The importance of communities

There is a growing consensus that much of our knowledge is constructed through dialogue with other people around a joint interest in “discourse communities”.

Dissatisfied with overly individualistic accounts of learning and knowing, psychologists and educators are recognizing that the role of others in the learning process goes beyond providing stimulation and encouragement for individual construction of knowledge (Resnick, 1991). Rather, interactions with the people in one’s environment are major determinants of both what is learned and how learning takes place. This sociocentric view (Soltis, 1981) of knowledge and learning holds that what we take as knowledge and how we think and express ideas are the products of the interactions of groups of people over time. Individuals participate in numerous discourse communities (Fish, 1980; Michaels & O’Connor, 1990; Resnick, 1991), ranging from scholarly disciplines such as science or history, to groups of people sharing a common interest, to particular classrooms. These discourse communities provide the cognitive tools – ideas, theories, and concepts – that individuals appropriate as their own through their personal efforts to make sense of experiences. The process of learning, too, is social. Indeed, some scholars have conceptualized learning as coming to know how to participate in the discourse and practices of a particular community (e.g., Cobb, 1994; Lave & Wenger, 1991).

Putnam and Borko, 2000, page 5

The groups that Putnam and Borko call “discourse communities”, Wenger (1998) calls “communities of practice”. Wenger defines them as communities that are informally bound by what they do together and what they have learned by taking part in these mutual activities.

The term “community of practice” refers to a group of individuals who, through the pursuit of a jointly defined enterprise, have developed shared practices, historical and social resources, and common perspectives.

Stein and Coburn, 2005, page 17

Communities combine their practices, resources, and perspectives to form a shared knowledge base that informs their practice. Members of a community of practice have a common sense of purpose and a real need to know what the others know. Wenger (1998) explains that because they are “fully engaged in the process of creating, refining, communicating, and using knowledge” (page 1), communities of practice are able to “preserve the tacit aspects of knowledge that formal systems cannot capture” (page 3). He adds that they can structure an organisation’s learning potential in two ways: through the knowledge they develop at their core and through interactions at their boundaries. Stein and Coburn (2005) draw on Wenger in describing ways in which different communities of practice can stimulate new insights by interacting at their boundaries. The chapter Change for Improvement describes the way in which ISTEs can act as the brokers of change in the “third space” – the place where the members of two communities collaborate to inquire into their theories and knowledge of practice.

According to Cochran-Smith and Lytle (1999), the conception of teacher learning as knowledge-of-practice depends on the assumption that “knowledge is constructed collectively within local and broader communities” (page 274). By taking a joint inquiry approach, professional development initiatives can help communities of practice to make their tacit knowledge explicit and to generate new knowledge.

In teacher learning initiatives that derive from the knowledge-of-practice conception, the point of action research groups or inquiry communities or teacher networks is to provide the social and intellectual contexts in which teachers at all points along the professional life span can take critical perspectives on their own assumptions as well as the theory and research of others and also jointly construct local knowledge that connects their work in schools to larger social and political issues.

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