As I was working my way through Teaching and Christian Practices: Reshaping Faith and Learning*, edited by David I. Smith and James K. A. Smith I had my first serious encounter with the work of Etienne Wenger who defines practice as action “in a historical and social context that give structure and meaning to what we do . . . a shared history of learning that requires some catching up for joining” (from “Introduction: Practices, Faith, and Pedagogy”).
Since that time I have done further study on Wenger and his work. Here are some bits of information that should assist our understanding about communities of practice as we continue to strive to be the people that The Creator intends us to be.
Communities of practice are formed by people who engage in a process of collective learning in a shared domain of human endeavor: a tribe learning to survive, a band of artists seeking new forms of expression, a group of engineers working on similar problems, a clique of pupils defining their identity in the school, a network of surgeons exploring novel techniques, a gathering of first-time managers helping each other cope.
Not everything called a community is a community of practice. A neighborhood for instance, is often called a community, but is usually not a community of practice. Three characteristics are crucial:
1. The domain: A community of practice is not merely a club of friends or a network of connections between people. It has an identity defined by a shared domain of interest. Membership therefore implies a commitment to the domain, and therefore a shared competence that distinguishes members from other people. (You could belong to the same network as someone and never know it.) The domain is not necessarily something recognized as “expertise” outside the community. A youth gang may have developed all sorts of ways of dealing with their domain: surviving on the street and maintaining some kind of identity they can live with. They value their collective competence and learn from each other, even though few people outside the group may value or even recognize their expertise.
2. The community: In pursuing their interest in their domain, members engage in joint activities and discussions, help each other, and share information. They build relationships that enable them to learn from each other. A website in itself is not a community of practice. Having the same job or the same title does not make for a community of practice unless members interact and learn together. The claims processors in a large insurance company or students in American high schools may have much in common, yet unless they interact and learn together, they do not form a community of practice. But members of a community of practice do not necessarily work together on a daily basis. The Impressionists, for instance, used to meet in cafes and studios to discuss the style of painting they were inventing together. These interactions were essential to making them a community of practice even though they often painted alone.
3. The practice: A community of practice is not merely a community of interest–people who like certain kinds of movies, for instance. Members of a community of practice are practitioners. They develop a shared repertoire of resources: experiences, stories, tools, ways of addressing recurring problems—in short a shared practice. This takes time and sustained interaction. A good conversation with a stranger on an airplane may give you all sorts of interesting insights, but it does not in itself make for a community of practice. The development of a shared practice may be more or less self-conscious. The “windshield wipers” engineers at an auto manufacturer make a concerted effort to collect and document the tricks and lessons they have learned into a knowledge base. By contrast, nurses who meet regularly for lunch in a hospital cafeteria may not realize that their lunch discussions are one of their main sources of knowledge about how to care for patients. Still, in the course of all these conversations, they have developed a set of stories and cases that have become a shared repertoire for their practice.
It is the combination of these three elements that constitutes a community of practice. And it is by developing these three elements in parallel that one cultivates such a community.
“Etienne Wenger is a globally recognized thought leader in the field of communities of practice, who was featured by Training Magazine in their “A new Breed of Visionaries” series. A pioneer of the “communities of practice” research, he is author and co-author of seminal articles and books on the topic, including Situated Learning, where the term was coined, Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity, where he lays out a theory of learning based on the concept of communities of practice, Cultivating Communities of Practice: a Guide to Managing Knowledge, addressed to practitioners in organizations, and Digital Habitats dealing with issues related to technology. His work as researcher, author, and consultant has influenced both thinking and practice in a wide variety of fields, including business, education, government, and social theory.”
All of this information may be found by visiting http://www.ewenger.com/theory/index.htm
When we begin our shared learning experiences in September we will be working together to become intentional practitioners in a community of practice.
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