Communities of Practice and PLNs

Communities of Practice Theory

I credit my former Multiple Literacies professor, Christine Kane, with flipping my perception of knowledge upside down saying something along the lines of “In today’s world, your value comes not from the ideas you own but the ideas you share.” I have been reminded of this throughout my process of discovery of PLNs and again while reading about Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger’s communities of practice. At the heart of both of these things is the value of shared learning and knowledge.

As Wenger defines them, 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.” According to Wenger and Lave, communities of practice are not limited to professional work groups or the world of education. Instead and community of practice can develop anywhere interaction occurs, from the government, to the social sector, to the internet and beyond.

In this sense, the concept of what constitutes a “community of practice” could seem rather broad. One may wonder if they are indeed a member of a community of practice anywhere they interact. Do the people in front of and behind me in line at the grocery store constitute my community of practice at the end of the work day? We may share a passion for getting dinner on the table…but no. Alas, Wegner narrows the definition by requiring three characteristics: the domain (a shared, committed interest), the community (members engage in joint activities), and the practice (shared resources). Since my Vons co-patrons and I hardly exchange a cordial word or two, we do not constitute a community of practice. But my neighbors-with whom I pass recipes back and forth-may be a hidden community of practice that even I didn’t know I belonged to. But this too, is possible. As Wegner states, “Communities of practice are everywhere. They are a familiar experience, so familiar perhaps that it often escapes our attention.”

Critiques of Communities of Practice Theory

Communities of practice broaden our definition of where it is that learning takes place so widely that some may feel it threatens the foundation of organized learning—i.e. schools. Wegner himself says, “The class is not the primary learning event. It is life itself that is the main learning event.” Herein lays the root of much of the criticism of community of practice; it may appear as a rather romanticized concept that broadens the definition of “learning” to “living”, and in doing so undermines the importance of structured education and obliterating the role of the “master”. In a critique I read of communities of practice written by J. Atherton on http://www.learningandteaching.info/learning/situated.htm, Atherton referred to communities of practice theory as a “clumsy” theory “worth almost as much as ‘Zone of Proximal Development’ in the jargon stakes.” Perhaps some of the “clumsiness” of the theory that Atherton refers to the difficulty delineating learning from practice within the theory.

Communities of Practice Theory and PLNs

A quote from Infed that I felt relates particularly to my current PLN experience is:

 “Initially people have to join communities and learn at the periphery. The things they are involved in, the tasks they do may be less key to the community than others. As they become more competent they become more involved in the main processes of the particular community. They move from legitimate peripheral participation to into 'full participation (Lave and Wenger 1991: 37). Learning is, thus, not seen as the acquisition of knowledge by individuals so much as a process of social participation” (emphasis added).

I think the role of teacher/master and student/learner is so ingrained in our society that many may balk at the notion of “peripheral participation” as a legitimate form of learning. PLNs allow for this peripheral participation as a phase of learning. This is where I sit now in my PLN community of practice, on the periphery learning but not participating quite yet.



Reference: Atherton J S (2011) Learning and Teaching; Situated learning [On-line: UK] retrieved 24 September 2011 from http://www.learningandteaching.info/learning/situated.htm