Customer Reviews

Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity

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This book was a slow, arduous read, but well worth the effort.

I teach at a school that is part of the Professional Learning Communities (PLC) movement. Wenger's book has shed light on why "top-down" implementation of school improvement has failed. The guru of the PLC movement, Richard Dufour (2004), claims that the three big ideas of PLC's are ensuring that students learn, a culture of collaboration and a focus on results. It is in this context that I found Wenger's book valuable in understanding the poverty of the PLC movement.

Wenger claims that communities of practice are learning communities. Are Professional Learning Communities true learning communities as described by Wenger? The answer is no. In a learning community there is interplay between reification and participation. Reification is the artifacts and procedures of previous practice. Participation is the activity engaged in by the practitioner for the organization that results in reification. It is not an either/or model, but dualism. It is within this interplay that learning about practice and the ownership of meaning and identity formation takes place.

Teachers directed by their employer to become PLCs are required to make such large changes in their teaching practices that they become overwhelmed and lost in establishing new practices. The reason for this is that the PLC regime does not consider the requisite identity work and the time required for teachers to own the meaning of new practices. PLCs are not true learning communities.

What about schools? Wenger claims a community of practice emerges when an organization sets forth a structure to accomplish its goal: "... the existence of a community of practice is a response to an institutional mandate, it is not the mandate that produces the practice, it is the community" (p. 244). The practices in which teachers are engaged are developed over time in the process of reification and participation.

Schools represent an effort to manage learning and the acquisition of knowledge regardless of public policy statements. PLCs represent an extreme example of knowledge management by viewing students as disembodied intellects. There is no consideration given to the identity formation of students. According to the PLC mantra, teachers should lead the learning process so that students learn more. Under the PLC regime students can repeat information given and are deemed to have acquired essential learning. However, according to Wenger, unless the student owns the meaning of what is learned, it is not true learning (p. 265).

Wenger rightly judges that "Learning and teaching are not inherently linked. Much learning takes place without teaching, and indeed much teaching takes place without learning" (p. 266). Because teaching cannot control its own effects, Wenger advocates that teachers must be opportunistic and work at recognizing the "...emergent character of learning" (p. 267).

Wenger advocates developing architecture for learning. This architecture will afford for the three modes of belonging: engagement, imagination and alignment. The interplay and trade-offs allow for identity formation and the acquisition of meaningful knowledge. He further describes the dimensions for learning architecture. These dimensions are found in the dualities of participation/reification, designed/emergent, local global and identification/negotiability (p. 231-236).

The reader will find some of Wenger's theory (along with other theorists) reflected in Gherardi's Organizational Knowledge: The Texture of Workplace Learning and Mitchell and Sackney's Sustainable Improvement. Wenger's book is well worth reading for those in public education who want to better understand the phantom of learning in school.

Dr. John Merks
Teacher
Riverview High School
Riverview
New Brunswick

You'll struggle to work through "Communities of Practice." Yet, if you persevere, you'll have gained a sound basis for evaluating and keeping in perspective the relative business value of all the recent advances in knowledge management.

A good companion book to "Communities of Practice" with respect to how people make meaning is Yankelovich's "The Magic of Dialogue."

One cannot be practically effective without being grounded in a philosophy. Philosophy leads to strategy, and strategy leads to a coordinated set of tactics and the opportunity to be proactive. Without it, tactics are reactive.

This book provides an outstanding philosophical guideline for making sense of the workplace and communities of practice. It is easy to divine practical solutions to common workplace issues and problems as you read it. His vignettes show mistakes that businesses make, and how the communities compensate. Preventing those mistakes in your business allows your communities to solve other problems. Additionally, you will understand where, why, and how your communities and how they help you, and because of this recognition, perhaps you can continuously remove the obstacles to their success.

For those grappling with the need to understand and talk about how people come together and interact beyond the org. chart, this book has a lot to offer. Theoretically-based, it focuses on a social theory of learning that is broad enough to cover a wide range of human activities, well beyond what we would normally consider to be 'learning'. 'Communities of practice' offers a comprehensive framework for understanding and analysing what people do in the context of their social milieu. The author includes many examples and uses a work-place vignette to illustrate the relevance and power of his ideas. If you are not afraid of theory and abstraction and are open to new concepts, this book may indeed be revolutionary.

This is a very important resource as the Institute of Medicine calls for using a socioecological perspective to solve the nation's health care challenges. Wenger has powerful ideas and examples. Educators and health care experts alike will find this very useful.

The writing style is somewhat dense and requires a quiet space to read and reflect. Be patient, skip around as needed, it is worth the effort.

If you are looking for practical, hard hitting insight and knowledge you can use as a practising manager, totally BYPASS this wordy, ivory tower compendium of theoretical jargon.

A wonderful book that uses communities of practice as the entry-point to think about learning along several rich dimensions (e.g., meaning in relation to participation and artifacts, the relationship between identity and learning).

Definitely worth a slow, reflective reading.

Provides a lot of context for thinking about organizational learning.