Learning in Communities of Practice

Learning in a community of practice is based on social activity and a deepening process of participation.

It occurs through practice based explorations by members of what they do, how they could do things differently and the contextual and situational factors that impact on their practice. The unique aspects are that the learning is situated, relational, concertive and that it makes explicit knowledge that practitioners have not articulated before.

Knowledge is created collaboratively by participants through working together towards a common purpose. People use real problems they are encountering in their work as opportunities to problem solve together. In this situated approach to learning, knowledge is not cut off from practice—that is from 'doing'! In this way communities combine individual and also shared learning. Often this can involve participants surfacing tacit knowledge.

Tacit knowledge

Tacit knowledge is personal knowledge built through experience rather than through books. It can consist of beliefs, opinions, sensibilities, attitudes, and ways of doing things—that are often expressed in stories and anecdotes. Through externalizing this tacit knowledge, the community generates new explicit knowledge. This knowledge is contextual and pertains to their practice situations. 

Situated learning

Situated learning acknowledges the importance of context, the embedding of learning in the particular social and physical environment in which it is applied. This approach to learning mingles different voices, experiences and sources of insight through conversations in which knowledge is contested and explored. The community re-negotiates meaning, enriches context, and produces new knowledge and artefacts from its creative process. This is achieved through mutual engagement.

Relational learning

In a community of practice learning is not the acquisition of knowledge by individuals but rather the process of social participation—which is a relational view of the person and learning. Members through  identifying with the community, learn to speak, act and improvise in ways that make sense within it. In this way learning in the community of practice nests in the various conversations of which members are a part of. (McDermott, in Murphy 1999:17) 

'Learning is in the conditions that bring people together and organize a point of contact that allows for particular pieces of information to take on a relevance; without the points of contact, without the system of relevancies, there is no learning, and there is little memory. Learning does not belong to individual persons, but to the various conversations of which they are a part.'

McDermott (in Murphy 1999:17)

Reflective practice

Personal and group reflection is actively seeded and practised in communities of practice resourced by CEDAM at the ANU. It is a way of making sense of and advancing practice. Reflection can be thought of as ‘a process of reviewing an experience of practice in order to describe, analyse, evaluate and so inform learning about practice’, Reid (1993: 306). In the context of communities of practice it is a collaborative process that occurs in supportive social and physical contexts. For participants it is an interactive interpretation of the university environment and their own professional practice context. Reflection has proved a vital bridge in assisting people to integrate new knowledge or skills into action.  

For further information refer to Dewey’s ideas about thinking and learning, and Schõn’s work on professionals in action during the 1980s. For Schõn, and in our work at ANU we have found reflection-in-action to be a rigorous professional process that involves acknowledgement of, and reflection on, uncertainty and complexity in our practice, (1983:69).

Resources

Bandura, A. (1977) Social Learning Theory, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Lave, J. and Wenger, E. (1991) Situated Learning. Legitimate peripheral participation, Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press. 

Murphy, P. (ed.) (1999) Learners, Learning and Assessment, London: Paul Chapman. 

Reid B. ‘ “But we're doing it already!” Exploring a response to the concept of reflective practice in  order to improve its facilitation’. Nurse Education Today 13(4), 305-309, 1993

Salomon, G. (ed.) (1993) Distributed Cognitions. Psychological and educational considerations, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Schõn, D. (1983) The reflective practitioner: How professionals think in action, New York: Basic Books

Smith, M. K. (1999) 'The social/situational orientation to learning', the encyclopedia of informal education, www.infed.org/biblio/learning-social.htm.

Wenger, E. (1999) Communities of Practice. Learning, meaning and identity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.