark Fenton-O'Creevy, Steven Hutchinson, Chris Kubiak, Beverly Wenger-Trayner, Etienne Wenger-Trayner, Mark Fenton-O'Creevy, Steven Hutchinson, Chris Kubiak, Beverly Wenger-Trayner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317692522
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Higher Education

If the body of knowledge of a profession is a living landscape of practice, then our personal experience of learning can be thought of as a journey through this landscape. Within Learning in Landscapes of Practice, this metaphor is further developed in order to start an important conversation about the nature of practice knowledge, identity and the experience of practitioners and their learning. In doing so, this book is a pioneering and timely exploration of the future of professional development and higher education.

The book combines a strong theoretical perspective grounded in social learning theories with stories from a broad range of contributors who occupy different locations in their own landscapes of practice. These narratives locate the book within different contemporary concerns such as social media, multi-agency, multi-disciplinary and multi-national partnerships, and the integration of academic study and workplace practice.

Both scholarly, in the sense that it builds on prior research to extend and locate the concept of landscapes of practice, and practical because of the way in which it draws on multiple voices from different landscapes. Learning in Landscapes of Practice will be of particular relevance to people concerned with the design of professional or vocational learning. It will also be a valuable resource for students engaged in higher education courses with work-based elements.

Part I Theory

In this section of the book, which consists of just one chapter, we introduce some social learning theory which provides a foundation for our later discussions.

Chapter 1 Learning in a landscape of practice A framework

DOI: 10.4324/9781315777122-1

Etienne Wenger-Trayner

Beverly Wenger-Trayner

One day we were sitting in the office of a friend who is a lawyer. Pointing to a collection of volumes on her bookshelf she informed us that this was the ‘body of knowledge’ of her profession. It was an impressive series of thick books. Later on, we both agreed we were glad not to be lawyers, not to be held accountable to all that knowledge. While we understood what she meant, we agreed that this expression ‘body of knowledge’ was a convenient but possibly misleading shorthand. For social learning theorists like us the ‘body’ of knowledge of a profession is not just contained in a set of books. As important as the books undoubtedly are, they are only part of the story. They are too dead to constitute the full body of a living practice. From a social perspective we see the real ‘body of knowledge’ as a community of people who contribute to the continued vitality, application, and evolution of the practice.¹

For professional occupations, however, the social body of knowledge is not a single community of practice. In this chapter we argue that the ‘body of knowledge’ of a profession is best understood as a ‘landscape of practice’ consisting of a complex system of communities of practice and the boundaries between them. Developing the metaphor of a landscape of practice, first introduced in Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning and Identity (Wenger, 1998), provides a broad social perspective on professional learning, and learning more generally. To account for the complex relations that people build across the landscape, we introduce the concept of knowledgeability. Whereas we use competence to describe the dimension of knowing negotiated and defined within a single community of practice, knowledgeability manifests in a person's relations to a multiplicity of practices across the landscape. In these relations identification may involve little or no accountability to actual competence. Yet these practices may be just as significant in constituting an identity of knowledgeability, if identification is understood as something that is modulated across the whole landscape.

Knowing in practice: regimes of competence

Being practicing members in good standing of a respected community of practice is a key reason why practitioners of any occupation deserve our patronage. If your doctor informed you that he had seen many patients in the last twenty years, but had not talked to any colleague, read any new article, or participated in any conference, you may question whether he was really qualified to deal with your health. Conversely, if he told you that he had read endless articles, but not treated any patients, you would have the same question about his legitimacy. You trust practitioners like your doctor to help you both for their experience and personal characteristics, and also because their actions reflect a competence defined by their community. Connection, engagement, status, and legitimacy in that community are all part of what makes someone a trustworthy practitioner.

One could in fact define a responsible practitioner as someone whose experience in providing a service reflects the current competence of a community. In this sense, the community's social negotiation of what constitutes competence results in a regime of competence: membership in good standing entails accountability to that competence. The importance of accountability to such a regime can be appreciated in the example of a malpractice lawsuit against a doctor. The fact that a patient died, however regrettable, is not in itself an indictment of the doctor; it is a piece of data. To adjudicate the case, a judge has to bring other members of this doctor's community to testify whether their accused colleague has been competent in applying the most current practice of the community. It is this mix of personal experience and accountability to the regime of competence of a respected community that assures professional standing and constitutes someone's identity as a practitioner.

In the sense used here, competence includes a social dimension. Even as manifested by individuals, competence is not merely an individual characteristic. It is something that is recognizable as competence by members of a community of practice.

A regime of competence is not static, however. It shapes personal experience but can also be shaped by it. It is both stable and shifting as it lives in the dynamic between individuals’ experience of it and the community's definition of it. Indeed, competence and experience are not a mere mirror-image of each other. They are in dynamic interplay. Members of a community have their own experience of practice, which may reflect, ignore, or challenge the community's current regime of competence. Learning in a community of practice is a claim to competence: it entails a process of alignment and realignment between competence and personal experience, which can go both ways. When newcomers are entering a community, it is mostly the regime of competence that is pulling and transforming their experience – until their experience reflects the competence of the community. This is what happens in apprenticeship, for instance. Conversely, experience can also pull, challenge, and transform the community's regime of competence. A member can find a new solution to a problem and attempt to convince the community it is better than existing practice. The experience of the physician whose patient died may challenge the community into reconsidering its practice. Any new experience that does not quite fit the regime of competence may cause the community to inspect and renegotiate its definition of competence. Or not. A challenge or a claim to competence may be refused by the community; a newcomer may be marginalized; a dissertation turned down; a new idea dismissed. Acceptance or resistance may be well founded, groundless, or even politically motivated. However derived, it remains potentially contestable. The power to define competence is at stake. Learning as a social process always involves these issues of power.

This dynamic interplay of experience and competence is why active engagement in a community of practice is so important for someone to become and remain current as a practitioner in a domain. For those who receive their services, reliable, up-to-date practitioners embody the evolving regime of competence of their community.

A body of knowledge as a landscape of practice

The notion of a single community of practice misses the complexity of most ‘bodies of knowledge.’ Professional occupations, and even most non-professional endeavors, are constituted by a complex landscape of different communities of practice – involved not only in practicing the occupation, but also in research, teaching, management, regulation, associations, and many other relevant dimensions.² All these practices have their own histories, domains, and regimes of competence.³ The composition of such a landscape is dynamic as communities arise and disappear, evolve, merge, split, compete with or complement each other, ignore or engage the other. Landscapes of practice are coming into focus as globalization, travel, and new technologies expand our horizons and open up potential connections to various locations in the landscape.

To understand how a landscape of practice constitutes a complex ‘social body of knowledge,’ it is useful to consider some key characteristics.

The landscape is political: the power dynamics of practice

Various practices have differential abilities to influence the landscape through the legitimacy of their discourse, the legal enforcement of their views, or their control over resources. Regulators produce national policies and verify compliance with auditing practices. Theorists devise ‘discourses of truth’ (Foucault, 1970) and abstract models that attempt to shape how people talk about practice. Researchers seek evidence for what works in the hope that their findings will direct practice. Teachers impart the right curriculum and grant degrees to those who seem to get it. Managers design work systems, distribute budgets, give orders, and set local policies. All these practices represent attempts to colonize the field of practice in various ways. And practitioners sometimes comply with mandates and demands, and sometimes shrug it all off as too disconnected to be relevant. Sometimes they even create an appearance of compliance while doing their own thing.

In this sense the landscape of practice is political. The power dynamics of defining competence inherent in communities of practice have a counterpart among practices. A landscape consists of competing voices and competing claims to knowledge, including voices that are silenced by the claim to knowledge of others. This creates knowledge hierarchies among practices. In such a political landscape, there is no guarantee that a successful claim to competence inside a community will translate into a claim to ‘knowledge’ beyond the community where it is effective. Whether the competence of a community is recognized as knowledge depends on its position in the politics of the landscape.

The landscape is flat: the local nature of practice

A more traditional view of knowledge suggests that knowledge flows from practices that produce it to practices that receive it: whether it is top-down, north–south, or center–periphery; and at times it seems as though communities even conspire to keep it that way. A colleague was doing a detailed ethnographic study in a hospital. She observed a clear hierarchy of practices. For instance, she said that when a group of nurses have an idea about what to do about a patient, they ‘do this little dance’ (her expression with a corresponding hand gesture) to make sure that it looks as though the idea came from the doctor.

The nurses’ story illustrates the pervasive power of a ‘hierarchy of knowledge’; but it also suggests that the hierarchical view misses something important. Even if they conspired to make it invisible, the nurses had their own understanding of the patient, which reflected their perspective and experience. The hierarchy was real enough, but it masked a more complex reality.

In a landscape, all practices are practices. Regulation, management, and research are practices too, with their own local regimes of competence, just like frontline work. In this complex system, no practice can claim to contain or represent the whole, even if, like policy-makers, managers, or development agencies, they have the power or resources to influence large regions of the landscape with their perspective. Scale is not free. Collecting data for research, extracting measurements for management, or using financial rewards for compliance can achieve scale, but it loses some of the texture of the experience of practice itself. Therefore, all practices in the landscape have a fundamental ‘locality.’

There is an internal logic to any practice because it is the production of the community that engages in it. A mandate or a set of standards may give rise to a practice, but they do not produce the practice; the practitioners do. It is their practice even if it is produced in compliant response to a mandate. Similarly, regulations inform practice in the sense that they become an influential element of judgment; but regulations do not produce practice: even a practice of strict compliance is produced by the practitioners.

That one practice has more power than another in the landscape does not mean that it ‘subsumes’ the other. In other words one practice cannot have such control over another that it replaces the internal logic and local claim to knowledge of that other practice; the knowledge of one practice is never merely implemented in another. Practices in a landscape inform and influence each other. For instance, a detailed national curriculum with minute prescriptions and regular inspections will definitely influence the practice of teachers. Such radical combination of curriculum design and enforcement may silence the perspectives of teachers or render the competence of their practice invisible or irrelevant. It may even sap their enthusiasm and engender a practice of cynicism and passive resistance as a response. But engendering such a response is not the same thing as one practice subsuming another. Engagement in lived practice is too complex and dynamic to be a mere implementation of prescription or the simple application of research. There is local knowing in each practice, whether or not this local knowing is recognized as knowledge in the broader landscape. Without denying the reality of the power dynamics among practices, there is a sense in which the landscape is flat. Relations among practices are at once epistemologically flat, politically unequal, and potentially contestable.

The landscape is diverse: boundaries of practice

If a practice could subsume another, then the boundary between them would be unproblematic. Practitioners would simply implement regulations, mandates, and evidence-based prescriptions. But meaning is produced in each practice. Because this makes mere subsumption impossible, relationships between practices are always a matter of negotiating their boundary. Without subsumption, the boundaries between practices are never unproblematic, in the sense that they always involve the negotiation of how the competence of a community of practice becomes relevant (or not) to that of another.

Boundaries of practice are unavoidable. A practice of any depth requires a sustained history of social learning, and this creates a boundary with those who do not share this history. Boundaries of practice are not necessarily formally marked, but they are unmistakable. Spend your lunch break with a group of computer geeks and you know what a boundary of practice is: you can’t make sense of what they are talking about or why they are so passionate in talking about it. You might as well have landed on another planet.

Because of the lack of shared history, boundaries are places of potential misunderstanding and confusion arising from different regimes of competence, commitments, values, repertoires, and perspectives. In this sense, practices are like mini-cultures. Even common words and objects are not guaranteed to have continuity of meaning across a boundary. And the boundaries between the practices involved are not necessarily peaceful or collaborative. What researchers find, what regulators dictate, what management mandates, what international development agencies try to make happen, what clients expect, and what practitioners end up deciding, all these attempts to colonize moments of practice can be in conf...