The social world 54-58
Lave and Wenger now turn their attention to learning in the social world. They highlight learning as situated in a larger landscape. Thus, the learning of the craft is hard to reproduce in the class room, which primariliy treats the immediate context of the individual student and the material to impart outside the contextual components where the competency functions. Not only is there a broader context where learning is situated in the present time, there is also a broader historical social context that creates a perspective to the learning process that is hard to separate from the learning taking place. These elements of the community that are difficult to reproduce in a classroom, are essential components of the learning process. (54-55)
If learning is to reach the point of social transformation, It is not only the student who will be transformed, but the society as well when learning is situated in the community of practice.
“Legitimate peripheral participation refers to the development of knowledgeably skilled identities in practice and to the reproduction and transformation of communities of practice. It concerns the latter insofar as communities of practice consist of and depend on a membership, including it characteristic biographies/trajectories, relationships, and practice.” (55)
Note that Lave and Wenger are moving from hte individual to the collective context of learning in realtion to both the subject and its aims. Here learning is being abstracted from the individual to the community in a concrete setting. Even the process or agent of instruction moves from an individual teacher to a variety of actors within the community.
“In any given concrete community of practice the process of community reproduction – a historically constructed, ongoing, conflicting, synergistic structuring of activity and relations among practitioners – must be deciphered in order to understand the specific forms of legitimate peripheral participation through time. This requires a broader conception of individual and collective biographies than the single segment encompassed in the studies of “learners.” Thus, we have begun to analyze the changing forms of participation and identity of persons who engage in sustained participation in a community of practice: from the entrance as a newcomer, through becoming an old-timer with respect to new newcomers, to a point when those newcomers become old-timers. Rather than a teacher/learner dyad, this points to a richly diverse field of essential actors and, with it, other forms of relationships of participation.” 56
So the objective of learning is not only the change or transformation of the individual student, it also includes the change or transformation of the community itself. This process of change however, involves cycles of working through problems, conflict and transition that take into account the learning of the student and their finding a place to participate and contribute to the growing community. This process helps learner to develop both an individual and collective identity as they integrate into the community. While this process of change involves conflict, it also involves the ability to resolve these conflicts in a collective and productive manner that enables to the community to grow and become more effective.
“Among the insights that can be gained from a social perspective on learning is the problematic character of processes of learning and cycles of social reproduction, as well as the relations between the two. These cycles emerge in the contradictions and struggles inherent in social practice and the formation of identities…. One implication of the inherently problematic character of the social reproduction of communities of practice is that the sustained participation of newcomers becoming old-timers, must involve conflict between the forces that support the processes of learning and those that work against them. Another related implication is that learning is never simply a process of assimilation: Learning, transformation, and change are always implicated in one another, and the status quo needs as much explanation as change. Indeed, we must not forget that communities of practice are engaged in the generative process of producing their own future. Because of the contradictory nature of collective social practice and because learning processes are part of working out these contradictions in practice, social reproduction implies the renewed construction of resolutions to underlying conflicts. In this regard, it is important to note that the reproduction cycles are productive as well. They leave a historical trace of artifacts – physical, linguistic, and symbolic – and of social structures, which constitute and reconstitute the practice over time .” (58)
We will skip the next chapter that illustrate these concepts in 5 different case studies on communities of practice, and move onto chapter 4 in our next reflexion,
Yorumlar