Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky was born in Belorussia in 1896 and died in 1934. He was a brilliant student of literature, philosophy and aesthetics and for a time was employed at a teachers training college in his home town of Gomel where he started lecturing in psychology. He also encountered problems of educating physically impaired children. He received his PhD in psychology in 1925, was a prodigious reader, theoretician. Founded a number of institutes
and laboratories, Kozulin (1986). In an introductory anthropology lecture at Aberdeen University Ingold (2002, p. 3) said that,
Vygotsky was probably the most important developmental psychologist of the twentieth century. Influenced by
Vygotsky‘s theory anthropologists such as Jean Lave and Barbara Rogoff have approached learning as a process of apprenticeship, in which learners advance their skills and understanding through guided participation with more experienced partners in shared problem solving.
Vygotsky was known for his concept and work on Sociocultural-historical theory on the psychology of learning and said children‘s cultural
development happened firstly at a social level and then at an individual level (Kozulin, 1999) and (Bernstein, 1994). This idea of collective learning
happens where a more experienced person (it could be a peer) aids and advances another‘s, is fundamental to people‘s knowledge building and progresses their cognitive abilities. Although Vygotsky‘s background centred on analysing children, it obviously happens over the life span. Lave (1991) added to his ideas and proposed that learning is situated when it is involved in a process of engagement with another person and said this happened in a community of practice.
A community that involves practice relies on a process of participation; a central component is called legitimate peripheral participation. More than the learner being on the outside, observing, they are drawn into the centre of the process. Then becoming masterful of that process which both absorbing and they are being absorbed in. The learners are also actively involved in the process of learning from each other.
According to Lave and Wenger (1991) communities of practice are
everywhere. We choose to be involved in many of them at the same time; they are formed for a number of reasons and in their very nature a
progression of collective learning takes place by means of collaboration, a sharing of similar experiences, exchanges of idea take place. Communities of practice are diverse, informal or structured, formed by two people or groups of people who share concerns, wish to share experiences and to learn how to solve problems or gain mastery of a particular interest.
Tacit knowledge is knowledge gained not through the established and formal means of education such as lecturing or reading, but by deriving an
understanding through learning from personal contact such as being in an apprenticeship. It is knowledge is acquired through practice, a hands-on approach, is observational, unwritten and is hard to define. It results from being in the company of others who may be more expert workers which may be enough. It is knowledge that is unspoken, or not necessarily spoken, and may not have to be spoken about. This becomes shared knowingness, or just a beingness and is derived from speaking a relational language.
Shared understanding is acquisition based in a peer development situation such as apprenticeship learning which is the basis of a community of
practice. A shared understanding is the result of the cooperation and collaboration with others in a group. It is action orientated, sharing the moment, of being in the liminal state where members bond with each other. They can then identify with the other people in the group, something
happens, By sharing the space and experiencing the gambit of withdrawal from society they are reintegrated – a transformation takes place. They then share an understanding.
Vygotsky influenced many social scientists and his work is used in many disciplines, including psychology, anthropology and linguistics and by many professions, from education to medicine and business organisations. For this
study I was interested to see anthropology intersected with the community of practice model. Lave (1991) produced the concept of situated learning and Rogoff (1991) likewise on social interaction as apprentices. It was Lave (2001) who published on Portuguese nationals learning to and trying to integrate into an expatriate British community. Lave, Duguid et al (1992) conducted a research study of adolescents in Britain. Using Vygotsky‘s ideas Lave, Rogoff, Quinn and Holland (1987) worked in the fields of culture and cognition. Aretxaga (2001) an anthropologist, researched communities of practice within women‘s prisons in Northern Ireland to understand how they develop structures of coping and resistance. Bunn (1999) an anthropologist studied apprenticeships in Central Asia. Cole a well known Vygotskian
Psychologist (Holland & Cole, 1995) published in Anthropology and Education Quarterly on the cultural historical aspects of cognition. Holland and Lave (2001) anthropologists edited a book on the history of people‘s struggles. Hutchins (1980);(1987) a social anthropologist who researched Trobriand Islanders also discusses Hutchins (2003) distributed cognition based on Vygotsky‘s works.
I have been influenced by Vygotsky‘s works. I wrote my Masters thesis about a study of a community of practice of men and Multiple Sclerosis MS (McCool, 2000). I presented some findings at a conference on education in Sydney, Australia (McCool, 2002). I presented at the Association of Social Anthropologists of Aotearoa/New Zealand on the methodology of
anthropologists as apprentices for learning and modelling their craft (McCool, 2003). I described another community that operated a community of
practice for intellectually impaired members to co-construct meaning (McCool, 2005). Ochs, an anthropologist along with social linguists,
describes the research conducted on how children made meaning in their own communities of practice over the dinner table (Ochs, Smith, & Taylor,
1992; Ochs & Taylor, 1992; Ochs, Taylor, Rudolph, & Smith, 1992). Wenger, McDermott et al.(2002) Wenger was a teacher involved in developing the idea of communities of practice with Lave. Willis (2001) a cultural
ethnographer who wrote on the ideas of apprenticeships and the values they had in society for helping and educating workers into become insiders.
According to Fetterman (1989, p. 34) ―The ethnographer must reduce and crystallize a world of observation to produce a clear picture of a community.‖ Genzuk (2003, p. 1) elaborates that further to show, ―It relies heavily on up- close, personal experience and possible participation, not just observation, by researchers trained in the art of ethnography.‖ The use of participant observation, intensive field-work, listening to life stories are basic
procedures used in this research. A dictionary of Anthropology says,
―Participant observation is long-term, intense interaction with members of a community during which the researcher plunges into their activities as
completely as possible…‖ (Barfield, 1997, p. 48). New Zealand educationalist Russell Bishop advances the value of storytelling in his own study as an insider researcher, and says, ―Stories increase the range of interpretation, knowledge and experiences available to the potential researcher and reduce the tendency to use reifying metaphors in current discursive practice‖
(Bishop, 1996, p. 24).
Ethnographic research is similar to narrative inquiry. Clandinin & Connolly (2000, p. 63) develop a whole chapter on ―being in the field‖ as walking in the midst of storytelling when they look at the experiences of researchers who negotiate complex relationships in the field. I am an insider researcher, I am partially there; this gives a distinct advantage over other researchers, as the essence of ethnographic research is, as an outsider, to show the insider or native‘s perspective of reality and world-view.