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This review has been accessed times since April 6, 2006

David, Barton and Tusting, Karin. (Eds.) (2005). Beyond Communities of Practice: Language, Power and Social Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Pp xi + 243
(Hardcover) ISBN 0521836433

(Papercover) ISBN 0521544920

Reviewed by Steven Barfield
University of Westminster

April 6, 2006

This edited collection is the latest volume in a series from Cambridge University Press, whose series title (Learning in Doing, Social, Cognitive and Computational Perspectives) flags up its integral relationship to current theories of "situated approaches" to learning and cognition and the often cognate term, "communities of practice." As Roy Pea, Christian Heath and Lucy Suchman in the series foreword (p. xi) suggest: "these contributions are providing the basis for new ways of understanding the social, historical and contextual nature of learning, thinking and practice that emerges from human activity." It is therefore a book which is concerned to expand and develop elements of this influential, albeit recent body of work, rather than one which attempts any wholesale rebuttal of the theories and adjacent positions. It helps to have some understanding of the relevant theories to make sense of this collection (though these are explained within the introduction) and it is probable that the book will be read by those already interested or even committed to situated approaches to learning and cognition in the first place.

The theory of situated learning stems in large part from Jean Lave’s and Etienne Wenger’s Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation (Cambridge University Press, 1991) and has become a dominant challenge to cognitivist and individualised theories of mind and learning associated with the tradition of Piaget. It emphasizes instead that cognition and learning are intrinsically socially based and organized through communal networks and practices; in effect, it views individual agency, activity and world as shared and interrelated realms. One of the strengths of Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation was that it examined forms of learning that were vocational or community based, (such as traditional midwives from Yucatec, tailors from Vai and Gola, non-drinking alcoholics), and how new members learned to become practitioners through a form of apprenticeship. This in turn demonstrated how such peripheral participants were engaged in legitimate learning in ways that were not centered on traditional student-teacher relationships. From such peripheral participation these members became engaged in greater complexity that eventually resulted in becoming full members of their specific practitioner communities. In the original book, Lave and Wenger are somewhat less sure that such legitimate peripheral participation is in itself an educational form, although it is certainly part of the social matrix by which community practices of knowledge and skills are reproduced and acts as a type of fulcrum for learning activities.

This, however, has not stopped the theories from being applied in different ways to education debates across a broad range of learning and teaching settings and practices where work based learning, schools, adult education providers, and universities are the various subjects of research. Etienne Wenger’s Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning and Identity (Cambridge University Press 1998) whose title is explicitly being alluded to in the title of this new book, did much to move the argument of the earlier book forward. In particular, it did so by providing a much clearer explanation of what a social theory of learning (pp. 3-14) would look like, and elaborated its concepts through a more familiar example of a case study of work based learning that was organizational in its context, namely, a case study of claims processing in an insurance company. Wenger’s approach is still in many ways anthropological, but the book is more consciously about how people learn and develop their roles in specific familiar and recognizable institutional communities and western organizations—the "communities of practice" of the title.

As the editors of Beyond Communities of Practice: Language, Power and Social Context set out in their lucid introduction, the collection has as its overarching aim the exploration and critical examination of the concept and usage of the term "communities of practice," from the point of view of educational researchers and linguists. This is done in a wide variety of different educational settings, including: adult basic education (Steve Harris and Nicola Shelswell); the training of nuclear workers in Sellafield, Britain (Greg Myers); the Continuous Professional Development of bilingual speech therapists (Deirdre Martin); a multiethnic London secondary school (Angela Creese); UK Higher Education systems (Mary R. Lea); and how police officers learn from their colleagues (Frances Rock). What many of these contexts have in common is that they are much more informed by issues of social power, conflict, and the critical role of language in establishing and negotiating that power than was the case of Wenger’s somewhat anodyne insurance claims workers, where language and discourse were not explicitly addressed. Nor indeed in Wenger’s account were the hierarchies and power relations implicit in the organization discussed. This viewpoint is perhaps most explicitly represented in an essay in this collection by Angela Creese, who compares ethnographic data from a secondary school showing the differences and similarities between analyzing the data as a "speech community" to that of a "community of practice." She suggests that without considering the idea of a speech community, it becomes impossible to differentiate between the relative power relations and conflicts between different kinds of discourse that inhabit communities of practice.

Several other essays do not so much analyze how the term might work in or apply to specific institutional contexts, but instead explore how it can be expanded or related to other theories. David Barton and Mary Hamilton engage with theories about how literacy is produced and learned, developing a concept of "reification," and emphasize the role of textually mediated social worlds in developing the theory of communities of practice. Karin Tusting, drawing on critical social linguistics, argues that language as social practice is largely overlooked in the original model of communities of practice and turns to this to produce a new model of the centrality of language in such communities. These can both be seen as expanding the terms of reference of Lave’s and Wenger’s original work. James Gee’s chapter stands out as the only one which openly offers a fundamental challenge to Lave’s influential model, perhaps explaining why it is in the final chapter of the book. Gee proposes a different model of "affinity spaces" rather than "communities of practice." A spatial rather than a membership metaphor is seen as a more effective and critical way of describing how children learn in networks in schools through language, as well as other interactions. He also finds that the affinity space concept has far more relevance to theories of "deep education" in schools and their curriculum organization, than the form of vocational education objectives presupposed by Wenger and Lave, which is perceived as potentially limiting rather than empowering.

At least one chapter focuses much less on language and on a broad educational framework, rather than specific setting that provides information for a case study. Lea argues that while the term "communities of practice" has applicability when applied to Britain's current development of mass higher education, the term often leads to rather naive ideas about students being straightforwardly enculturated to such communities. In fact, there are many (and many types) of practices and communities being negotiated by students within higher education. In particular, she asks a significant question: should student retention (of non traditional students) be thought of as a failure of negotiating these communities of practice? I did wonder, though, after reading her interesting chapter, if questions of the applicability of the Lave and Wenger model work differently for vocational degrees rather than for the academic, non-vocational ones. What the vast majority of these essays have in common, though, is a central interest in theories derived from critical sociolinguistics and discourse analysis and the way social power operates through language. From the point of view of a reader unfamiliar with these particular fields—for example from an educational psychology or organizational theory background—this type of approach may well be unfamiliar. While all the essays are clear and well argued, I did think some basic explanation of critical sociolinguistics and discourse analysis by Barton and Tusting in the introduction, would have been germane. Their cogent account of the origin and historical development of the term "communities of practice" (pp. 1-6) for instance, does much to locate the unfamiliar terms from Lave and Wenger and provide a context for the book’s readers. I would have thought the more complex field of critical sociolinguistic and discourse analysis needed as much disentangling.

One of the interesting aspects of the collections is that despite the wide variety of learning communities that are analysed with special regard to language, the book yields an organic sense of the different ways in which such approaches can be made and the interactions between the different bodies of theory, rather than any mechanical application of pre-existent views. For example, Maria Keating shows how the engagement with a specific community of practice interacts with a student’s creation of their individual identity within a broader social and discursive space. The student's empowerment comes as much through their individual development as a reflective person, as it does through becoming a member of the community. In contrast, Frances Rock’s account of how police officers learn suggests that in explaining "the right to silence" to a member of the public they are arresting, they are not just learning from their colleagues, but are actively working out the practical problems of explaining a high legal discourse to those who may be unable to understand the terms in which it is couched. They are acting as much as discursive translators as they are simply learning how to do things. In addition, Rock’s essay, like Creese’s, suggests that heterogeneity is just as potentially common in a community of practice as homogeneity might be. Greig Myers suggest that in the case of nuclear workers there may be different views of what constitutes legitimization by workers and management and thus inherent conflicts about what is legitimate and what is not, within any practitioner community. Deirdre Martin suggests that bilingual speech therapists learn as much through specific strategies of active collaboration with their monolingual peers, as they do by any straightforward enculturation in a community of practitioners.

Although I have singled out a number of essays to comment on, all of the chapters in this collection have something relevant and appropriate to say. For anyone beginning research in these contexts, or interested in possible amendments to Lave’s and Wenger’s original model, this book will prove timely. I was surprised at a few omissions here. In practical, I wondered why there was no discussion of mentoring and peer mentoring, as this seems to be one of the most concrete practices allied to theories of how specific members of an interest group seek to develop newer members into their role within that group. In addition, mentoring is foregrounded linguistically in the main because of the emphasis it puts on reflective talk between mentor and mentee. Second, considering the role that language plays in the aims of the book, there is relatively little discussion of the social and macroscopic natures of many of the discourses that contributors perceive as informing and operating in these micro-communities. But arguably, discourses are not just spatially determined as practitioner discourse or user discourse, and so forth, nor just as "language-in-use" that is located within a community; they also carry within them paradigmatic assumptions and points of view that exist and alter over long periods of time and that are carried within institutions as well as communities. However, the book as a whole makes a robust case that it has suggested a very fruitful line for future research.

About the Reviewer

Steven Barfield is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Westminster, London UK and Deputy Director of the UK Network for Modern Fiction Studies. His web page is at http://www.wmin.ac.uk/sshl/page-858.

Copyright is retained by the first or sole author, who grants right of first publication to the Education Review.

Editors: Gene V Glass, Kate Corby, Gustavo Fischman

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