Communities of Practice: Where Language, Gender, and Power All Live1
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Forming Communities of Practice in Higher Education: a Theoretical Perspective
FORMING COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE IN HIGHER EDUCATION: A THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVE Maria Jakovljevic University of South Africa, South Africa [email protected] Sheryl Buckley University of South Africa, South Africa [email protected] Melanie Bushney University of South Africa, South Africa [email protected] Abstract: Communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly. The current problem is that there is no specific guidance to form communities of practice (CoP) in higher educational institutions to guide learners’ practical and theoretical knowledge and learning experiences. This comparative action research study will investigate, explore and describe ways of developing learning communities at institutions of higher education in South Africa and Europe, as well as determine the feasibility of doing so. In this research project entitled ‘Women in research’ the team of researchers who are predominantly women will focus on how learner learning can be stimulated through learning in communities of practice. Communities of practice recognise the diverse needs of the increasing numbers of learners entering university with different academic and cultural backgrounds and with varying social expectations and experiences. This study consists of six phases: developing a theoretical framework for communities of practice; exploring preliminary learners’ attitudes toward communities of practice; forming pilot communities of practice; evaluating pilot communities of practice groups; implementing action research to pilot communities of practice; and applying the communities of practice model to other groups. The aim of this paper is to highlight phase one of the study, that of developing a theoretical framework for communities of practice. -
Meaning and Linguistic Variation
i Meaning and Linguistic Variation Linguistic styles, particularly variations in pronunciation, carry a wide range of meaning – from speakers’ socioeconomic class to their mood or stance in the moment. This book examines the development of the study of sociolin- guistic variation, from early demographic studies to a focus on the construc- tion of social meaning in stylistic practice. It traces the development of the “Third Wave” approach to sociolinguistic variation, uncovering the stylistic practices that underlie broad societal patterns of change. Eckert charts the development of her thinking and of the emergence of a theoretical community around the “Third Wave” approach to social meaning. Featuring new material alongside earlier seminal work, it provides a coherent account of the social meaning of linguistic variation. PENELOPE ECKERT is the Albert Ray Lang Professor of Linguistics and Anthropology at Stanford University. She is author of Jocks and Burnouts (1990) and Linguistic Variation as Social Practice (2000), co- editor of Style and Sociolinguistic Variation (Cambridge, 2002) with John R. Rickford and co- author of Language and Gender (Cambridge, 2003, 2013) with Sally McConnell- Ginet. ii iii Meaning and Linguistic Variation The Third Wave in Sociolinguistics Penelope Eckert Stanford University, California iv University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia 314– 321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 79 Anson Road, #06- 04/ 06, Singapore 079906 Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. -
The Role of Communities of Practice in Cloud Skills Executive Summary
Achieving Digital Transformation: The Role of Communities of Practice in Cloud Skills Executive Summary Digital transformation has become central to the success Successful digital transformation, however, doesn’t just happen of nearly every major industry. According to a recent IDG in the IT department. It requires all employees to buy in, as well report, 93% of surveyed enterprises have a digital-first as a commitment by the organization to cloud-skills training strategy for their business, encompassing everything from that goes beyond a single one-day class or a few online courses. enhanced data availability to the development of new Organizations need a comprehensive skills development program. revenue streams. A third of the respondents reported that This begins with identifying skill gaps throughout the workforce and digital business has already helped their organization includes creating a strong strategic communication plan to bring all achieve revenue growth.1 Digital transformation has become employees onboard. a critical trend for industry leaders, as organizations harness the power of technology to create better customer experiences and improve worker productivity. Cloud fluency has become a major component of that transformation. In a recent survey by the management consulting firm McKinsey & Company, companies that move to the cloud can improve service levels, shorten times to market, and reduce IT overhead costs by up to 40%.2 © 2020, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. 2 Such a program incorporates both formal teaching methods (classroom training, digital training, certification exams) and informal approaches (workshops, peer mentoring). Among these informal processes, communities of practice have garnered a great deal of attention from industry leaders. -
Communities of Practice and Social Learning Systems: the Career of a Concept Etienne Wenger
Communities of practice and social learning systems: the career of a concept Etienne Wenger The concept of community of practice was not born in the systems theory tradition. It has its roots in attempts to develop accounts of the social nature of human learning inspired by anthropology and social theory (Lave, 1988; Bourdieu, 1977; Giddens, 1984; Foucault, 1980; Vygostsky, 1978). But the concept of community of practice is well aligned with the perspective of the systems tradition. A community of practice itself can be viewed as a simple social system. And a complex social system can be viewed as constituted by interrelated communities of practice. In this essay I first explore the systemic nature of the concept at these two levels. Then I use this foundation to look at the applications of the concept, some of its main critiques, and its potential for developing a social discipline of learning. The concept of community of practice does not exist by itself. It is part of a broader conceptual framework for thinking about learning in its social dimensions.1 It is a perspective that locates learning, not in the head or outside it, but in the relationship between the person and the world, which for human beings is a social person in a social world. In this relation of participation, the social and the individual constitute each other. When I refer to “the theory” in what follows, I refer to this version of social learning theory. A social systems view on learning: communities of practice as social learning systems A community of practice can be viewed as a social learning system. -
Practicing Community: Outline of a Praxeological Approach to the Feeling of We-Ness
Klückmann Practicing Community Practicing Community: Outline of a Praxeological Approach to the Feeling of We-ness Matthias Klückmann Ludwig-Uhland-Institut für Empirische Kulturwissenschaft University of Tübingen Germany Abstract Community, once a backbone of the social sciences as well as the study of folklore, has lost its status as a framing concept. My aim in this article is to argue for the analytical value of community for the study of expressive culture and the everyday. Based on assumptions of practice theory, especially the work of Theodore R. Schatzki, I propose to understand community as a feeling of we-ness that evolves and transpires through bundles of practices and arrangements among participants of these practices. The praxeological perspective allows comparing communities of different types in order to gain general insights into aspects of boundaries as well as spatial and temporal orders of communities. usic played in the distance. I entered the district through a leafy graveyard. It was a hot summer day and immediately I missed the shadow I had been enjoying for the last few minutes. The streets around me—with their brick Mstone buildings, their small shops, bars and cafés on the main street, the allotments, the church and the school in the near distance—make up a small neighborhood in Stuttgart, a city in the southwest of Germany. The neighborhood is part of my fieldwork; the fieldwork is part of my research on the feeling of home and diversity in multi-ethnic neighborhoods. The neighborhood is commonly called Nordbahnhofviertel—literally translated ‘North Station Quarter’.1 It was built for railroad employees toward the end of the nineteenth century, in conjunction with a newly constructed freight station. -
Motivation for Information Exchange in a Virtual Community of Practice: Evidence from a Facebook Group for Shrimp Farmers
Motivation for Information Exchange in a Virtual Community of Practice: Evidence from a Facebook Group for Shrimp Farmers Guenwoo Lee1 and Aya Suzuki2 May, 2018 PRELIMINARY AND INCOMPLETE PLEASE DO NOT CITE OR DISTRIBUTE WITHOUT PERMISSION Abstract In order to reveal the motivation of information exchanges between farmers, we take a case of one Facebook group, which share a common farming crop and the majority of the members are farmers. We construct a monthly panel data to addresses a Facebook group member's motivation for information exchange between January 2015 and May 2017. Based on Poisson and negative binomial regressions, we found that: (i) members who have previously asked questions are more active in sharing information than people who have never asked; (ii) other members' positive expressions to previous information shared (such as clicking likes) promote future information sharing; (iii) the act of information sharing by one’s peer promote his/her own information sharing, and (iv) the more the member shares information in the past, the more s/he asks information today. These findings suggest that reciprocity does play a significant role in motivating information exchange even in the virtual communities of practice, similar to the communities of practice. We also confirm that professional reputation is one of the motivations for information sharing and that there is a positive effect of peer’s prosocial behavior. Keywords: Peer effect; Reciprocity; Reputation; Shrimp farming; Virtual community of practice JEL Codes: D80; O33; Q10 1 Corresponding author: Department of International Studies, Graduate School of Frontier Sciences, University of Tokyo, Environmental Studies Building #706, 5-1-5 Kashiwanoha, Kashiwa-shi, Chiba-ken 277-8563 Phone: +81 80-4726-6874 email: [email protected] 2 Department of International Studies, Graduate School of Frontier Sciences, University of Tokyo 1 1. -
Communities of Practice Approach for Knowledge Management Systems
systems Article Communities of Practice Approach for Knowledge Management Systems Sitalakshmi Venkatraman 1,* and Ramanathan Venkatraman 2 1 Department of Information Technology, Melbourne Polytechnic, Preston, Victoria 3072, Australia 2 Institute of Systems Sciences, National University of Singapore, Singapore 119615, Singapore; [email protected] * Correspondence: [email protected]; Tel.: +61-3-9269-1171 Received: 26 August 2018; Accepted: 24 September 2018; Published: 27 September 2018 Abstract: In this digital world, organisations are facing global competition as well as manpower pressures leading towards the knowledge economy, which heavily impacts on their local and international businesses. The trend is to foster collaboration and knowledge sharing to cope with these problems. With the advancement of technologies and social engineering that can connect people in the virtual world across time and distance, several organisations are embarking on knowledge management (KM) systems, implementing a community of practice (CoP) approach. However, virtual communities are relatively new paradigms, and there are several challenges to their successful implementation from an organisation’s point of interest. There is lack of CoP implementation framework that can cater to today’s dynamic business and sustainability requirements. To fill the gap in literature, this paper develops a practical framework for a CoP implementation with a view to align KM strategy with business strategy of an organization. It explores the different steps of building, sharing, and using tacit and explicit knowledge in CoPs by applying the Wiig KM cycle. It proposes a practical CoP implementation framework that adopts the Benefits, Tools, Organisation, People and Process (BTOPP) model in addressing the key questions surrounding each of the BTOPP elements with a structured approach. -
Style and Sociolinguistic Variation Edited by Penelope Eckert and John R
This page intentionally left blank The study of sociolinguistic variation examines the relation between social identity and ways of speaking. The analysis of style in speech is central to this field because it varies not only between speakers, but in indi- vidual speakers as they move from one style to another. Studying these variations in language not only reveals a great deal about speakers’ strate- gies with respect to variables such as social class, gender, ethnicity and age, it also affords us the opportunity to observe linguistic change in progress. The volume brings together a team of leading experts from a range of disciplines to create a broad perspective on the study of style and varia- tion. Beginning with an introduction to the broad theoretical issues, the book goes on to discuss key approaches to stylistic variation in spoken language, including such issues as attention paid to speech, audience design, identity construction, the corpus study of register, genre, distinc- tiveness and the anthropological study of style. Rigorous and engaging, this book will become the standard work on stylistic variation. It will be welcomed by students and academics in socio- linguistics, English language, dialectology, anthropology and sociology. is Professor of Linguistics, Courtesy Professor in Anthropology, and co-Chair of the Program in Feminist Studies at Stanford University. She has published work in pure ethnography as well as ethnographically based sociolinguistics including Jocks and Burnouts: Social Identity in the High School (1989) and Variation as Social Practices (2000). . is the Martin Luther King, Jr., Centennial Professor of Linguistics at Stanford University. He is also Courtesy Professor in Education, and Director of the Program in African and African American Studies. -
Communities of Practice Guide
Communities of Practice Guide Creating, reinvigorating or transforming a community of practice. by Christine Lupton, Harry Webne-Behrman, Julie Hunt Johnson, Margaret Merrill, Tetyana Schneider Community of Practice (CoP) Network Communities of Practice Guide In this Guide: Overview ………….……………………………………………………………………………… 3 5 Phases of CoPs………………………………………………………………………………. 4 Worksheets for 5 phases: Define……………………………………………………………..……………………… 6 Design…………………………………………………………………………………….. 8 Grow……………………………………………………………………..………………... 10 Perform……………………………………………………………………………..…….. 12 Transform……………………………………………………………………………..…. 14 References………………………………………………………….……………………………… 16 2 Communities of Practice Guide What are Communities of Practice (CoPs)? CoPs are “groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly” (Wenger-Trayner & Wenger-Trayner, 2015). Not everything called a “community” is a community of practice. For example, a neighborhood may be considered a community, but not necessarily a community of practice. Book club members may all enjoy reading novels, but they do not share a practice that expands the field of literature or addresses literacy. Three elements are key: COMMUNITY members “engage in joint activities and discussions, help each other, and share information” (Wenger-Trayner & Wenger-Trayner, 2015). DOMAIN is “shared domain of interest” (Wenger-Trayner & Wenger-Trayner, 2015), “a concern, a set of problems, or a passion about a topic” (Wenger, McDermott, & Snyder, 2002). PRACTICE is a “shared repertoire of resources: experiences, stories, tools, ways of addressing recurring problems” (Wenger-Trayner & Wenger-Trayner, 2015). Why are CoPs useful? Communities of practice (CoPs) connect people with common goals and interests for the purpose of sharing resources, strategies, innovations and support. CoPs support the transmission and expansion of knowledge and expertise for leaders, learners and professionals in any field or discipline. -
Studying STEM Faculty Communities of Practice Through Social Network Analysis
The Journal of Higher Education ISSN: 0022-1546 (Print) 1538-4640 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/uhej20 Studying STEM Faculty Communities of Practice through Social Network Analysis Shufeng Ma, Geoffrey L. Herman, Matthew West, Jonathan Tomkin & Jose Mestre To cite this article: Shufeng Ma, Geoffrey L. Herman, Matthew West, Jonathan Tomkin & Jose Mestre (2019): Studying STEM Faculty Communities of Practice through Social Network Analysis, The Journal of Higher Education, DOI: 10.1080/00221546.2018.1557100 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00221546.2018.1557100 Published online: 09 Jan 2019. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 40 View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=uhej20 THE JOURNAL OF HIGHER EDUCATION https://doi.org/10.1080/00221546.2018.1557100 Studying STEM Faculty Communities of Practice through Social Network Analysis Shufeng Ma a, Geoffrey L. Herman b, Matthew West c, Jonathan Tomkind, and Jose Mestre e aInstitute of Education, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China; bDepartment of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, Illinois, USA; cDepartment of Mechanical Science and Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, Illinois, USA; dDepartment of Geology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, Illinois, USA; eDepartment of Physics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, Illinois, USA ABSTRACT ARTICLE -
1 Three Waves of Variation Study
1 Three Waves of Variation Study: The emergence of meaning in the study of variation Penelope Eckert Stanford University Abstract The treatment of social meaning in variation has come in three waves of analytic practice. The first wave of variation studies established broad correlations between linguistic variables and the macro-sociological categories of socioeconomic class, sex class, ethnicity and age. The second wave employed ethnographic methods to explore the local categories and configurations that inhabit, or constitute, these broader categories. In both waves, variation was seen as marking social categories. This paper sets out a theoretical foundation for the third wave, arguing that (1) variation constitutes a robust social semiotic system, expressing the full range of social concerns in a given community; (2) variation does not simply reflect, but constructs, social meaning, hence is a force in social change and (3) the meanings of variables are basic and underspecified, gaining more specific meanings in the context of styles (personae). 1. The fate of social meaning in the study of variation The first quantitative community study of variation was all about social meaning. Based on ethnographic observations and interviews on Martha's Vineyard, William Labov (Labov 1963) established that the pronunciation of /ay/ had been recruited as an indexical resource in a local ideological struggle. This diphthong had a centralized nucleus in the Vineyard dialect, but for some years, island speakers had been following the mainland trend to lower the nucleus to [ɑ]. Labov found that some speakers were reversing this lowering trend, in an apparent move to recapture one of the most salient features of the distinctive island dialect. -
Medicine As a Community of Practice: Implications for Medical Education Richard L
Perspective Medicine as a Community of Practice: Implications for Medical Education Richard L. Cruess, MD, Sylvia R. Cruess, MD, and Yvonne Steinert, PhD Abstract The presence of a variety of independent Having communities of practice as the medical education’s complexity. An learning theories makes it difficult theoretical basis of medical education initial step is to acknowledge the for medical educators to construct a does not diminish the value of other potential of communities of practice as comprehensive theoretical framework learning theories. Communities of practice the foundational theory. Educational for medical education, resulting in can serve as the foundational theory, and initiatives that could result from this numerous and often unrelated curricular, other theories can provide a theoretical approach include adding communities instructional, and assessment practices. basis for the multiple educational activities of practice to the cognitive base; Linked with an understanding of identity that take place within the community, thus actively engaging students in joining formation, the concept of communities of helping create an integrated theoretical the community; creating a welcoming practice could provide such a framework, approach. community; expanding the emphasis emphasizing the social nature of learning. on explicitly addressing role modeling, Individuals wish to join the community, Communities of practice can guide mentoring, experiential learning, and moving from legitimate peripheral to full the development of interventions reflection; providing faculty development participation, acquiring the identity of to make medical education more to support the program; and recognizing community members and accepting the effective and can help both learners the necessity to chart progress toward and educators better cope with 2017 community’s norms.