Nuts and Bolts: Communities of Practice

“Communities ofpractice are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for somethingthey do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly.”—Etienne Wenger

Background

I was lucky early in my career to be involved in a robust,active community of practice (CoP) comprising classroom trainers employed inNorth Carolina government. On a mission to “stamp out bad training,” they metvoluntarily once a quarter and ran a three-day conference every spring. Alreadywell established long before I found my way in, the group began when a dozen friends,all trainers in a single county, got together to discuss challenges they werehaving and bemoan the fact that most classroom training was just so… bad. Theydecided to commit to the mission of “stamping out bad training.” Recognizingthat it would not be possible for 12 people to stamp out bad trainingstatewide, the group decided to open up to a wider population of trainers who,in the age before email, mostly found their way to the group by word of mouth. CoPmembers further supported their mission by—on their own time, at their owninitiative—developing a training skills course based on what they felt were keyprinciples of creating and facilitating great instruction. The CoP grew to amailing list of 150, with average meeting attendance at about 50. While the CoPis past its heyday—for one thing, there came a split between those very muchattached to the classroom, and others, like me, who moved into eLearning andthe use of educational technologies—many of us are still in touch and stillmeet informally. And we still offer the training skills course, now in its 30thyear and seventh iteration. This community formed the unit of interest of my 2008 dissertation,in which I compared the internal dynamics of this CoP against a frameworkdeveloped by Etienne Wenger. As there is so much interest in—andmisunderstanding of—the idea of communities of practice, I thought I’d offer upa recap of the framework.

Analyzing a community of practice

In the simplest overview of his framework, Wenger dividesanalysis across four components: meaning,community, identity, and learning. Hisunit of interest was a group of insurance claims processors; mine, the group ofclassroom trainers. Here’s a quick overview of the basics. Details for analysis(like how you measure whether “meaning” is being made) rely on markers for eachitem; for more on that, see my full paper.

Meaning

Community members help make meaning and transfer it to theirpractice. For my CoP, there was ongoing conversation and negotiation aroundmeaning: “What do we mean by bad training? What is good training? What do wemean by putting the learner first?” Simply being part of those conversations,demonstrating the ideas, and working together to figure it out is all part ofparticipation. Transferring that back to practice includes reification—acollectively understood definition of ideas, of materials, of what is “good”training. A key idea in the CoP, for instance, was “finding your 20 percent”—identifyingyour critical content, what people must know to perform—as critical to “good” training.As the community dealt with this as a shared point of focus, the idea for thisimage emerged. That’s reification. It’s this duality of participation andreification that that helps make meaning: We all know putting things in writingisn’t always enough. When I was doing my research, CoP members were verygenerous with materials they had saved over the years (Figure 1). I wouldn’thave been able to make much use of them had I not spent years in activeinvolvement with the CoP’s repertoire, vocabulary, and shared stories. You needoverlap with participation, seeing material in use, and understanding generativemeaning. It’s through that duality of participation and reification thatmeaning is made and can be transferred to practice.

Figure 1: CoP artifacts amassed for my dissertation research

I was glad to have such a preponderance of information, butit would have made little sense had I not been an active CoP participant or hadaccess to active members.

Knowledge is embedded in practice: “A quality of the CoPmissing from more traditional, cognitive approaches to learning is the CoP’sability to transmit tacit knowledge, that which may otherwise never be found inmanuals, guidelines, or similar documentation amassed by organizations,” Iwrote in my dissertation (see References).

Community

This aspect looks at what binds people to each other: In atrue CoP, it’s a shared interest and passion for work, and a desire to improve.“Community” is not just people attending meetings, but refers to meaningful,collaborative engagement: being included in what matters, contributing tocommunity maintenance, and having the opportunity to really contribute. Behaviorsinclude asking for and giving help, truly wanting to see others succeed, and notmaking life harder for others. People work together to tune the enterprise, ashappened in my CoP when the community decided, as a unit, that it would moveinto the business of developing and providing a train-the-trainer course.

Wenger talks here of the function of negotiating a jointenterprise as helping to make a job more habitable. In the case of my group oftrainers, members found the CoP helped to alleviate feelings of isolation,marginalization, and being misunderstood. One research interviewee said: “[TheCoP] fills a need for us by reminding us that there are reasons for what we doand the way we do it. Adult learning, the way adults learn—the regularbureaucrat doesn’t know a lot about it. They’ve been to college and thinkthat’s what ‘adult education’ is. They experienced what was probably crappytraining all their lives, they don’t see the sweat that goes into makingtraining effective and good. They see the end result but don’t connect it totheory or effort.”

Identity

I’ve been interested in the role of identity for years,starting with research into why many classroom trainers seemed so resistant toeLearning. A key takeaway from the literature: Those who identified themselvesas “experts” hired to “impart knowledge” were much more resistant than thosewho saw themselves as partners and facilitators of learning. The idea ofidentity in CoPs deals with how members differentiate themselves from otherpeople and groups, how they identify with a way of practice involving specificartifacts and approaches. A component of identity is the idea of competentmembership: In my example case, the member identifies with and wants to beknown as “a good trainer” aligned with the other members, understands thecommon conception of what makes training “good,” and is fluent with the CoPrepertoire—and because of this can make valuable contributions to the CoP. There’sa shared view of “bad” training and an agreement that members will notpromulgate it. Recognizing and using the repertoire, operating and adaptingpractice based on this common discourse, is part of competence. (Note here thatnot every person on the mailing list is a “member” as it’s defined here.)

Learning

What has the community learned? How has time affectedmeaning, community, and identity? Over time members learn who knows what, whois good at what, who has expertise or connections. What things have beennegotiated or undergone ongoing tuning? What stories, anecdotes, and routines havedeveloped? In the case of my group, we saw two big periods of disruption: theinvention of PowerPoint and the advent of online learning. Both of thesebrought long, frequent conversations about what constitutes “good” training. Therewas also ongoing tension in reconciling evidence-based practice with craft, andstress in holding people to the enterprise: Again and again, conversationturned to “Are we really interested in stamping out bad training, or beingfabulously entertaining presenters?” It was in examining this time-basedanalytic component that the artifacts (see Figure 1 above) proved invaluableand shone a light not only on what the CoP had learned but what it hadforgotten. In our case, a question as big as “What is good training?” might be “Whatdid we learn about how practice can be handed down?” The answer, in brief, is:Yes, much can be handed down explicitly, but it also requires an ongoingsocial/interaction process.

I hope this quick overview helps further your understandingof CoPs and helps differentiate the idea of CoPs from other groupconfigurations. I have had a long, happy, successful career in L&D andcredit my own CoP of peers with a passion for learning for much of that. Ifthis has piqued your interest, please do take a look at the resources below.

References

Bozarth, Jane. The Usefulness of Wenger’s Framework in Understanding a Community of Practice. Dissertation, North CarolinaState University, 2008.

Pastoors, Katja. “Consultants:love-hate relationships with communities of practice.” The Learning Organization, Vol. 14, No. 1. 2007.

Wenger, Etienne. Communitiesof Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity. Cambridge, UK: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1999.