|
|
Community of Practice (CoP)
Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger (1991) described a Community of Practice as "a set of relations among persons, activity and world, over time and in relation with other tangential and overlapping CoPs".
A lot of learning is social, which means it occurs in some type of group setting. The basic premiss developed by Lave and Wenger is that CoPs are everywhere and at we are involved in a number of them at work, school, and home. In some CoP groups we might be core members, while in others, we are more at the margins. These social groups increase our chances of learning.
A CoP defines itself along three dimensions:
- What it is about: A joint enterprise understood and continually renegotiated by its members.
- How it functions: A mutual engagement that bind members together into a social entity.
- What capability it has produced: The shared repertoire of communal resources (routines, sensibilities, artifacts, vocabulary, styles, etc.) that members have developed over time.
These community of practices normally go through five stages:
- Potential: People face similar situations without the benefit of a group to help.
- Coalescing: People come together and recognize the potential of forming a group.
- Active: The members of a group develop a community of practice.
- Dispersed: Members no longer engage very intensely, but the community still lives as a center of knowledge for the group.
The community is no longer central, but people still remember it as a significant part of their lives.
A CoP involves organizing around some particular area of knowledge that gives members a sense of joint enterprise and identity. It also involves developing a set of relationships over time and developing communities around things that matter to its members. For a CoP to function, it needs to generate a shared repertoire of ideas, commitments and memories. In addition, it also needs to develop resources, such as tools, documents, routines, vocabulary and symbols that carry the wealth of knowledge within the community.
Further Readings
Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger - CoPs.
Communities
Reference
Lave, Jean and Wenger, Etienne (1991). Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge University Press.
|
|