Communities of Practice

   What does learning mean? I have been reflecting on this question in light of my reading of Etienne Wenger's book Communities of Practice. Learning is actually pretty mysterious, or it least it's been presented as such by psychologists who focus on the brain. For many people, learning is a process that involves activation of certain centers of the brain. But according to thinkers like Wenger, learning is an active process of shaping an identity that becomes over time within a situated context, or what Wenger refers to as communities of practice. Wenger interestingly notes that in order for learning to happen, several conditions need to be met, including a shared goal that is valued by a community, a learner's sense of identity moving through community to attain desirable ends, a negotiated sense of meaning that is intersubjective and always open-ended.

       Here is one interesting implication: even though people are said to work toward the same goals in a community, they still construct very different meanings around how they move toward that goal and who they are in relation to that goal. To use a simple example : a church or a Buddhist community has many people who are volunteering with the same ends in mind, but they see themselves as having different places in that shared meaning. I might consider myself to be a "novice" practitioner in relation to  someone who is more experienced and seasoned, and this influences the way I speak or act within the community, or where my "place" is in relation to others. It even influences what I feel I am learning in that community, and here is where the role of mutual affirmation plays a big part in deciding to what extent I am "learning". The most obvious example of this is seeking confirmation from a Dharma master of one's spiritual attainment in practice. But there are less obvious examples elsewhere that show how learning is an affirmed process of constructing a narrative.

 I am not thinking, however, that learning is entirely based on a social construction. After all, there does need to be a cognitive component to learning. But I am saying that even this learning needs to situate itself in some social context to even be considered learning. I suppose a hypothetical case might be that of a person who does math equations on a desert island, using a writing in sand to record their findings. Such a person might be said to learn, but how would anyone know what they have learned unless it fits into a context of past learning by others? How would we even know that learning has been achieved if it is not properly recorded or accounted for? Learning has to have some kind of performance to be considered learning.

As well, I would also argue that certain kinds of learning claim more social legitimacy than others. Learning C programming (or BASIC, an early computer program) would seem a rather futile exercise if we know that these programs are no longer actively used anywhere. When these programs are being learned, there is an implicit understanding that some skill is transferable to something that has more social import or viability (for example, a more contemporary software, or the ability to reason in general, which has many applications).  I am hard  pressed to find a form of learning that is not in some way linked to a social system or community.

Wenger, E. (1998) Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning and Identity.  Cambridge:Cambridge University Press.