User:Sorenhogberg/Wenger

'''Reflections on the text Wenger Etienne (1998), Communities of Practice, Learning, Meaning, and Identity, Cambridge University Press'''

How does it all intersect? Wenger gives us a theoretical perspective upon learning in a very convincing way. To me it all sums up with the help of a few concepts, yet the social theory of learning is very comprehensive.

The short answer could be expressed as: Participation in practices of social communities, a process depending on power and meaning, creates learning, which can be described as a construction of identities and objects. This, i.e. changed identities and the reification of processes into objects, will create new conditions for participation. So there it is! An ever ongoing story! What else is to be said?

Well, what Wenger does is to discuss and elaborate each central concept in many ways but always in relation to the the others, always connecting them in different ways. Reading his work is like entering a building. When coming into a room we start thinking about it and how this room and others are linked to each other. After a while we walk out again just to enter through another door. Each time we start from another angel. Our first thought might be that we are somewhere else but soon after finding the connections between the other rooms we understand that our first notion of seeing something different is not the case. We realize that we are in the same building as before. The process of walking in and out of the building through different doors gives us a deep understanding of the building, i.e. a social theory of learning. If I would choose a room to start this visit in the building I would chose the room of reification. I believe that this is a perspective that often is neglected when trying to understand the complexity of learning. Wenger explains that the use of the concept, the processes of reification include making, designing, representing, naming, encoding, describing, perceiving, interpreting, using, reusing, decoding and recasting. To me that is another way of saying that everything we do, including the words we say ends up in reification. The concepts of participation and reification are so strongly linked together that we tend to forget the part of participation he names reification. In every situation when we participate in a community of practice it all ends up in one or more different ways of reification. It’s like a memory that shapes our experience of the situation. In a very concrete sense the experience can produce some kind of object or artifact that reminds us about the participating process. This could be a decision, a protocol, a new policy or whatever. In a less concrete sense the situation can end up in a memorable story, symbol or another kind of abstraction. The thing is that every reification that a community is able to remember will be part of all new ways of participating.

A parallel to reification is the process of constructing identity. In the room next door, if you are kind to forgive me for my metaphor, where identity is discussed we realize that the construction of an identity is just as, and even more, complex. Since all that goes on within a community leads to some kind of learning when people participate then the construction of identity can be understood as learning. (Only once I disagree with Wenger when he says on page 266 “Much learning takes place without teaching, and indeed much teaching takes place without learning.” I think the last two words should be “intended learning”. To his defense his discussion afterwards gives me the impression that “intended learning” is what he is trying to say.) The creation of an identity is as a result of the theory an ever ongoing process. There is no such thing as a person’s identity that last in time and space. Instead it is more fruitful to look upon identity as negotiated experience. The negotiation is a matter of bringing all the expectations of participating on the table but also the ways of imagining new sets of how to participate. The expected ways of participating is a reflection of the competences needed in a community of practice and the imagined a reflection of experiences from outside the community, which could be described as the result of a local-global interplay. The negotiation that takes place within an individual becomes a process of identifying him or her in relation to what is possible in two different senses; what is allowed and what is seen as wanted or not wanted, the last due to participation or non-participation. In other words it’s a mix of reification of boundary objects captured in different communities of practice. When Wenger talks about identification in terms of belonging to a community of practice this belonging can be everything in between from full participation to non-participation, which also carries a dimension of agency that is a person’s participation can be peripheral or marginalized due to what is wanted.

As previously said identity is a result of a learning process and according to the discussion above learning too must be understood as a matter of negotiation. Wenger claims that processes of identity formation are related to different modes of belonging as engagement, imagination and alignment. Engagement is described as active involvement in mutual processes of negotiating meaning. Imagination is about creating images of the world and seeing connections through time and space by extrapolating from our own experience, which creates possibilities for negotiation. Alignment concerns coordination our energy and activities in order to fit within broader structures and contribute to broader enterprises. This coordination can be understood as a question of negotiation to what extent we choose to fit in.

Negotiation, just as learning is an act about meaning. To belong and how to belong to a community of practice has to do with questions about how to relate to the world. Imagining answers, negotiating them in relation to answers from elsewhere, reifications from the past, in a mutual engaging process can be understood as an endeavor of searching for meaning and being part of a community. Every individual that participate in such a process has to take into account reifications, whether he or she wants it or not. Reifications are in itself more than objects that has to be dealt with, reifications are actually restrictions of what is possible to negotiate. Living in a community of practice is the same as being in a certain context where the world is understood in a unique way. Acting in this context will be valued in relation to relevant competences in the community of practice, all set by earlier participation which has led the community to its reifications. Within the context of the community the reifications might become invisible because it’s the reifications that set the context. This is why I think a clever door to open when visiting the building of “A social theory of learning” is the door to the room of reification.

At last, is there a possibility that the reifications from the work of Wenger, when studying organizations, only are appropriate to such organizations? Maybe Wenger makes a mistake when trying to export his reifications, what he has learnt, the theory of learning, to such an unique institution as education? Learning at schools takes place simultaneously in different levels. The process of participating and reification is something that continuously goes on and at the same time the joint enterprise of the community. This unique community might need a slightly different theory grown with the help of reifications from within, why not negotiated in relation to global influences such as Wenger’s social theory of learning.