Community of Practice

The concept of community of practice has its root in constructivism (e.g. Piaget, 1950)

as an anti-force to traditional pedagogy where instructors instill knowledge to learners

via codification and transference. In line with this view, cognition develops at the

time and place in which certain experience occurs with the individual. Learning from

the perspective of constructivism emphasizes the presence of both hands-on tasks that

bring up real-world problems and the co-participants, usually teammates. That is,

group activities are of great value in this teaching method because participants are

needed to engage in negotiated processes with the aim to attain their shared goals.

Learning in groups is later attributed to communities of practice (Lave & Wenger,

1991; Wenger, 1998), a notional space in which learning takes place as one

communicates with other members during participation in particular practices. Such

participatory learning is termed as situated learning (Wenger, 1998) because it is

situated in authentic contexts from real situations. With regard to this approach to

pedagogy, Bielaczyc and Collins (1999) further stresses that a culture of learning in a

community of practice is built upon participants’ shared knowledge of learning how

to learn, or say, their social interdependence.

The community of practice is actually a theory of identity. According to Wenger

(2010), the concepts of community of practice and identity coexist as a whole since

they complement each other’s social meaning. A community of practice without a

place for identity loses sight of the social dynamics of membership while identity out

of its belonging community of practice (or context) brings us back to the essentialist

era assuming over-determinant integrity of oneself. Learning in meaningful context, a

person actively constitutes him/herself as not only a cognitive entity but also a social

participant who is a negotiated product of social interaction. To be more specific, the

way of being in a community of practice is a knower equipped with the competence

of the community. In this respect, a newcomer of the community may possess little

competence of value; but it does not mean that the person cannot contribute to the

group at all. When entering the community, he/she brings along personal experience

of knowledgeability that could be new and conducive to some change to the existing

belief system. No matter whether the new element is rejected or accepted, further negotiation or “realignment” (p. 181) of meaning occurs among the community

members. It is through this avenue that the participants identify and dis-identify with

the community, others, and themselves. In other words, identity in the framework of

community of practice is interactionally defined; it should be realized in a dynamic

process where an individual finds his/her way to the periphery or holds his/her

position at the core of a social group.

In relation to the resources community members use to achieve mutual understanding, Wenger (1998) suggests that “shared repertoire” (p. 82) like words,

artifacts, and routines reflects not just a well-established history of mutual

engagement but also possibilities for future reengagement in new situations. Such heritage is “ambiguous” (p. 83) not because of its uncertainty of locating meaning but

because it entails an element of unexpectedness from negotiability. The repertoire

constructs a discourse against which members create meaningful statements and form

styles of expressing their standing in the community. As a result, the community of

practice framework revolutionizes the treatment for linguistic heterogeneity. It

supplements the long stood speech community model (e.g. Labov, 1966; Trudgill,

1974) with a link between arbitrary variation patterns and the complex meaning

speakers negotiate during concrete interactions, in local communities. Language itself

reflects little reality if it loses contact with the social and physical context of its use.

Taking on the idea of community of practice in the field of sociolinguistics and

linguistic anthropology, Eckert (1989, 2000) examines the linguistic styles adopted by

the opposing identity categories that constitute the social order of Detroit suburban

Belton High School: the jocks and the burnouts. The jocks and burnouts embody

middle class and working class cultures or institutional and locally oriented cultures

respectively, with conflicting ideologies and sociolinguistic competences. Through a

look at vocalic variables associated with urban and suburban communities, the study

shows that speakers are linguistic agents in constructing style and identity. In other words, the relation between style and identity is “reactive” (p. 214) to the regime of a

particular community. Only by treating the jocks and the burnouts as communities of

practice, their cultures as constituted by different social practices, can the actual

dynamics of social meaning be revealed and give implications to social change.

At another time and space, Bucholtz (1999) also attempts to approach the role

language plays in socialization using the community of practice framework. She

observes a third group of high-school students, the nerds. To the community of nerds,

the optimal symbolic capital is not the charisma of coolness as claimed by the jocks

and burnouts. Rather, the value is placed on intelligence as well as practices that help

to achieve it, including school attendance, books, and academia. Bucholtz presents the

findings with two kinds of linguistic indices to the nerd identity: negative identity

practices and positive identity practices. While negative identity practices are

employed by individuals to increase the social distance between themselves and

unsanctioned identity, positive ones are employed to claim the chosen identity. Both

of them could be stratified into several linguistic levels such as phonological,

syntactic, lexical, and discursive practices. The analytic categories of linguistic

identity practices reveal “the heterogeneity of membership” (p. 220) in the

community of practice. That is, within the cohort of nerds, successful or unsuccessful

intellectual display makes emerge a heterogeneous group of both central and marginal

members. Bringing peripheral members to the foreground, Bucholtz’s work is notable

for its attention to the individual, not the group, as the unit of analysis. Both of the

above-mentioned studies exemplify research on linguistic variation as a social

practice; they take a more agentive view to individual identity while also admitting the community’s structural constraints on its work.