510

arab and Duffy introduce us to the historical shift in discourses about the design of learning environments from a focus on representational, objective theories of individual learning “by acquisition,” to “situative,” socio-cultural theories that emphasize the relationship between participation in a “community of practice” (CoP), and the provision of opportunities to learn by appropriation.

The impact of Lave and Wenger’s (1991) Situated Learning on the ways that educational researchers and community-based practitioners construe the complex relationship between learning and setting has been extraordinary. As Barab and Duffy point out, there is a potentially confusing, apparent similarity between (a) educational theorists who talk about situated learning, and who design learning environments that are intended to help students “do school” more successfully, and (b) educational theorists whose interest is in characterizing how it is that learning occurs as a byproduct of interaction in communities of practice where participation is predicated on opportunities to learn.

A brief elucidation of the main characteristics of the CoP perspective will highlight what is unique about this perspective on learning. Lave and Wenger did not study, or even prioritize, the analysis of school learning, in the development of their theoretical account of CoPs. Rather, Lave (an anthropologist) and Wenger (a teacher) studied relatively bounded communities where people including naval quartermasters, AA members, midwives learned as part and parcel of joint action undertaken within social structures of participation.

For socio-cultural constructivists like Lave and Wenger, then, learning is not most significantly understood in terms of representational states in individual “minds”, but rather, as dialectical social and cultural practices that reflect the sedimented institutional history of particular settings, and involves the “historical production, transformation, and change of persons.” Understood as such, learning is an explicitly collaborative activity that is fundamentally orchestrated for the purpose of engineering social reproduction, as well as innovation.

A CoP orientation to learning is typically attuned to issues of power that shape social interactions in pedagogical settings, and to particular patterns of inclusion and exclusion. As Vygotsky (1997) pointed out,

“Pedagogics is never and was never politically indifferent, since, willingly and unwillingly, through its own work on the psyche, it has always adapted particular social patterns, political lines, in accordance with the dominant social class that has guided its interests.”

Closely related to the attention to issues of power and social inequities in CoPs, the focus on identity as a significant element in learning represents an important advance in constructivist theories. Thinking about the role of identity as scripted and produced in the course of learning, and as intimately bound up with opportunities for participation, requires us to think about the public character of learning, and the ways in which learning selves are public selves that are tied to particular conditions within which recognition is negotiated. This observation alone clearly tags a CoP analysis of learning environments as one within which any unreservedly optimistic notions about relations between environments, and opportunities for participation and citizenship, would of necessity be tempered by critical perspectives.