Categories: Theory & Rhetoric, Communication Design
Summary:
Wenger's book presents a theory of learning he and Jean Lave created from their observations and research working with different businesses and not-for-profit companies. The theory is that all learning occurs in social situations, and therefore the social practices and experiences that accompany learning are a fundamental aspect of what we learn, our perspectives, and ultimately who we are. He provides a compelling argument that we need to look at learning as a lifelong, continual process of meaning-making forged by experiences and shaped through interactions. He calls for: (1) individuals to actively engage in the learning process, (2) communities to assess and refine their educational practices to determine what is being taught from the social interaction, and not just the text, and (3) organizations to consciously sustain the interconnected communities that maintain their knowledge and practices.
The first chapter explores meaning. The author argues that all meaning is negotiated through a process of participation and reification ("the process of giving form to our experience by producing objects that congeal this experience" p. 58). The second chapter defines community's three dimensions of mutual engagement, a joint enterprise, and a shared repertoire. In the third chapter, Wenger explained that learning occurs through participation and reification in communities.
The fourth chapter discusses boundary encounters; events like meetings and conversations where meaning is negotiated. Three types of boundary encounters are one-on-one, immersion, and delegations. Within a community of practice, these specific boundaries are less rigid, and there are overlaps, amalgamations (called boundary practices) and peripheries (influence by other sources).
In chapter five, the authors differentiated between local and global (constellations) communities, believing distance did not prevent such relationships, but could hinder them. How the communities composed identity, involved participants, and found belonging were the subjects of chapters six through eight, while nine returned to the concepts of identification and negotiability. These ideas are explained clearly through the citations below.
Citation-worthy:
"Our institutions... are largely based on the assumption that learning is an individual process, that it has a beginning and an end, and it is best separated from the rest of our activities, and that it is the result of teaching. ... As a result, much of our institutionalized teaching and training is perceived by would-be learners as irrelevant, and most of us come out of this treatment feeling that learning is boring and arduous, and that we are not really cut out for it" (Wenger, 1998, p. 3).
"My assumptions as to what matters about learning and as to the nature of knowledge, knowing, and knowers can be succinctly summarized as follows. I start with four premises. 1) We are social beings. Far from being trivially true, this fact is a central aspect of learning. 2) Knowledge is a matter of competence with respect to valued enterprises - such as singing in tune, discovering scientific facts, fixing machines, writing poetry, being convivial, growing up as a boy or a girl, and so forth. 3) Knowing is a matter of participating in the pursuit of such enterprises, that is, of active engagement in the world. 4) Meaning - our ability to experience the world and our engagement with it is as meaningful - is ultimately what learning is to produce...
"A social theory of learning must therefore integrate the components necessary to characterize social participation as a process of learning and of knowing. These components ... include the following. 1) Meaning: a way of talking about our (changing) ability - individually and collectively - to experience our life and the world as meaningful. 2) Practice: a way of talking about the shared historical and social resources, frameworks, and perspectives that can sustain mutual engagement in action. 3) 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. 4) Identity: a way of talking about how learning changes who we are and creates personal histories of becoming in the context of our communities" (Wenger, 1998, pp. 4-5).
"If we believe that productive people in organizations are the diligent implementers of organizational processes and that the key to organizational performance is therefore the definition of increasingly more efficient and detailed processes ... then it makes sense to engineer and re-engineer these processes. ... But if we believe that people in organizations contribute to organization goals by participating inventively in practices that can never be fully captured by institutionalized processes, then we will minimize prescription, suspecting that too much of it discourages the very inventiveness that makes practices effective. ... Our institutions are designs and ... our designs are hostage to our understanding, perspectives, and theories" (Wenger, 1998, p. 10).
"The communal regime of mutual accountability plays a central role in defining the circumstances under which, as a community and as individuals, members feel concerned or unconcerned by what they are doing and what is happening to them and around them, and under which they attempt, neglect, or refuse to make sense of events and to seek new meanings" (Wenger, 1998, p. 81).
"Calling every imaginable social configuration a community of practice would render the concept meaningless. On the other hand, encumbering the concept with too restrictive a definition would only make it less useful" (Wenger, 1998, p. 122).
"Because a community of practice need not be reified as such in the discourse of it participants, indicators that a community of practice has formed would include: 1) sustained mutual relationships - harmonious or conflictual; 2) shared ways of engaging in doing things together; 3) the rapid flow of information and propagation of innovation; 4) absence of introductory preambles, as if conversations and interactions were merely the continuation of an ongoing process; 5) very quick setup of a problem to be discussed; 6) substantial overlap in participants' descriptions of who belongs; 7) knowing what others know, what they can do, and how they can contribute to an enterprise; 8) mutually defining identities; 9) the ability to assess the appropriateness of actions and products; 10) specific tools, representations, and other artifacts; 11) local lore, shared stories, inside jokes, knowing laughter; 12) jargon and shortcuts to communication as well as the ease of producing new ones.
"Focusing on identity brings to the fore the issue of non-participation as well as participation, and of exclusion as well as inclusion" (Wenger, 1998, 145).
"An identity ... is a layering of events of participation and reification by which our experience and its social interpretation inform each other" (Wenger, 1998, 151).
"Our identities are rich and complex because they are produced within the rich and complex set of relations of practice. ... [Identity in practice is] lived ... negotiated ... social ... a learning process... a local-global interplay" (Wenger, 1998, pp. 162-163).
"The mix of participation and non-participation through which we define our identities reflects our power as individuals and communities to define and affect our relations to the rest of the world. It shapes such fundamental aspects of our lives as: 1) how we locate ourselves in a social landscape; 2) what we care about and what we neglect; 3) what we attempt to know and understand and what we choose to ignore; 4) with whom we seek connections and whom we avoid; 5) how we engage and direct our energies; 6) how we attempt to steer our trajectories" (Wenger, 1998, pp. 168-169).
"Engagement [is] a threefold process, which includes the conjunction of: 1) the ongoing negotiation of meaning; 2) the formation of trajectories; 3) the unfolding of histories of practice" (Wenger, 1998, p. 174).
"Identification is not merely a relation between people, but between participants and other constituents" (Wenger, 1998, p. 192).
"The relevance of a social perspective is not limited to special situations of learning ... This does not mean that all learning is best done in groups and some learning is best done by oneself. At the issue is what defines learning as learning? ... The difference between mere doing and learning, or between mere entertainment and learning, is not a difference in kind of activity. It is not that one is mindless and the other thoughtful, that one is hard and the other easy, or that one is fun and the other arduous. It is that learning–whatever form it takes–changes who we are by changing our ability to participate, to belong to negotiate meaning. And this ability is configured socially with respect to practices, communities, and economies of meaning where it shapes our identities" (Wenger, 1998, p. 226).
"This social perspective on learning may be summarized succinctly by the following principles. [1] Learning is inherent in human nature. ... [2] Learning is first and foremost the ability to negotiate new meanings. ... [3] Learning creates emergent structure. ... [4] Learning is fundamentally experiential and fundamentally social. ... [5] Learning transforms our identities. ... [6] Learning constitutes trajectories of participation. ... [7] Learning means dealing with boundaries. ... [8] Learning is a matter of social energy and power. ... [9] Learning is a matter of engagement. ... [10] Learning is a matter of imagination. ... [11] Learning is a matter of alignment. ... [12] Learning involves interplay between the local and the global" (Wenger, 1998, pp. 226-228).
"Communities of practice already exist through out our societies – inside and across organizations, schools, and families – in both realized and unrealized forms. 1) potential.… 2) active.… 3) latent" (Wenger, 1998, p. 228).
"Communities of practice are about content – about learning as a living experience of negotiating meaning – not about form. In this sense, they cannot be legislated into existence or defined by decree. They can be recognized, supported, encouraged, and nurtured, but they are not reified, designable units" (Wenger, 1998, p. 229).
"Learning cannot be designed: it can only be designed for – that is, facilitated or frustrated" (Wenger, 1998, p. 229).
"When it concerns practice and identity, design inevitably confront fundamental issues of meaning, time, space, and power" (Wenger, 1998, p. 231).
"Participation and reification are two complementary aspects of design that create two kinds of affordance for negotiating meaning.
– One can make sure that some artifacts are in place – tools, plans, procedures, schedules, curriculums – so that the future will have to be organized around them.
– One can also make sure that the right people are at the right place in the right kind of relation to make something happen" (Wenger, 1998, pp. 231-232).
"There is an inherent uncertainty between design and its realization in practice, since practice is not the result of design but rather a response to it. As a consequence, the challenge of design is not a matter of getting rid of the emergent, but rather of including it and making it an opportunity" (Wenger, 1998, p. 233).
"Communities of practice differ from institutional entities along three dimensions.
– They negotiate their own enterprise, though they may at times construct a conforming response to institutional prescriptions.
– They arise, evolve, and dissolve according to their own learning, though they may do so in response to institutional event.
– They shape their own boundaries, though their boundaries may at times happen to be congruent with institutional boundaries" (Wenger, 1998, p. 241).
"This approach suggests the following set of general guidelines.
– Construe learning as a process of participation, whether for newcomers or old-timers.
– Place the emphasis on learning, rather than teaching, by finding leverage points to build on learning opportunities offered by practice.
– Engage communities in the design of their practice as a place of learning.
– Give communities access to the resources they need to negotiate their connections with other practices and their relation with the organization" (Wenger, 1998, p. 249).
"Education, in its deepest sense and at whatever age it takes place, concerns the opening of identities – exploring new ways of being that lie beyond our current state. Whereas training aims to create an inbound trajectory targeted at competence in a specific practice, education must strive to open new dimensions for the negotiation of the self. It places students in an outbound trajectory toward a broad field of possible identities. Education is not merely formative – it is transformative" (Wenger, 1998, p. 263).
