In April 2016, we visited the Academic Enhancement Center at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University in Suzhou, China. We did a keynote at their Learning and Teaching Colloquium and participated in a series of activities.

The team created a great video report of our visit, including extracts from our keynote and workshops, as well as thematic snippets from a formal interview. (You have to click on “Next page” to see the videos – took us a while to see it!)

You can see this report on their website here.

They set a high bar for the careful editing and presentation of the videos!

In my visiting professor position at Manchester University and during the course of social theories of learning I co-teach there, I have often been challenged to articulate how my own theorizing relates to other theories, such as Activity, Structuration, or Actor-Network theories, or the work of people like Bourdieu, Foucault, Gee, and Holland.

I have also been challenged to explain why certain issues of traditional interest in social theory are not directly addressed, for instance, socio-political and organizational structures, class, gender, or race.

Recently the Manchester group invited me to reflect on what I have learned from these questions in a chapter for a book they were publishing.

The result is a kind of meta-theory of progress in social theory. I call it the discipline of plug-and-play. The idea is that in the social sciences, the real challenge is to have theories run through each other rather than to replace each other in a quest for some grand unifying theory.

While plug-and-play suggests something easy for the user, it is in fact a very demanding discipline for the designer. Applied to social theorizing, the plug-and-play metaphor suggests that theorists have to work hard to define the essence of their theory so that people can understand its modular place in the broader system of social theory. This way researchers can apply some rigor to combining theories when it serves their purpose, rather than looking for everything within a single theory.

In my chapter I suggest three dimensions of theories to pay attention to for more pug-and-play rigor: purpose, stance, and technical language.

My chapter is called “The practice of theory: confessions of a social learning theorist” and you can download the last draft in my possession:

Download plug and play paper here

P.S. As the comment below suggests, I forgot to include the citation in the original post:

Wenger-Trayner, E. (2013) The practice of theory: confessions of a social learning theorist. In Farnsworth, V. and Solomon, Y. (Eds.) Reframing Educational Research: Resisting the “What Works” Agenda. Routledge.

Theoretically it represents a new step in the evolution of the theory:

• We focus on landscapes of practice, rather than single communities or networks as a key locus of social learning capability.
• We introduce the concept of knowledgeability as an outcome of learning with respect to a landscape, which includes a lot of practices in which one cannot claim competence. Theoretically knowledgeability is a landscape-level counterpart to the concept of competence, which is defined at the level of communities of practice.

These are significant developments, whose full implications we are now exploring in our current writing.

Practically we identify the role of systems conveners. These are people who work at the landscape level to enable new forms of social learning capability. We involve people we are working with to explore the role:

• We discuss key dimensions of the role: its challenges, the traits of people who do this, and what a social learning approach looks like.
• We co-author two case studies of ambitious systems convening projects.

In addition to our chapters, our co-authors use stories to explore various aspects of living a landscape of practice, including the emotional and political dimensions of boundary crossing, brokering, multimembership, and visiting practices along one’s journey.

Wonder how these developments resonate with you?

Communities of practice and social learning systems:
the career of a concept

This article was written by Etienne in 2009 for a textbook co-published by the Open University and Springer. It does two things. It relates the conceptual framework of communities of practice to systems theory and it reviews the career of the concept of community of practice since its inception in Etienne’s work with Jean Lave in 1987.

Contents

Download

You can download a PDF version of the paper here:

Citation

Wenger, E. (2010) Communities of practice and social learning systems: the career of a concept. In Blackmore, C. (Editor) Social Learning Systems and communities of practice. Springer Verlag and the Open University.

If facing change, expanding our horizon, and dealing with complexity are all social learning challenges, we live in demanding times. In the context of rapid globalization and increasing interdependence, we face a threatened environment, economic precariousness and imbalances, the need for better education, ideological conflicts – to name a few of our challenges.

These challenges are neither simply personal nor abstractly global. They require accelerated learning at various levels of scale at once, from individuals, to communities, to organizations, to regions, to nations, to worldwide learning systems.

Learning capability – or the ability to learn – is a paradoxical aspiration because learning by itself does not guarantee learning capability. Sometimes being successful at learning is precisely what prevents you from learning the next thing. When applied to social systems, learning capability depends on the learning capability of individuals, but in the context of the structure of the system in which they live. Networking, convening new social learning spaces, brokering across boundaries, acting as learning citizens and social artists – these are the kinds of interventions that have the potential to increase social learning capability at a systemic level.

Taking such a systemic view is especially critical at a time when global challenges are placing unprecedented demands on our ability to learn together. Developing social learning capability across sectors may be urgent, but it is still an elusive aspiration. We need a social discipline of learning.

Making sense of social learning capability is the great challenge of learning theory in the 21st century. Learning how to enhance it, accelerate it, and evaluate it is the challenge of the practitioner. Both undertakings are interrelated – and contributing to both is our personal and professional aspiration.

Etienne’s work on social learning theory places learning at the core of human existence and assumes that it is fundamentally a social phenomenon. Learning is the foundation of who we are (becoming). It is social because our human nature is social, not just because (or when) we interact with others or use certain tools.

We are aware of the current trend to focus conversations about social learning on social media. We understand this trend because, indeed, emerging social media technologies are surprisingly aligned with the tenets of social learning theory. We believe that this is precisely why they constitute such an important trend. But it is the social nature of human learning that makes these tools so relevant today, and potentially transformative, not the tools that make human learning suddenly social.

We want to promote this broader view of social learning and base our work on it, whether it is theoretical work on social learning capability or practical work with organizations, governments, and international development projects. All these areas can benefit from taking a deeply social view of learning.

While social learning has never been about social media, we agree that a theory and practice of social learning today certainly can’t ignore these emerging technologies. They open countless new avenues for the social nature of human learning to manifest and in some cases, expand.

Even so, we want our work on social learning to explore this social nature in its essence, while seeing social media as a recent phenomenon to be explored and leveraged. What makes all this exciting is the convergence of multiple trends: the increasing acceptance of social learning theory, the explosion of social media, the rise of social networks, the need to anchor organizational strategies, public policy, and developmental imperatives in a social understanding of learning, and the globalization of learning challenges.

We are not entirely sure how they do it, or even if there is a recipe for how it is done. But we know that what they do is important. Their work in key to the development of social learning capability at all levels, from small conversations and communities to large-scale social systems.

It is definitely an art form – expressed in many different ways – that can change the way we experience the world and ourselves.  One thing that social artists have in common is that they use their passion and commitment to guide the process and act as exemplary learning citizens. As with artists, they live what they do. Their identity is the wellspring of their ability to create social learning spaces. And as with artists, their contribution often goes unnoticed. We need a language for talking about their art and their contribution. The world will be a better place when their subtle form of leadership is recognized as the key for developing the array of social learning capabilities we urgently need today.

As we participate in different social learning spaces our actions affect those spaces. They also affect the people we interact with. And those people belong to other social spaces. So our own learning behavior can affect the learning capability of a whole landscape of learning spaces.

The notion of learning citizenship brings an ethical dimension to learning. How we decide to act as learning citizens affects the world around. It enhances or decreases the learning capability of the social systems we are part of. Because learning citizenship is anchored in the experience of who we are in the world and uses our identity as source of leadership, we could call it an “ethics of identity”.

Organizations need to start recognizing, fostering, and supporting learning citizenship as a way to increase their learning capability and fostering and spreading innovation. Workers can act as learning citizens when they make decisions that affect the learning capability of their surroundings. Say you are a bridge engineer in a company, and the bridge engineers in your organization are spread all over the world and don’t talk to each other very much. As a worker, you’d say, “I have all this work to do; I don’t have time for anything else.” As a learning citizen, you’d say, “This organization is not maximizing its learning capability. We need to put some energy into making sure we engineers form a community and learn from each other.” We would call doing that an act of “learning citizenship.” That brings a new dimension to the definition of work. But right now it is something that is not recognized in most organizations. There is not even a language to talk about it. We would say, your most valuable employee is your best learning citizen.

That’s what we mean by social learning spaces:

…social containers that enable genuine interactions among participants, who can bring to the learning table both their experience of practice and their experience of themselves in that practice.

Not all attempts to bring people together to learn create social learning spaces! They involve a social discipline of learning, a spirit of learning citizenship, and often the skills of a social artist.

Opening new social learning spaces, when they work well, is a key intervention for increasing the learning capability of a social system.

Participation in this project crystallized some initial thoughts on social learning capability, which are captured here. The topic is now becoming a major thrust of our work.

Contents

Download

You can download a PDF version of the paper in English here:

A portuguese translation is also available:

Citation

Wenger, E. (2009) Social learning capability: four essays on innovation and learning in social systems. Social Innovation, Sociedade e Trabalho. Booklets 12 – separate supplement, MTSS/GEP & EQUAL Portugal, Lisbon.