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or using any kind of representation is a complex accomplishment, a balance of improvisation and accommodation to constraint. |
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People learn how to do this everyday, impossible action as they become members of what Lave and Wenger (1991) call communities of practice, or what Strauss (1978) calls social worlds. A community of practice (or social world) is a unit of analysis that cuts across formal organizations, institutions like family and church, and other forms of association such as social movements. It is, put simply, a set of relations among people doing things together (Becker 1986). The activities with their stuff, their routines, and exceptions are what constitute the community structure.
49 Newcomers to the community learn by becoming ''sort of" members, through what Lave and Wenger (1991) call the process of "legitimate peripheral participation." They have investigated how this membership process unfolds and how it is constitutive of learning. |
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We are all in this sense members of various social worldscommunities of practicethat conduct activities together. Membership in such groups is a complex process, varying in speed and ease, with how optional it is and how permanent it may be. One is not born a violinist, but gradually becomes a member of the violin playing community of practice through a long period of lessons, shared conversations, technical exercises, and participation in a range of other related activities. |
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People live, with respect to a community of practice, along a trajectory (or continuum) of membership that has elements of both ambiguity and duration. They may move from legitimate peripheral participation to full membership in the community of practice, and it is extremely useful in many ways to conceive of learning this way. |
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How Does This Include Categories? |
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Learning the ropes and rules of practice in any given community entails a series of encounters with the objects involved in the practice: tools, furniture, texts, and symbols, among others. It also means managing encounters with other people and with classes of action. Membership in a community of practice has as its sine qua non an increasing familiarity with the categories that apply to all of these. As the familiarity deepens, so does one's perception of the object as strange or of the category itself as something new and different.50 Anthropologists call this the naturalization of categories or objects. The more at home you are in a community of practice, the more you forget |
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