Communities of practice

However, the most important breakthrough in extension of the cultural historical tradition took place with Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger’s previously mentioned work on ‘situated learning’ (Lave and Wenger 1991) and Etienne Wenger’s work on ‘communities of practice’ (Wenger 1998), which draws to a considerable extent on the cultural historical tradition in combination with Lave’s social anthropological and Wenger’s broad psychological and information technology background.

In the context of the interaction dimension of learning, Lave and Wenger’s book has been of decisive importance for the boom that has taken place since the 1990s in the understanding of the key position of this dimension in learning – even though theoretically their definition of the concept of ‘situated learning’ was ambiguous, because it was, at the same time, supposed to function as the focal point for promoting the values of apprenticeship learning in relation to traditional school teaching. On the face of it, the concept deals with all learning taking place in a specific situation, this situation being significant for the nature of the learning process and for its result. Thus Lave and Wenger write that the concept

took on the proportions of a general theoretical perspective, the basis of claims about the relational character of knowledge and learning, about the negotiated character of meaning, and about the concerned (engaged, dilemma-driven) nature of learning activity for the people involved. That perspective meant that there is no activity which is not situated.

(Lave and Wenger 1991, p. 33) In this context Lave and Wenger make another very interesting point which further deepens the situation’s general significance for learning, namely:

that even so-called general knowledge only has power in specific circumstances. Generality is often associated with abstract represen- tations, with decontextualization. But abstract representations are meaningless unless they can be made specific to the situation at hand. Moreover, the formation or acquisition of an abstract principle is itself a specific event in specific circumstances. Knowing a general rule by itself in no way assures that any generality it may carry is enabled in the specific circumstances in which it is relevant.

(Lave and Wenger 1991, pp. 33–34) Thus according to Lave and Wenger it is not simply that the concrete situation influences the learning that occurs, but it also has significance for which existing learning results are activated. When the learning occurs in

an interaction between existing structures and new impulses (see section 4.2), the environment and the learning situation influence not only the learner’s perception of the new impulses, but also which existing structures are involved in the internal elaboration processes.

In my opinion, had Lave and Wenger kept to these positions, their concept of situated learning could have proved a clear and productive contribution to the understanding of learning. However, it seems as if they do not quite want to acknowledge these general points of view and elaborate on them, for they are following a different agenda. Their ultimate message is not that all learning is influenced by the situation in which it occurs, but that a specific type of situation has certain particular learning qualities, i.e. situations that can generally be termed legitimate peripheral participation and typically appear in connection with apprenticeship. I shall return to this subject in section 12.4.

However, the rather convoluted concept of legitimate peripheral participa- tion would now seem to have faded into the background, also in Lave and Wenger themselves, and Wenger has first and foremost continued with a concept concerning ‘communities of practice’ as the crucial framework condition for learning, partly in his book of the same title (Wenger 1998), and partly in a number of later articles and books (in particular, Wenger and Snyder 2001; Wenger et al. 2002).

In Communities of Practice, Wenger set up what he terms a ‘social theory of learning’ (Wenger 1998, s. 4) – or what in the present context could be called a holistic theory of the interaction dimension of learning. He states quite clearly that it is precisely this dimension of learning on which he is focusing:

There are many different kinds of learning theory. Each emphasizes different aspects of learning, and each is therefore useful for different purposes. To some extent these differences in emphasis reflect a deliberate focus on a slice of the multidimensional problem of learning, and to some extent they reflect more fundamental differences in assumptions about the nature of knowledge, knowing, and knowers, and consequently about what matters in learning.

(Wenger 1998, pp. 3–4) Wenger’s conception that learning embraces various aspects or dimensions seems right in line with the basic view of this book, but while I attempt to specify and discuss the dimensions in relation to each other, Wenger gives priority to what I term the interaction dimension, and even though he also includes what in my terminology is called inner acquisition matters, this is placed under the social perspective, so much indeed that at times it seems that he has forgotten his introductory statement to the effect that other perspectives also exist.

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Thus he also places the concept of ‘learning’ (not ‘social learning’) at the centre of the model that sums up his general understanding and approach (Figure 7.2):

Wenger himself gives the following explanation for the model:

A social theory of learning must . . . integrate the components necessary to characterize social participation as a process of learning and knowing. These components . . . include the following:

1) Meaning: a way of talking about our (changing) ability – individu- ally 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 partici- pation 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.

Clearly, these elements are deeply interconnected and mutually defining. In fact, looking at [Figure 7.2], you could switch any of the four

peripheral components with learning, place it in the centre as the primary focus, and the figure would still make sense.

Therefore, when I use the concept of ‘community of practice’ in the title of this book, I really use it as a point of entry into a broader con- ceptual framework of which it is a constitutive element. The analytical power of the concept lies precisely in that it integrates the components of (the figure) while referring to a familiar experience.

(Wenger 1998, pp. 4–6) The social dimension of learning is tied to community and practice, and creates meaning and identity, and therefore learning presupposes action and participation and converts them into experience and development. These key words and their positions in the model provide a valuable illustration of the significance of the community of practice for learning, which is elaborated through Wenger’s further descriptions and finally converted into important consequences for the development of organisation and education.

The most important quality of the theory lies in its comprehensive and coherent understanding of the social level – while the psychological and societal levels are only brought in as extensions or examples. This is probably also partly why neither internal psychological nor societal conflicts have any important role to play in the theory. As a learning theory it expands the concept of social learning, but in relation to individual development, it lacks the perspective of conflict, and although there is a concept of experience, it is not in the same dialectic mode (and therefore developmental and conflict-oriented mode), as in the concept of experience developed in extension of the socialisation approach of critical theory. I will discuss this further in the next chapter.

In spite of the critical points and limitations mentioned, there can be no doubt that Lave and Wenger’s work has represented a tremendous impulse for the understanding of the significance inherent in the social context of learning. Thus, it is my opinion in general that those who have inherited the cultural historical tradition have now worked themselves far further than the original Soviet Russian positions and have made important contributions to the understanding of the interaction dimension of learning. 7.7 Politically oriented approaches

Other approaches to the interaction dimension of learning are more directly politically oriented in that they refer to current social conditions and are focused on the way in which learning can contribute to solving urgent societal problems.

The classic and, probably, most extreme example of such an approach is to be found in the work of the previously mentioned Brazilian educational

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theorist and practitioner Paulo Freire, in particular in his books entitled Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Cultural Action for Freedom (Freire 1970, 1971), the first of which appeared in over 700,000 copies all over the world, making it probably the most read book on pedagogics ever.

Freire’s pedagogical work was primarily oriented towards the simultan- eous liberation of, and the teaching of reading skills to, poor rural labourers in Brazil, and later, broadly, of oppressed peoples in the third world, and his theory concerned pedagogics more than learning. Nevertheless, it contained several key points of learning theory. The most basic was about linking elementary reading instruction directly with discussions about political oppression through working with so-called ‘generative themes’:

The starting point for organizing the program content of education or political action must be the present, existential, concrete situation, reflecting the aspirations of the people. Utilizing certain basic contra- dictions, we must pose this existential, concrete, present situation to the people as a problem which challenges them and requires a response – not just at the intellectual level, but at the level of action. . . . It is to the reality which mediates men, and to the perception of that reality held by educators and people, that we must go to find the program content of education. The investigation of what I have termed the people’s ‘thematic universe’ – the complex of their ‘generative themes’ – inaugurates the dialogue of education as the practice of freedom.

(Freire 1970, pp. 85 and 86) The way is thus pointed to active, problem-oriented and action-directed learning around themes directly reflecting or exemplifying the participants’ contradictory experiences of societal oppression, in contrast to the traditional ‘filling up’ form of teaching which Freire calls ‘banking education’ (see section 4.2).

Part of Freire’s work was later taken up and continued in the USA, in particular by Henry Giroux and Stanley Aronowitz, with a series of critical books about the American school system, especially in relation to poor and oppressed groups. These included Ideology, Culture, and the Process of Schooling (Giroux 1981), Education under Siege (Aronowitz and Giroux 1985), Schooling and the Struggle for Public Life (Giroux 1988), Postmodern Education (Aronowitz and Giroux 1991) and Pedagogy and the Politics of Hope (Giroux 1997).

Of particular interest in the present context, however, is the book entitled Theory and Resistance in Education – Towards a Pedagogy for the Opposi- tion (Giroux 1983), which first and foremost is about resistance against marginalisation and oppression through learning and education – which is something quite different from individual resistance against learning, which I deal with in section 9.5.

There are many parallels between Freire’s approach and previously mentioned German consciousness sociologist Oskar Negt’s concept about ‘exemplary learning’ (i.e. learning on the basis of representative examples) for capitalist industrial workers (Negt 1971 [1968]) – and one common element is, among others, the central importance of experience for learning, to which I return in the next chapter.

Here, however, as another European example of a politically oriented approach to the interaction dimension of learning I will discuss the work of Flemish Danny Wildemeersch, who works on youth and adult educa- tion from a social perspective and is particularly interested in learning perspectives in connection with grass-roots activities, social work and the like. Wildemeersch defines social learning as ‘combined learning and problem-solving activities which take place within participatory systems such as groups, social networks, movements and collectivities, operating within “real life” contexts and thereby raising issues of social responsibility’ (Wildemeersch 1999, p. 39).

Social learning thus occurs in participatory systems, which operate in a tension field between creativity, power and responsibility, and the learning takes place around four axes characterised as action, reflection, com- munication and negotiation. In the present context it is significant that Wildemeersch attempts to span both the external societal conditions and the internal psychological conditions.

Wildemeersch thus connects social learning with the processes that occur in dedicated forward-looking problem solving. This also includes a concept of social responsibility, which, in several contexts, Wildemeersch has been aiming at (Wildemeersch 1991, 1992; Jansen et al. 1998). This concept has not been precisely defined, but it is clearly more wide-reaching than the concept of ‘responsibility for one’s own learning’ – as it spans right from the external societal responsibility regarded by many today as absolutely essential in a large number of contexts, both local and global, to the responsibility a participant may have in a goal-directed group project, and the personal responsibility for our own actions and our own lives.

In terms of learning, social responsibility forms a particularly significant relationship with reflexivity (Wildemeersch 1991, pp. 156ff.; see section 5.6). If reflexivity is not to end up in individualistic selfishness, lacking any social perspective, it must be connected with a sense of social obligation. Wildemeersch also uses expressions such as ‘critical reflectivity’ and ‘aesthetic reflectivity’, which imply a critical distance and a social connection, respectively (Wildemeersch 1998, pp. 98–99).

Social learning and social responsibility are thus for Wildemeersch a way to behave, which develops – or perhaps does not develop – societally as a part of socialisation, and comes to be seen in a new light in extension of late-modern developments which, in one respect, have put reflexivity

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on the agenda, and in another are handing more and more societal functions over to the market mechanism and to individuality.

When someone constantly has to make a choice between apparently boundless possibilities, and even has to choose his or her own life course and identity, there is no avoiding reflexivity, which settles everything in relation to oneself. In this way, learning through reflexivity becomes a necessity, however demanding it may be, and it becomes vitally important to qualify this form of learning (Wildemeersch 2000).

Wildemeersch has also worked together on these issues with Dutch Theo Jansen and Swiss Matthias Finger, in particular (see Wildemeersch et al. 1998; Jansen et al. 1998), and in his own work Finger has especially related the requirement concerning social responsibility to environmental policy and the environmental movements (Finger 1995; Finger and Asún 2001). In another important project about marginalised young people, Wildemeersch, together with, for example, Theo Jansen and British Susan Weil, has worked with the same angles of approach (Weil et al. 2004).

With respect to learning, this is a discussion with far-reaching conse- quences, for without the general development of a reflexivity that is always a match for the development of a market society, the in-built mechanisms within this development will lead to an ever-stronger impoverishment of the world’s resources, both material and human. The basic qualification for balanced learning with both reflexivity and responsibility is that the learning content should be perceived to be meaningful with regard to oneself. This basic qualification is far from always fulfilled in institutional education, but is basically present in grass-roots activities and the like.

Thus Wildemeersch is active around the boundary between the critical and the pedagogical normative. Social learning is societally determined and for that very reason must be qualified. In terms of learning, this concerns experience, transmission and activity.