Communities of Practice
The concept of ‘a community of practice’ is closely related to the model of situated cognition and is used to describe a learning situation where the construction of knowledge is the result of a social procedure where ideas are shared and contextualised activities are taking place (Roschelle, 1995). From a situated view, people learn as they participate and become intimately involved with a community or culture of learning, interacting with the community and learning to understand and participate in its history, assumptions, and cultural values and rules (Lave and Wenger, 1991). When the students first enter the community of practice they act as observers; but gradually they give up the observer’s role and they move from the periphery of the community to its centre developing their identity and acting as fully functioning members (Herrigton and Oliver, 1995).
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References
Herrigton, J. and Oliver, R. (1995) Critical characteristics of situated learning: Implications for the instructional design of multimedia. In: ASCILITE 1995 Conference, 3 - 7 December 1995, University of Melbourne, Melbourne
Lave, J. and Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press
Lave, J. (1988). Cognition in Practice: Mind, mathematics, and culture in everyday life. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press
Roschelle, J. (1995). Learning in Interactive Environments: Prior Knowledge and New Experience. _Public Institutions for Personal Learning: Establishing a Research Agenda_. John Falk and Lynn Dierking, Editors. Washington: American Association of Museums
