3 Communities of practice
CoPs is another way of conceptualising how weCan I change ‘we’ to ‘practitioners’ here? interact with others in developing our practice. Etienne Wenger (1998, 2000, 2010) and Wenger-Traynor and Wenger-Traynor (2020) have developed the ideas of CoPs as a social theory of learning which provides a range of guiding principles that many have found useful. As a starting point Wenger-Traynor and Wenger-Traynor recognise that practitioners in relationship with a shared repertoire, a community of practice, are everywhere and that they have a key role in learning (Box 2).
Box 2 Communities of practice are everywhere
We all belong to communities of practice. At home, at work, at school, in our hobbies, and we belong to several communities of practice at any given time. The communities of practice to which we belong change over the course of our lives. Communities of practice can be found everywhere.
Over time families establish a habitable way of life. They develop their own practices, routines, rituals, artefacts, symbols, conventions, stories and histories. Family members may hate each other and love each other, sometimes both together; they agree and they disagree. They do what it takes to keep going. Even when families fall apart, members create ways of dealing with each other. Living together is an important enterprise, whether that consists in the search for food and shelter or in the quest for a viable identity.
Workers organise their lives with immediate colleagues and customers to get their jobs done. In doing so, they develop or preserve a sense of themselves that 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.
Students go to school and, as they come together to deal in their own fashion with the agenda of the imposing institution and the unsettling mysteries of youth, communities of practice sprout everywhere – in the classroom as well as on the playground, officially or in the cracks. And in spite of curriculum, discipline and exhortation, the learning that is most personally transformative turns out to be the learning that involves membership in these communities of practice.
Examples of communities who share a concern and recognise the need to manage their collective response to it by mobilising their knowledge, their ability to learn and their resources include:
- practitioners working together at regional, national and international levels to prevent the spread of pandemic disease
- groups of people affected by – or trying to help those affected by – disasters, such as major earthquakes or floods
- people responding to crime in a geographical area through coordinated responses such as Neighbourhood Watch schemes or Community Safety partnerships
- professional practitioners working together to improve a service to customers or clients (the original research on CoPs was based on understanding what insurance claims processers did when they did what they did). In other words CoPs are common in business including SMEs (small and medium sized enterprises)
- volunteers, social enterprise or NGO/CBO members who form to address an issue or issues of concern.
While often associated with particular geographical areas, other factors that bring such communities together include their shared concerns or interests, perceptions of need for action and a wish to work effectively with others to improve a situation. Increased globalisation and the development of information and communications technologies are among the factors that have extended the notion of community well beyond geographical areas. Global connectivity has seen the burgeoning of online communities with wide geographical spread.
The extent to which communities are managing change with others does vary. The ‘community of practice’ is one particular type of community that has emerged as significant in recent years – associated with shared concern, improving practice and with social learning, which can mean both learning in a social context and collective learning. A community of practice is a concept that has captured the imagination of many people across the world who are concerned with developing and improving their practice in a particular domain and who, in order to do that, look to other people of like mind, interests or similar experience and adopt a principle of mutual support. It must be emphasised that in CoP theory it is practice that creates community.
Activity 2 Your experiences of communities and networks
Review your own experiences of communities and networks in relation to your practices and plot them in some way, possibly using a timeline or a spray diagram. How might have these groups have been important to you in helping you improve your practices? If networks and communities have not been a significant part of your experience or if you do not consider them important to your practice, consider whether increased involvement and networks is desirable or feasible in relation to your practice.
In the full STiP course TB872, on which this short course is based, students can choose to focus their work on their own professional setting or apply CoP concepts to other practices related to their interests and life experiences. The principles of CoPs can be demonstrated in many domains. You may also like to consider if common practices are shared, or not, between different communities you belong to. CoPs have appeared in many forms and at different levels – within single organisations and across a range, and at local, regional, national and international levels. The focus of a CoP is not on the organisation per se but on the practice of working together as a community. The focus on learning through CoPs is practice-based, just as your practice in this course is learning-based.