Palette Summer school: on
the idea of communities of
practice
Murray Saunders
Theoretical overview: communities of practice
• Learning in work is produced through practices
• A workplace can be understood as an activity system
or a community of practice
• Practice produces different types of knowledge
resource
• Learning processes are often ‘informal’ Learning
takes place in different contexts
Alternative perspectives 2: Wenger
“A concept of practice includes both the explicit and the
tacit. It includes what is said and what is left unsaid;
what is represented and what is assumed. It includes
the language, tools, documents, images, symbols, well
defined roles, specified criteria, codified procedures,
regulations, and contracts that various practices make
explicit for a variety of purposes. But it also includes all
the implicit relations, tacit conventions, subtle cues,
untold rules of thumb, recognizable intuitions, specific
perceptions, well tuned sensitivities, embodied
understandings, underlying assumptions and shared
world views.” [p47Wenger 1999]
Wenger on ‘practice’
• “ The concept of practice connotes doing, but not just
doing in and of itself. It is doing in a historical and
social context that gives structure and meaning to
what we do. In this sense, practice is always social
practice” [Wenger 99, p 47]
Alternative perspectives 1: Giddens on
‘practice’
• Informal learning often occurs through practice or learning about
a practice. Practice is at the heart of informal learning
• Giddens’ notion of the practical refers to behaviour which is
recurrent or routine i.e. happens on a day to day basis and is
rooted in the normal routine of daily life. Therefore a ‘practice’ is
a way of doing something, the pattern of which is reproduced in
a social context [i.e. work] according to certain rules.
• A practice is recurrent or routine, rule governed behaviour
• Can we say that the ‘rules’ constitute the knowledge base of
informal learning in communities of practice?
Reification!!!
Important concept
because it refers to
when a practice
becomes a system, a
procedure or even a
standard: “the process
of giving form to our
experience by
producing objects that
congeal this experience
into ‘thingness’”
[Wenger p58].
Blackler’s images of work-based knowledge
• Embrained knowledge [dependent on conceptual skills and
cognitive abilities]
• Embodied knowledge [action oriented likely to be only partly
explicit, mostly tacit, ‘the way we do things here’]
• Encultured knowledge [refers to the process of achieving shared
understandings through language, socialisation acculturation,
socially constructed and negotiable]
• Embedded knowledge [resides in systemic routines {reification of
practice} relationships between technologies, roles, formal
procedures and emergent routines]
• Encoded knowledge [information conveyed by signs and
symbols, traditional forms {hard copy} and emergent forms
{electronic}
Knowledge descriptors [Blackler]
•
•
•
•
•
Mediated [activity systems]
Situated [Wenger]
Provisional
Pragmatic
Contested
Learning contexts
• Immediate Informal learning needs requiring short
term solutions mainly embedded in day to day
practices [what kinds of knowledge resources
required?]
• Project Learning needs medium term, structured,
requiring formal procedural knowledge based
resources, outcomes represented in written form
[what kind of knowledge resources required?]
• Validated Learning is formal, structured, validated by
external authority and qualified [what kinds of
knowledge resources?]
• Organic Learning needs are diffused, changing,
defined by a community of practice, loosely organised
groups, organised at a distance
Learning in the workplace as informal or
non formal learning?
•
•
•
•
•
Happens everywhere
Happens any time
Outside a prescribed framework
Rarely an organised event or package
Can use all kinds of different people as a learning
resource
• Is undertaken ‘socially naturally’ and is not usually
accredited
• Usually is open ended without the specification of
learning outcomes apart from learning intentions
• Can be quite close to the idea of ‘socialisation’
Learning through work in a community of practice
Practice clusters
as routine
recurrent, rule
governed
behaviours
Evolving practice
creates new
rules as
knowledge
resources
Accessing and
producing
knowledge
resources through
practice
New members
access
practices
through
informal
learning
processes