Download Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity PDF

Rating: (14 reviews) Author: Etienne Wenger ISBN : 9780521663632 New from $34.50 Format: PDF

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Learning is becoming an urgent topic. Nations worry about the learning of their citizens, companies about the learning of their workers, schools about the learning of their students. But it is not always easy to think about how to foster learning in innovative ways. This book presents a framework for doing that, with a social theory of learning that is ground-breaking yet accessible, with profound implications not only for research, but also for all those who have to foster learning as part of their responsibilites at work, at home, at school.

Direct download links available for PRETITLE Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity (Learning in Doing: Social, Cognitive and Computational Perspectives) [Paperback] POSTTITLE

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• Series: Learning in Doing: Social, Cognitive and Computational Perspectives
• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press; 1 edition (January 13, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0521663636
• ISBN-13: 978-0521663632
• Product Dimensions: 0.7 x 6 x 9.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)

Download Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity PDF

This book was a slow, arduous read, but well worth the effort.

I teach at a school that is part of the Professional Learning Communities (PLC) movement. Wenger's book has shed light on why "top-down" implementation of school improvement has failed. The guru of the PLC movement, Richard Dufour (2004), claims that the three big ideas of PLC's are ensuring that students learn, a culture of collaboration and a focus on results. It is in this context that I found Wenger's book valuable in understanding the poverty of the PLC movement.

Wenger claims that communities of practice are learning communities. Are Professional Learning Communities true learning communities as described by Wenger? The answer is no. In a learning community there is interplay between reification and participation. Reification is the artifacts and procedures of previous practice. Participation is the activity engaged in by the practitioner for the organization that results in reification. It is not an either/or model, but dualism. It is within this interplay that learning about practice and the ownership of meaning and identity formation takes place.

Teachers directed by their employer to become PLCs are required to make such large changes in their teaching practices that they become overwhelmed and lost in establishing new practices. The reason for this is that the PLC regime does not consider the requisite identity work and the time required for teachers to own the meaning of new practices. PLCs are not true learning communities.

What about schools? Wenger claims a community of practice emerges when an organization sets forth a structure to accomplish its goal: "...