Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity

Etienne Wenger

Cambridge University Press, Sep 28, 1999 - Psychology - 318 pages

Presents a broad conceptual framework for thinking about learning as a process of social participation.

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Contents

• Meaning: 51
• Negotiation of meaning: 52
• Participation: 55
• Reification: 57
• The duality of meaning: 62
• Community: 72
• Mutual engagement: 73
• Joint enterprise: 77
• Shared repertoire: 82
• Negotiating meaning in practice: 84
• Learning: 86
• The dual constitution of histories: 87
• Histories of learning: 93
• Generational discontinuities: 99
• Boundary: 103
• The duality of boundary relations: 104
• Practice as connection: 113
• The landscape of practice: 118
• Locality: 122
• Constellations of practices: 126
• The local and the global: 131
• Knowing in practice: 134
• Identity: 143
• A focus on identity: 145
• Some assumptions to avoid: 146
• Structure of Part II: 147
• Identity in practice: 149
• participation and reification: 150
• Community membership: 152
• Trajectories: 153
• Nexus of multimembership: 158
• Localglobal interplay: 161
• Participation and nonparticipation: 164
• Identities of nonparticipation: 165
• Sources of participation and nonparticipation: 167
• Institutional nonparticipation: 169
• Modes of belonging: 173
• Engagement: 174
• Imagination: 175
• Alignment: 178
• Belonging and communities: 181
• The work of belonging: 183
• Identification and negotiability: 188
• Identification: 191
• Negotiability: 197
• The dual nature of identity: 207
• Social ecologies of identity: 211
• Learning communities: 214
• Epilogue Design: 223
• Design for learning: 225
• Design and practice: 228
• Structure of the Epilogue: 229
• Learning architectures: 230
• Dimensions: 231
• Components: 236
• A design framework: 239
• Organizations: 241
• Dimensions of organizational design: 242
• Organization learning and practice: 249
• Organizational engagement: 250
• Organizational imagination: 257
• Organizational alignment: 260
• Education: 263
• Dimensions of educational design: 264
• a learning architecture: 270
• Educational engagement: 271
• Educational imagination: 272
• Educational alignment: 273
• Educational resources: 275
• Notes: 279
• Bibliography: 301
• Index: 309

Popular passages

Page 47 - It is in this sense that they constitute a community of practice. The concept of practice connotes doing, but not just doing in and of itself. It is doing in a historical and social context that gives structure and meaning to what we do.

Page 4 - Such participation shapes not only what we do, but also who we are and how we interpret what we do.

Page 3 - ... and inevitable, and that - given a chance - we are quite good at it? And what if, in addition, we assumed that learning is, in its essence, a fundamentally social phenomenon, reflecting our own deeply social nature as human beings capable of knowing?

Page 4 - Participation here refers not just to local events of engagement in certain activities with certain people, but to a more encompassing process of being active participants in the practices of social communities and constructing identities in relation to these communities.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity; Learning in Doing: Social, Cognitive and Computational Perspectives; Learning in doing
• Author: Etienne Wenger
• Edition: illustrated, reprint
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 1999
• ISBN: 0521663636, 9780521663632
• Length: 318 pages
• Subjects: Psychology / General; Psychology / Social Psychology