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Communities of Practice: Fostering Peer-to-Peer Learning and Informal Knowledge Sharing in the Work Place
1.1 Introduction Each year corporations spend millions of dollars training and educating their - ployees. On average, these corporations spend approximately one thousand dollars 1 per employee each year. As businesses struggle to stay on the cutting-edge and to keep their employees educated and up-to-speed with professional trends as well as ever-changing information needs, it is easy to see why corporations are investing more time and money than ever in their efforts to support their employees’ prof- sional development. During the Industrial Age, companies strove to control natural resources. The more resources they controlled, the greater their competitive edge in the mark- place. Senge (1993) refers to this kind of organization as resource-based. In the Information Age, companies must create, disseminate, and effectively use kno- edge within their organization in order to maintain their market share. Senge - scribes this kind of organization as knowledge-based. Given that knowledge-based organizations willcontinuetobeadrivingforcebehindtheeconomy, itisimperative that corporations support the knowledge and information needs of their workers.
- GenresEducation
150 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2008
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May 12, 2021
I’m working on a project at work that has involved me writing a number of papers with work colleagues on things I only know a little bit about. And so that has involved me in having to learn more about those things in a fairly short time. Truth be told, that is the bit of the job that I like the most. One of the things I’ve needed to swat up on fairly quickly is the idea of communities of practice and the role that case studies play in these. I’d read Situated Learning a few years ago, but I didn't make the connection that this was, more or less, one of the places where the whole movement towards communities of practice had come from. I’d seen many of the dots, I just hadn’t realised they joined together.
This book has helped more dots together. But, like perhaps too many of my reviews, this one is going to be a bit more personal than might seem obvious for a book called Communities of Practice: Fostering peer-to-peer learning and informal knowledge sharing in the work place. In fact, this book has made two of my lives come crashing into each other in ways I really wasn’t expecting when I started reading it.
It wouldn’t be in the least bit outrageous to say that a big reason for me being in my current job was my overwhelming desire to no longer be in my previous job. My previous job was as an industrial officer in a trade union. It would be fair to say, if you were particularly fond of understatement, that I didn’t particularly like my previous job. I’m still very supportive of trade unions, but after 20 years of being active in the movement, and 8 of those employed full time in a union, and about two more years working full time at my workplace as the local union rat bag, it really was time to try something else. When I made my jump, (and as Arden says, look if you like, but you have to leap) I had no idea it would bring me to where I now am – working at a university in educational research. But, you know, as my mate Pontius Pilate like to say, ecce homo.
What the hell has any of this got to do with a book on communities of practice, you ask. Well, this book is centred around the community of practice in a very particular work place – a public defenders’ office in the US – and I’d never really made the connection between working as a union industrial officer and that of a public defender.
The first and most obvious connection – well, to me anyway – is that both roles are quite disrespected. One of the first things said in this book on the public perception of public defenders is a quote from Lethal Weapon 4 (which is something else I learnt from this book, there was more than one of those films – holy shit – you people really are sick) where one of the police is arresting someone and the policeman reads him his rights, “You have a right to remain silent. You’ve got a right to hire an attorney. If you can’t afford an attorney, we will provide you with the dumbest fucking lawyer on Earth.” And you bastards watch this shit - dear God...
And just like industrial officers, despite us often knowing that we were held in contempt by both management and by those we were representing, we often do the job, not for the money, but out of a sense of the moral value of the role. The problem is that it is hard to sustain that sense of the moral worth when you are worked to within an inch of your life and you are representing people you might rather not - like the guy I represented once accused of providing an under-age girl heroin in exchange for sex, fun times...
As someone I worked with once expressed it, a lot of the job is like juggling – you throw a ball away knowing it is going to come back again and you will need to catch it, and throw it up again. It is just that the next time it might have turned into one of those Medieval weapons that look like a ball, but have metal spikes sticking out of them. But you are so over worked and have so little time to deal with anything, that inevitably, things constantly explode in your face. Eventually, you have to stop caring or you will go insane, but to not care means losing the bit of your humanity that kept you in the job in the first place. If unions are different from public defenders offices it is in unions being highly, highly political – especially in Australia where they are used by arseholes (aka, members of the ALP) as their way into parliament. But I digress.
The other thing that is remarkably similar between the roles is how the people you are defending seem to think it is in their best interests to not tell you what they are in trouble about. One of the lawyers in this has a really interesting technique for dealing with this issue – brute (brutal) honesty. Once I was representing someone and I asked her what she had done. She refused to tell me. She literally said she would prefer I didn’t know. I struggle with this even now, so much so that I almost feel like I'm making it up. I said to her that I would be the only person in the room who didn’t know what she had done and that would make it impossible for me to defend her – besides which, her boss would almost certainly tell me as the very first thing after 'Hello Mr McCandless, did you have a pleasant drive over here?' She still refused to tell me. This was just the most extreme case, but time and time again the people I was representing would lie to me about what they had done – this never worked out well for them, as often the advice I could give generally required me having some version of the story that wasn’t total shit. Who would have thought that the person defending you might need to know what they were defending? Crazy, hey?
I’m going to give you a couple of pieces of free advice – one is, never lie to the person defending you. I know you think you are smarter than they are, but this is their day job, there are rules to this game and you are unlikely to know them, even if you get into trouble a lot, in fact, there's a hint in there too, if you think about it. As a lawyer once said to me, 'There should be only one person lying in that room, and that should be me'. I rarely lied for members, but at least if I was doing the lying, I would know I was lying and would keep my story straight – for most of the members I represented who lied, I was the only one in the room who was pretending not to notice. The other piece of advice I can give you is join your union – but look, if you need to be told the second piece of advice, you are probably too stupid to follow the first piece of advice.
This book is particularly interesting in that it shows that communities of practice are almost always formed bottom up, rather than top down. They can’t really be ‘imposed’ on people, not if they are going to work. The main idea of a community of practice is that there is a lot that you can learn from the theory behind some practice – I work in a university, I would say that, wouldn't I? – but most learning occurs within a context, and contexts and situations are different and hard to generalise. That is, while rules-of-thumb seek to be universal, what you need to do right now is always particular – and so the rule-of-thumb never quite fits the current situation. A community of practice is useful in this case, not because the other members of the community will have been through exactly the same situation you are currently faced with, but because their experience will have provided them with a series of possible solutions worth trying or at least things to think about.
The other thing about communities of practice is that they are generally non-hierarchical. I hadn’t thought about this before, but I think it is true. Obviously, the people with the most experience are likely to also have the best ideas, but this isn’t always the case, and communities of practice that always defer to the most experienced aren't really communities of practice. One of the things I was told when I started my Master of Teaching degree was that many supervising teachers liked engaging with pre-service teachers because it was an opportunity for them to see what advice was being given to beginning teachers by the universities. At the time I thought this was likely to be horse-shit, but I’m not as sure now. Certainly, in any community of practice worth its name it is possible for a master to learn from an apprentice.
I wasn’t expecting to be as affected by this book as I have been – it has brought together parts of my life I have spent most of the last 10 years or so keeping apart – all the same, it makes a strong case for how communities of practice work and the conditions that make them most effective. Too much of educational theory assumes a simple transmission of knowledge between those who know to those who do not know. Communities of practice imply something quite different to this, something much more dynamic and much harder to pin down in a simple flow diagram.
This book has helped more dots together. But, like perhaps too many of my reviews, this one is going to be a bit more personal than might seem obvious for a book called Communities of Practice: Fostering peer-to-peer learning and informal knowledge sharing in the work place. In fact, this book has made two of my lives come crashing into each other in ways I really wasn’t expecting when I started reading it.
It wouldn’t be in the least bit outrageous to say that a big reason for me being in my current job was my overwhelming desire to no longer be in my previous job. My previous job was as an industrial officer in a trade union. It would be fair to say, if you were particularly fond of understatement, that I didn’t particularly like my previous job. I’m still very supportive of trade unions, but after 20 years of being active in the movement, and 8 of those employed full time in a union, and about two more years working full time at my workplace as the local union rat bag, it really was time to try something else. When I made my jump, (and as Arden says, look if you like, but you have to leap) I had no idea it would bring me to where I now am – working at a university in educational research. But, you know, as my mate Pontius Pilate like to say, ecce homo.
What the hell has any of this got to do with a book on communities of practice, you ask. Well, this book is centred around the community of practice in a very particular work place – a public defenders’ office in the US – and I’d never really made the connection between working as a union industrial officer and that of a public defender.
The first and most obvious connection – well, to me anyway – is that both roles are quite disrespected. One of the first things said in this book on the public perception of public defenders is a quote from Lethal Weapon 4 (which is something else I learnt from this book, there was more than one of those films – holy shit – you people really are sick) where one of the police is arresting someone and the policeman reads him his rights, “You have a right to remain silent. You’ve got a right to hire an attorney. If you can’t afford an attorney, we will provide you with the dumbest fucking lawyer on Earth.” And you bastards watch this shit - dear God...
And just like industrial officers, despite us often knowing that we were held in contempt by both management and by those we were representing, we often do the job, not for the money, but out of a sense of the moral value of the role. The problem is that it is hard to sustain that sense of the moral worth when you are worked to within an inch of your life and you are representing people you might rather not - like the guy I represented once accused of providing an under-age girl heroin in exchange for sex, fun times...
As someone I worked with once expressed it, a lot of the job is like juggling – you throw a ball away knowing it is going to come back again and you will need to catch it, and throw it up again. It is just that the next time it might have turned into one of those Medieval weapons that look like a ball, but have metal spikes sticking out of them. But you are so over worked and have so little time to deal with anything, that inevitably, things constantly explode in your face. Eventually, you have to stop caring or you will go insane, but to not care means losing the bit of your humanity that kept you in the job in the first place. If unions are different from public defenders offices it is in unions being highly, highly political – especially in Australia where they are used by arseholes (aka, members of the ALP) as their way into parliament. But I digress.
The other thing that is remarkably similar between the roles is how the people you are defending seem to think it is in their best interests to not tell you what they are in trouble about. One of the lawyers in this has a really interesting technique for dealing with this issue – brute (brutal) honesty. Once I was representing someone and I asked her what she had done. She refused to tell me. She literally said she would prefer I didn’t know. I struggle with this even now, so much so that I almost feel like I'm making it up. I said to her that I would be the only person in the room who didn’t know what she had done and that would make it impossible for me to defend her – besides which, her boss would almost certainly tell me as the very first thing after 'Hello Mr McCandless, did you have a pleasant drive over here?' She still refused to tell me. This was just the most extreme case, but time and time again the people I was representing would lie to me about what they had done – this never worked out well for them, as often the advice I could give generally required me having some version of the story that wasn’t total shit. Who would have thought that the person defending you might need to know what they were defending? Crazy, hey?
I’m going to give you a couple of pieces of free advice – one is, never lie to the person defending you. I know you think you are smarter than they are, but this is their day job, there are rules to this game and you are unlikely to know them, even if you get into trouble a lot, in fact, there's a hint in there too, if you think about it. As a lawyer once said to me, 'There should be only one person lying in that room, and that should be me'. I rarely lied for members, but at least if I was doing the lying, I would know I was lying and would keep my story straight – for most of the members I represented who lied, I was the only one in the room who was pretending not to notice. The other piece of advice I can give you is join your union – but look, if you need to be told the second piece of advice, you are probably too stupid to follow the first piece of advice.
This book is particularly interesting in that it shows that communities of practice are almost always formed bottom up, rather than top down. They can’t really be ‘imposed’ on people, not if they are going to work. The main idea of a community of practice is that there is a lot that you can learn from the theory behind some practice – I work in a university, I would say that, wouldn't I? – but most learning occurs within a context, and contexts and situations are different and hard to generalise. That is, while rules-of-thumb seek to be universal, what you need to do right now is always particular – and so the rule-of-thumb never quite fits the current situation. A community of practice is useful in this case, not because the other members of the community will have been through exactly the same situation you are currently faced with, but because their experience will have provided them with a series of possible solutions worth trying or at least things to think about.
The other thing about communities of practice is that they are generally non-hierarchical. I hadn’t thought about this before, but I think it is true. Obviously, the people with the most experience are likely to also have the best ideas, but this isn’t always the case, and communities of practice that always defer to the most experienced aren't really communities of practice. One of the things I was told when I started my Master of Teaching degree was that many supervising teachers liked engaging with pre-service teachers because it was an opportunity for them to see what advice was being given to beginning teachers by the universities. At the time I thought this was likely to be horse-shit, but I’m not as sure now. Certainly, in any community of practice worth its name it is possible for a master to learn from an apprentice.
I wasn’t expecting to be as affected by this book as I have been – it has brought together parts of my life I have spent most of the last 10 years or so keeping apart – all the same, it makes a strong case for how communities of practice work and the conditions that make them most effective. Too much of educational theory assumes a simple transmission of knowledge between those who know to those who do not know. Communities of practice imply something quite different to this, something much more dynamic and much harder to pin down in a simple flow diagram.
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