CHAPTER 3: Learning

"learning as a characteristic of practice" (86)

The concept of learning is not absent from the claims processing office, but it is used mainly for trainees. And yet, when I posed the question directly to them, claims processors all agreed that they were learning continually. One reason they do not think of their job as learning is that what they learn is their practice. Learning is not reified as an extraneous goal or as a special category of activity or membership. Their practice is not merely a context for learning something else. Engagement in practice--in its unfolding, multidimensional complexity--is both the stage and the object, the road and the destination. What htey learn is not a static subject matter but the very process of being engaged in, and participating in developing, an ongoing practice. (95)

We wanted to point out that the required learning takes place not so much through the reification of a curriculum as through modified forms of participation that are structured to open the practice to nonmembers. (100)

...there is a big difference between a lesson that is about the practice but takes place outside of it, and explanations and stories that are part of the practice and take place within it. (100)

To open up a practice, peripheral participation must provide access to all three dimensions of practice: to mutual engagement with other members, to their actions and their negotiation of the enterprise, and to the repertoire in use. No matter how the peripherality of initial participation is achieved, it must engage newcomers and provide a sense of how the community operates. Note that the curriculum is then the community of practice itself. Teachers, masters, and specific role models can be important, but it is by virtue of their membership in the community as a whole that they can play their roles. (100)

Practice is a shared history of learning that requires some catching up for joining. It is not an object to be handed down from one generation to the next. Practice is an ongoing, social, interactional process and the introduction of newcomers is merely a version of what practice already is. That members interact, do things together, negotiate new meanings, and learn from each other is already inherent in practice--that is how practices evolve. In other words, communities of practice reproduce their membership in the same way that they come about in the first place. They share their competence with new generations through a version of the same process by which they develop. Special measures may be taken to open up the practice to newcomers, but the process of learning is not essentially different. (102)