Communities of Practice

11 Key excerpts on "Communities of Practice"

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  Handbook of Intercultural Communication

  • Helga Kotthoff, Helen Spencer-Oatey, Helga Kotthoff, Helen Spencer-Oatey(Authors)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  Communities of Practice in the analysis of intercultural communication 441 21. Communities of Practice in the analysis of intercultural communication Saskia Corder and Miriam Meyerhoff 1. Introduction Increasingly, there is a need for sociolinguists to engage and be familiar with the notion of the ‘community of practice’. In the last fifteen years, it has spread from its roots in the fields of language and gender, and variationist socioling-uistics, so that in a recent volume on applied linguistics, work using methods as diverse as conversation analysis, focus group discussions and corpus analysis have been gathered together as studies in ‘Communities of Practice’ (Sarangi and Van Leeuwen 2003). The approach has found favour outside the English-speaking world: the term has been translated into Portuguese as comunidades de prática (Ostermann 2003, in press), in Spanish as comunidades de práctica , in Italian as comunità di pratiche or comunità di prassi and it is usually translated into German as Praxisgemeinschaft(en) (the English term is also used in the German literature, as is Handlungsgemeinschaft ) (Grünhage-Monetti 2004a, 2004b). The sudden popularity and currency of the term is undoubtedly due to many factors – some methodological, some sociological and some philosophi-cal. One characteristic of Communities of Practice that touches on all three di-mensions is the fact that a community of practice focuses neither solely on the individual, nor solely on the community. Instead, it provides a framework for analysing the process by which sociolinguistic meaning emerges in which the individual and community are interdependent and inextricably linked. That is, “the value of the concept is in the focus it affords on the mutually constitutive nature of the individual, group, activity and meaning” (Eckert 2000: 35).

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  Developing Online Language Teaching

  Research-Based Pedagogies and Reflective Practices

  • Regine Hampel, U. Stickler(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  the power of the community to improve the work of individual teachers – projects are started, surveys done, papers read and discussed, members comment on one another’s blogs, it is easy to get feedback, etc. (my own italics)

  The focus of this chapter is to define and explore three different Communities of Practice for language teachers, and to examine how these notions of ‘variety’, ‘collaboration and sharing’ and ‘power of the community’, as well as other important characteristics of these communities impact on the success of a community of practice.

  What are Communities of Practice?

  ‘They are groups of people informally bound together by shared expertise and passion for a joint enterprise’ (Wenger & Snyder, 2000, p. 139); or, as described slightly more comprehensively by Wenger (2006): ‘Communities of Practice are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly’ (p. 1).

  First introduced by Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger in the late 1980s, the term refers to the ancient concept of a ‘guild’ or ‘corporations’ of craftsmen where apprentices would learn their craft and trade by associating themselves and working for a certain period of time with experienced, skilled workers (Wenger & Snyder, 2000). Les Compagnons du tour de France in the Middle Ages (Les Compagnons du tour de France, n.d.), for instance, would execute their ‘Tour de France’ to work with and learn from experienced artisans to develop a mastery of their craft that would then be evidenced by their ‘Chef d’oeuvre’ (masterpiece). Still in existence today,2 the Compagnonage enables a young apprentice to learn a trade from competent masters as well as from experiencing the community of a profession while living in a Compagnon

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  Communities of Practice and English as a Lingua Franca

  A Study of Students in a Central European Context

  • Karolina Kalocsai(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  Learning in Communities of Practice may therefore be summarized as “ changing participation and identity transformation ” through a joint enterprise and mutual engagement by the partic-ipants (Wenger 1998: 11). 2.1.1 Previous approaches to the community of practice model The fi rst use of the community of practice concept in linguistic research came from Eckert and McConnell-Ginet (1992, 1995). They argued, very convincingly, for the need to examine the analytical potential of the community of practice for the fi eld of language and gender research. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, several sociolinguists adopted and successfully applied the notion as an analytical tool (for an overview, see Meyerho ff 2002). Of particular relevance to this study is Holmes and Meyerho ff ’ s (1999: 175) observation that the notion ’ s great asset is in o ff ering a “ framework of de fi nitions within which to examine the ways in which becoming a member of a CofP [community of practice] inter-acts with the processes of gaining control of the discourse appropriate to it ” . For Bucholtz (1999: 207 – 210), the community of practice has a greater value for sociolinguistic work than its alternative, that is, the speech community. Firstly, it allows for greater fl exibility in the type of (social) practices around which a community is built; secondly, it allows for the examination of di ff erence, con-fl ict, and individual variation within the community; thirdly, it acknowledges the internal heterogeneity of community members; fourthly, it opens up the way for examining individual variation and agency; fi fthly, it allows the active construc-tion, or rejection, of identities and various other social meanings in the ongoing process of practice; and fi nally, it gives preference to local interpretations based on emic perspectives. According to Bucholtz (1999: 204), against this theoretical background, sociolinguists may well reverse the direction of analyses.

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  The Knowledge Economy, Language and Culture

  • Glyn Williams, Dr. Glyn Williams(Authors)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Multilingual Matters

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 5 Communities of Practice Introduction In the preceding chapters, reference has been made to Communities of Practice and how they are regarded as the operational structure wherein knowledge generation is possible. As such it is an important concept, one that is key to several aspects related to the knowledge economy. Its focus is on learning through social practice. In this respect, it addresses how the structuring of communities involves a learning process within inter-action. However, the key to the argument is the notion of community, in that other concepts such as social networks could well be regarded as capable of generating the same process. Thus the focus is on the mem-bers of the collectivity that, together, constitute the community, rather than on the individual. Given that the notion of community has been around for as long as the social sciences have been practiced, this facet is not new. Nonetheless, the associated work does draw upon recent soci-ological theory and, to this extent, leads to a reappraisal of the concept of community. It is important to recognise that the main thrust of this work is con-cerned with learning, and how it differs from the conventional under-standing of education. The main claim is that learning occurs within bounded, interactional contexts, without the individual necessarily know-ing that she is learning. To this extent learning is an on-going process that constitutes a fundamental part of the relations of production. This ‘learn-ing’ is reduced to the creation of new meanings. What is surprising is that a thesis that relies so exclusively upon ‘meaning’ makes so little reference to language. This is not to maintain that the orthodox conception of lan-guage is the location for an understanding of the construction of meaning, but that it would appear necessary to consider the details of meaning con-struction by reference to more than the theoretical conceptualisation of interactional practice.

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  Learning Architectures in Higher Education

  Beyond Communities of Practice

  • Jonathan Tummons(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  And even if we focus specifi-cally on HE, the range of contexts that has been explored through communities Communities of Practice 3 of practice theory seems remarkable. Recent research has focused on academic disciplines (architecture, education, linguistics, psychology) as well as academic work (assessment moderation, curriculum reform, online learning, staff devel-opment). Even just a cursory glance through the literature indicates a consider-able variety in the kinds of practices and communities that have been researched and written about. This variety extends to the meaning that is attached to the term ‘community of practice’, however, and this is the first complication that we need to address. This complication has been created and then exacerbated by those researchers and writers who have used the term ‘community of practice’ in more or less robust ways, for example, in describing a group of people as a community of practice but without providing an account as to why they are a community of practice, or in focusing so much on the community that the learning that is happening – and it is a theory of learning – gets left to one side. Perhaps a more diffi cult problem lies in the fact that one of the begetters of the theory has fun-damentally changed his definition and understanding of what a ‘community of practice’ actually is (Farnsworth et al., 2016; Lave and Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998, 2000; Wenger et al., 2002; Wenger-Trayner et al., 2014). In order to make sense of these differing and sometimes conflicting ideas, it seems sensible to spend some time thinking about what a community of practice actually is, and how thinking about them can help us to understand learning as a social practice.

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  Communication on and via Technology

  • Annely Rothkegel, Sonja Ruda, Annely Rothkegel, Sonja Ruda(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  Communities of Practice come into being everywhere, and that includes different workplaces and companies but especially those organizations that want to/have to act in the context of the knowledge economy: We all belong to Communities of Practice. At home, at work, at school, in our hobbies – we belong to several Communities of Practice. And the Communities of Practice to which we belong change over the course of our lives. In fact, Communities of Practice are every-where. […] Workers organize their lives with their immediate colleagues and customers to get their job done. In doing so, they develop or preserve a sense of themselves they can live with, have some fun, and fulfil the requirements of their employers and clients. No matter what their official job description may be, they create a practice to do what needs to be done. Although workers may be contractually employed by a large institution, in day-to-day practice they work with – and, in a sense, for – a much smaller set of people and communities (Wenger 1998: 6). Communities of Practice combine learning in the sense of an activity (practice) with learning in the sense of belonging (community): […] Practice: a way of talking about the shared historical and social resources, frame-works, and perspectives that can sustain mutual engagement in practice. […] Community: a way of talking about the social configurations in which our enterprises are defined as worth pursuing and our participation is recognizable as competence (Wenger 1998: 5). 90 Karl-Heinz Pogner Common practice is the source of cohesion and membership and is character-ized by the joint participation of the members in this practice. The practice is localized in the community of people and in their relations with each other which allow them to do what they do.

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  Blended Learning

  Tools for Teaching and Training

  • Barbara Allan(Author)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • Facet Publishing

    (Publisher)

  An extensive case study exploring the long-term impact of a multi-professional blended learning community is presented in this section. This is followed by an out-line of the processes involved in establishing a work-based community of practice. The final part of the chapter considers the topic of mentoring, as this process is often located within a community of practice. Communities of Practice and communities of interest There is a large and developing academic literature on Communities of Practice and Andrew Cox (2005) provides a helpful comparison and summary of four seminal works on this subject: Lave and Wenger (1991); Brown and Duguid (1991); Wenger (2003); and Wenger, McDermott and Snyder (2002). Ideas presented in this chapter focus on those developed by Wenger, McDermott and Snyder (2002), as they have developed the concept of Communities of Practice by linking it with 8 Communities of Practice professional or work-based communities. Wenger coined the phrase ‘Communities of Practice’, which he defined 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. (Wenger, 2003, 4) This definition is a helpful one because it enables us to distinguish between communi-ties of practice and communities of interest. Communities of Practice may develop spontaneously but they are often established by individuals who communicate with each other on a regular basis and are working together on a specific problem or issue. Anyone reading the literature on Communities of Practice is likely to come across the term ‘communities of interest’. These are large groups or networks, perhaps involving hundreds of people, and they support the dissemination and exchange of infor-mation but do not necessarily support collaborative learning processes. They develop when people come together to exchange news or information about a specific topic.

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  Social Actions for Classroom Language Learning

  • John Hellermann(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Multilingual Matters

    (Publisher)

  Understanding the process aspect of language learning within a community of practice necessitates methods for the analysis of language and social interaction as learner members 28 Social Actions for Classroom Language Learning participate to different degrees in the work of the classroom community of practice – language learning. Creese (2005) recently raised the issue of a lack of empirical illustration for the negotiation of meaning within community of practice theory. That critique suggested that more details of language use be given in future studies which use community of practice theory in order to better under-stand how negotiation of meaning is accomplished in the dialectic between participation and reification. As the next chapter explains, conversation analysis offers a well-developed method for highlighting members’ methods for co-constructing social action in the classroom community of practice through language. The ethnomethodological roots of conversa-tion analysis (hereafter, CA) make it consistent with the situated perspec-tive of community of practice learning focusing on uncovering members’ co-construction of intersubjectivity through language. As the discussion in Chapter 2 will show, CA’s focus on micro-level details of language and sequences of talk-in-interaction in the language learning classroom high-light the individual’s microgenesis of language development and can also describe the sociogenesis (Sfard, 2005) of language practices for the entire classroom community of practice. Conclusion Since the dissemination of the theoretical principles in community of practice in Lave and Wenger (1991) and Wenger (1998) there have been calls to continue the empirical investigations of learning in practice that use community of practice theory (Barton & Tusting, 2005; Chaiklin, 1993).

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  A Companion to Linguistic Anthropology

  • Alessandro Duranti(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  17 In this case the definition of community and social context creates a dichotomy between the knowledge developed by theorists versus the abstract communicative and linguistic knowledge of speakers involved in everyday interactions. In fact, one of the more persistent challenges in creole language studies and sociolinguistics in general is to determine the extent and ways in which information or linguistic facts gathered from a particular speech community can, in some way, benefit that commu-nity (Labov 1980, 1982). In creole language studies, this challenge often comes in the form of questions about power and hegemony when discussing historical linguis-tics and European colonization. Modern creole language situations have arisen mainly from European conceived and controlled plantation systems that brought together people of different nations, cultures, and languages to serve as either inden-tured workers or slaves (Garrett, this volume). While the situations from which creole languages have emerged can be described merely as examples of language contact, that denotation is hardly sufficient if one considers the complex ways in which these 10 MARCYLIENA MORGAN communities of speakers currently use language to mediate and substantiate multiple realities that constitute their world. These situations also provide an opportunity to illuminate the sites of contention in which creole language speakers and descendants negotiate and seek power. How linguists address these questions is as important to the speech community under study as the linguistic information that has been assembled. 3 R EPRESENTATION AND D ISCOURSE ABOUT L ANGUAGE S YSTEM While proficiency in a common language is a significant component of many speech communities, this knowledge need not be in relation to a standard dialect or norm or even a single language (Romaine 2000; Wodak et al. 1999).

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  Communities of Practice in Language Research

  A Critical Introduction

  • Brian Walter King, Brian King(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 6 of this volume). One cannot safely presume that a random group of people constitutes a community of practice (with its own set of highly localised practices) merely because they are participating in an activity together on a regular basis (Moore 2009) or because they share a social identity (Eckert and McConnell-Ginet 2007, 35). This critique is driven by a need for emphasis on other modes of belonging besides mutual engagement that might have had (or might be having) an effect on the status of practices under observation during research (more on the details of Community of Practice in the next section). These distinctions are significant, for in discourse analysis a great deal of interpretation can depend on the notion that people in a group somehow share localised language practices (King 2014b). The CofP model can instead be framed as one way amongst many of viewing a group and its practices; that is, one way amongst many of conceiving of aggregates of people and the practices they enact during meaning making (Gee 2005a; Muehlmann 2014; Ahearn 2017). Other frameworks include communities of the imagination (Wenger 1998), communities of alignment (Wenger 1998), nexus of practices (Scollon 2001b) and publics (Coulmas 2013; Muehlmann 2014) among others that will be explored in later chapters. A given aggregate of people and their practices might be better described by some of these other models, or those people might indeed form a community of practice that is also in interaction with or nested within other types of communities such as speech communities (Creese 2005), micro-communities of knowledge (Fletcher 2014) or affinity spaces (Gee 2005b; see also Mak and Chui 2013). For these reasons, heightened vigilance is required in language research so that application of the CofP model becomes more consistently critical and sophisticated.

  Communities of Practice

  The CofP as it was first developed (Lave 1988; Lave and Wenger 1991; Wenger 1998), and as it has been interpreted for use in investigations of language in society (Eckert and McConnell-Ginet 1992, 1999; Holmes and Meyerhoff 1999), has proved to be a robust framework for the investigation of language in use. As outlined in the previous section, its usefulness has become common knowledge, prompting Janet Holmes and Miriam Meyerhoff (1999, 175) to rationalise its appeal:

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  Communities of Practice in Health and Social Care

  • Andrée le May(Author)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  Part 1 INTRODUCING Communities of Practice The first part of this book introduces you to the concept of Communities of Practice and their relevance to health and social care. Chapter 1 INTRODUCING Communities of Practice Andr´ ee le May Defining Communities of Practice What are Communities of Practice (CoPs)? It would be difficult to improve upon Wenger et al .’s (2001: 4/5) description of them as: groups of people who share a concern, a set of problems, or a passion about a topic, and who deepen their understanding and knowledge of this area by inter-acting on an ongoing basis . . . . These people don’t necessarily work together on a day-to-day basis, but they get together because they find value in their interac-tions. As they spend time together, they typically share information, insight, and advice. They solve problems. They help each other. They discuss their situation, their aspirations, their needs. They think about common issues. They explore ideas and act as sounding boards to each other. They may create tools, standards, generic designs, manuals, and other documents; or they may just keep what they know as a tacit understanding they share . . . . Over time, they develop a unique perspective on their topic as well as a body of common knowledge, practices, and approaches. They also develop personal relationships and established ways of interacting. They may even develop a common sense of identity. They become a community of practice. This description immediately suggests why CoPs should be important for people who practice in health and social care settings. And indeed CoPs are increasingly forming, either naturally or through being deliberately created, as a mechanism for getting people together in order to develop best practice, implement new knowledge or shape old knowledge for new practices so that people might do their jobs better day to day.

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