Learning Architectures in Higher Education: Beyond Communities of Practice 9781474261692, 9781474261722, 9781474261708

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Learning Architectures in Higher Education

Also available from Bloomsbury Learning Communities in Educational Partnerships, Máirín Glenn, Mary Roche, Caitriona McDonagh and Bernie Sullivan Reflective Teaching in Higher Education, Paul Ashwin

Learning Architectures in Higher Education Beyond Communities of Practice Jonathan Tummons

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2018 Paperback edition first published 2020 Copyright © Jonathan Tummons, 2018 Jonathan Tummons has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. vi constitute an extension of this copyright page. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-4742-6169-2 PB: 978-1-3501-3097-5 ePDF: 978-1-4742-6170-8 ePub: 978-1-4742-6171-5 Typeset by Newgen KnowledgeWorks Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents Acknowledgements 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Communities of Practice Communities of Practice in Higher Education Learning and Assessment in Communities of Practice Necessary Extensions, Part 1 – Actor-Network Theory, and Literacy Studies Necessary Extensions, Part 2 – Threshold Concepts, and Activity Theory Learning Architectures in Higher Education Learning Architectures in Teacher Training Learning Architectures in Medical Education Two Conclusions Coda

References Index

vi 1 17 35 53 73 93 109 127 145 151 159 177

Acknowledgements I should like to acknowledge a number of truly magnificent friends and colleagues who have provided me with words of encouragement as well as opportunities for listening and talking: at Durham, Oakleigh Welply, Rille Raaper, Julie Rattray, Doug Newton and Michelle Wilkinson; at Dalhousie, Anna MacLeod and Olga Kits; at Northumbria, Liz Atkins and Sean McCusker; at Huddersfield, Kevin Orr and Lisa Russell; at Teesside, Ewan Ingleby and Clive Hedges; and at Edge Hill, Vicky Duckworth. I continue to acknowledge my debt to and gratitude towards Mary Hamilton at Lancaster and to David Lamburn, now at Warwick but formerly at the School of Continuing Education at Leeds. During the final stages of writing this book, I was fortunate enough to be able to attend – at the last minute – an impromptu seminar organized by Paul Keen (Carleton) and Cynthia Sugars (Ottowa), also attended by Andy Shrimpton and Pete Kilbane (both York), and Guy Street (London): my thanks to all of them. Many thanks are also due to Alison Baker, Maria Giovanna Brauzzi and Camilla Erskine at Bloomsbury. As always, my greatest debt is to Jo, Alex and Eleanor. This book is for my father, Peter Tummons, and in memory of my mother, Faith Tummons. My mum might not have read all of it, and she certainly would have teased me lightly about some of the vocabulary that I have used, but she would have been proud to put a copy on her bookshelf.

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Introduction In this chapter I  introduce two linked topics for discussion:  communities of practice and learning through legitimate peripheral participation (LPP). I provide a working definition of each of these and briefly outline some of their more problematic aspects: as the book continues, a more sustained exploration will emerge. I also provide a first indication of some of the different theoretical and conceptual approaches that different writers (including myself) have drawn on in order to solve some of the problems that are latent in communities of practice theory. The aim of this first chapter, therefore, is to set the scene for what follows, to provide a quick but nonetheless critically aware overview of our topics, and to begin to open up both communities of practice and LPP to a more detailed investigation.

Introducing communities of practice I start with a list of stuff that people do. Some of these things are jobs, others are hobbies or pastimes and some are everyday activities that count as work (in the sense that ‘work’ can be any kind of purposeful and effortful activity) even if they do not attract remuneration. Here is the list: amateur radio operators; athletes; recovering alcoholics; high-school teachers of mathematics; adult learners in a basic skills class; office managers; trainee nurses on placement; butchers; human resources officials; researchers; people who are unemployed; vocational trainers; architects; and higher education (HE) lecturers. These are some things that people do that have been written about, researched and theorized through reference to communities of practice. That is to say, researchers and writers (including me) have written about these (and

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many other) more or less discrete or straightforwardly definable groups of people who do particular jobs, have particular hobbies, or otherwise share particular kinds of work or practice in the world, and have theorized what these people do, how they talk, what tools or objects they make and use, and, most importantly, how they learn, using theoretical perspectives and concepts derived from a large, and ever-growing, body of work that, for the sake of simplicity, I shall refer to as being based on communities of practice theory. So we might find references to a community of practice for ‘university-based teacher educators’ (Herrington et al., 2008), communities of practice ‘in inclusive education’ (Mortier et al., 2010) or a community of practice in a ‘secondary mathematics classroom’ (Goos, 2004). It is a highly influential theory (if ‘theory’ is what it is – it might be a ‘concept’ or a ‘framework’, or something else entirely) and a popular one as well. It is also a troublesome theory, a theory that is used badly as often as it is used well. But I go on to argue that this is also the case with the use of several other theories in HE research and practice. And it is important to reflect on the fact that it is an attractive theory, which may well explain elements of its popularity. The term ‘community of practice’ seems to be quite straightforward for people to pick up and use. I have lost count of the number of conference presentations that I have listened to or journal articles that I have read that set out to explore a community of practice, to investigate how one might be established, or to provide an account for how being in one might contribute to education, learning or the transfer of knowledge. It seems right to say that if a proposed theoretical framework that is based on empirical study can accommodate practices as diverse as some of those that I  have listed above, then to go about dismantling that same theoretical framework must be seen as being of questionable value, not to say wisdom: a framework that can be employed so straightforwardly across so many different contexts must be doing something right. But at the same time it seems right to pause for a moment and consider that if we have a theory that can be used to make sense of practices as diverse as those listed above, then does that mean that the theory is being used indiscriminately, or that it is too big or too diffuse? Does it make sense to use the same theoretical framework to explore how apprentice tailors learn their craft, how university lecturers learn to grade essays or how office managers leverage innovation within their organizations? These all seem to me to be rather different from each other. And even if we focus specifically on HE, the range of contexts that has been explored through communities

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of practice theory seems remarkable. Recent research has focused on academic disciplines (architecture, education, linguistics, psychology) as well as academic work (assessment moderation, curriculum reform, online learning, staff development). Even just a cursory glance through the literature indicates a considerable variety in the kinds of practices and communities that have been researched and written about. This variety extends to the meaning that is attached to the term ‘community of practice’, however, and this is the first complication that we need to address. This complication has been created and then exacerbated by those researchers and writers who have used the term ‘community of practice’ in more or less robust ways, for example, in describing a group of people as a community of practice but without providing an account as to why they are a community of practice, or in focusing so much on the community that the learning that is happening – and it is a theory of learning – gets left to one side. Perhaps a more difficult problem lies in the fact that one of the begetters of the theory has fundamentally changed his definition and understanding of what a ‘community of practice’ actually is (Farnsworth et al., 2016; Lave and Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998, 2000; Wenger et al., 2002; Wenger-Trayner et al., 2014). In order to make sense of these differing and sometimes conflicting ideas, it seems sensible to spend some time thinking about what a community of practice actually is, and how thinking about them can help us to understand learning as a social practice. As well as helping us to focus once again on learning (which is what the theory is all about), such an account can also provide the context for the empirical contribution to the conversation about communities of practice that I wish to make in this book, namely, that through a focus on Etienne Wenger’s concept of learning architecture we can find creative as well as theoretically robust ways to think about learning and teaching in universities. Learning architecture is a component of Wenger’s original (1998) theorization, and it is this iteration of communities of practice theory that this book rests on more broadly (although not without some criticisms and reservations). In order to fully unpack the problems of defining our key terms, it is necessary at different points to consider how the later iterations of communities of practice differ from the original, and place their emphases on different aspects of learning within quite different social and organizational contexts. But I start with a brief account of what I think communities of practice are and how learning as a social practice within communities of practice can be understood, before moving on to consider some of the problems that these ideas bring with them (Tummons, 2012, 2014a).

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What are communities of practice? When introduced by Jean Lave and Wenger in their book Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation, the term ‘community of practice’ was left relatively unexplored, only loosely defined as a ‘largely intuitive notion’ that required further investigation (1991:  42). Arguably, the term was introduced as a by-product of their more sustained analysis of learning as legitimate peripheral participation (which was in fact the focus of the book, and to which I shortly return), in order to create some sense of the kinds of cultural and social places where learning might happen. How a community of practice might be identified, described or defined, or questions relating to what the constituent components or characteristics of such communities might be, were only later explored in depth by Wenger (1998). So, what are communities of practice and where might we find them? Communities of practice are everywhere. We are all members of multiple communities of practice. Some of these communities work in relative isolation, while some overlap with others. Sometimes we actively seek out membership, but at other times we are not even aware that we are members of a particular community. As people in a social world, we engage in all kinds of activities – practices – as part of our everyday lives, interacting with other people, sometimes in close proximity and sometimes at a distance or by proxy: at work, at play, with families or with friends. In order to take part in these various practices people come together in communities so that they can talk about, share and learn more about them. These communities of practice can be found in formal, institutionalized settings and in informal, vernacular ones. Lave and Wenger’s examples include tailors, midwives and butchers (1991). Wenger’s examples include amateur radio operators, recovering alcoholics and office-based computer users (1998). In some communities, members meet and talk on a regular basis; in others, they meet only infrequently. Some communities have existed for a long time; others are relatively new. Some communities establish and sustain close relations with others, sharing aspects of their practice, while others are relatively selfsufficient. All communities of practice, however, share one characteristic: they are all socially configured spaces that necessarily involve learning as an aspect of membership. That is to say, for any member of any community of practice, learning is an ever-present aspect of participation – even if the learning is unintentional, or the member in question does not realize that they are learning. In his later book, Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning and Identity, Wenger takes the time to point out that not all communities of people are

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‘communities of practice’. It is perfectly possible for groups of people to come together in all kinds of ways in the social world without being part of, or forming, a community of practice. Therefore, in order to identify whether a community is in fact a community of practice, Wenger outlined a number of specific structural qualities that form around any such community. Three such qualities, or attributes, need to be looked for and, I  would suggest, richly described:  mutual engagement, joint enterprise and shared repertoire (Wenger, 1998: 73–85). Mutual engagement is the term used by Wenger to refer to all of those ways through which the members of a community of practice interact with each other and do whatever they do. Members of a community might engage with others in a complementary manner or an overlapping manner, depending on the relative competence and positions that they occupy: some people are newbies, and others are more expert; some people pick up and learn new things quite quickly, while others take longer. Mutual engagement can take different forms: in some communities, engagement might always be done on a face-to-face basis; in others, it might involve talking on the telephone as well as face to face, or chatting over Skype, or posting messages on Facebook or Twitter. Mutual engagement might require talking, writing and reading (on screen, on paper), listening, moving or making. Because working together creates differences as well as similarities, mutual engagement is never homogeneous. Members do not have to agree with each other all the time: in fact, change is a constant element of many, if not all, communities of practice. Things can be done, adjusted, argued over, tried differently or spoken about in various ways so long as these are, in the end, reconcilable to the joint enterprise of the community of practice. Joint enterprise refers to the shared work or endeavour of the community of practice – the thing or stuff that the community is about. So long as all the members keep that work in mind, community cohesion can be established and maintained. The joint enterprise of a community might involve a specific activity that entails physical effort, mental effort emotional effort, or – probably more likely – any combination of these. It might involve a small number of people who meet up in the same physical location on a monthly basis, or a larger number of people who communicate through a variety of means. In a way, it does not matter exactly how many people might be involved or how often they meet up or speak with each other: what is important is that they all stick to the job at hand, that they all continue to engage in practice in order to sustain, change or otherwise maintain the joint enterprise of the community. Doing the work of the community might require people to write things down, to take part in shared and routinized activities, to watch and comment on tasks,

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or to make or break different kinds of items, artefacts or bodies of materials. In order to engage in practice, therefore, members draw on the habits, discourses, routines, ways of talking, tools, structures and other artefacts that over time have been created or adopted by a community of practice: the shared repertoire of the community. Such structures and artefacts serve a number of functions. They allow the members of a community to make statements about their practice, to express their identities within the community, and they represent the history of mutual engagement within the community. The repertoire can be seen as taking aspects of the practices of a community and turning them into solid forms – a process that is called reification (to reify something means to turn a concept or mental construct into a physical thing – for example, abstract notions of justice can be reified into statutes, which can then be written down and passed around). The repertoire can also be seen as reflecting the different ways in which members engage in practice, so members draw on the repertoire of the community in differential ways as they learn. Newcomers probably will not know how all the tools or routines work at first, and so part of their learning within the community will include coming to know how the artefacts of the community work and can be used. This three-part model based on mutual engagement, joint enterprise and shared repertoire seems, at first look, to provide us with a helpful – and straightforwardto-operationalize – framework to ascertain the extent to which a collection of people, all engaged in some kinds of action, constitutes a community of practice. Indeed, it seems to be sufficiently straightforward to beg the question as to why it is not used more often in academic literature when people describe something as a community of practice (and then go on to drop in a reference to Wenger (1998)). I earlier suggested that the use of this three-part model would simply require the researcher to look for and richly describe each element: this is merely a reflection of the anthropological and ethnographic roots of the landmark books written by Lave and Wenger, and Wenger. But all too often we find collections of people or groups of practices described as being a ‘community of practice’, without any serious attempt to establish why they are so. In circumstances such as these, we find the phenomenon of poor or uncritical use of theory (Thomas, 2007). At the same time, we find a number of theoretical problems and questions that Lave and Wenger, and Wenger have opened up but failed to provide full answers to, and which other people have followed up instead. What about the power relations between members as they engage in practice? How diffuse can joint enterprise be while still being coherent enough to sustain a community? What can or cannot be done with the tools, artefacts, rules and routines

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of a community? What do we mean when we talk about ‘community’? What is ‘practice’? These are indeed difficult problems to consider: on the one hand, we have a theory being poorly considered, badly used and misunderstood; and on the other, a theory that does not necessarily stand up to rigorous scrutiny and that raises questions as to its coherence and ability to address the problems that it raises. And in both cases, it is something to do with the use of theory that needs to be addressed.

Interlude: Theory use in higher education research Issues surrounding the variable use of theory in HE research are well established in the literature (Tight, 2004), and I briefly touch on two key themes here (but I return to these from time to time in later chapters). The first problem to consider is the definition of ‘theory’, a word that is used in different ways. For James Paul Gee, a theory is a body of generalizations, which can be drawn together to offer explanations and descriptions of the phenomena being researched, which in turn inform peoples’ beliefs about things (1996:  16). Malcolm Tight has argued that theories are suppositions that explain something, or seek to explain it, and posits theory as the ability to explain or understand the findings of research within a conceptual framework (2004: 399). Paul Ashwin, likewise, has positioned theory as informing the conceptualization of research: the framing of research questions, the analysis of the data that is created through the research process and understanding the significance of the findings that are drawn. At the same time he warns against using theory to structure research in such a way that the research simply consists of a tautological restatement of the theory in question (2009: 133). Our problem, simply put, is that ‘theory’ is, all too often, poorly defined and poorly operationalized (Thomas, 2007). If the first problem is defining theory, then the second problem is how it is used and written about. Here I consider the second problem in two ways. The first rests in the relationship between theory and research. Martyn Hammersley (2008) has argued that one of the failings of qualitative research during the last five decades and more (my own research is undoubtedly ‘qualitative’, but I reject the spurious divide between qualitative and quantitative research) is the failure of qualitative researchers to develop and then test theory in a systematic manner, a failure that he links to the broader issue of generalizability (and, specifically, the lack thereof) in qualitative research. The second way in which I  want to

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consider this problem is through thinking about the ways in which some people write about and cite from or refer to theory that sees theory treated as a veneer, a layer of sometimes needlessly complex language, sometimes dropped into an empirical study with relatively little thought as to its applicability or relevance. This has resulted in what Gary Thomas has described as a use of theory now superseded by an excess of theory talk, erroneously used to claim ‘epistemological legitimacy and explanatory commentary’ (2007: 85).

Back to communities of practice There is not much that can be done with those studies that simply throw a ‘community of practice’ label onto some empirical work and hope for the best, other than to highlight these as examples of theory talk, rather than research that rests on a robust and critical reading of communities of practice. Fortunately, our other problem can be addressed in a more comprehensive manner: many excellent studies have sought to explore what might be termed the ‘problematic elements’ of communities of practice theory and these draw on other theoretical perspectives seen as being compatible with the work done by Lave and Wenger, and Wenger. The analysis of power relations within communities of practice has been explored from a Foucauldian perspective, and from the perspective of actor-network theory (Fox, 2000, 2005). The strength  – or otherwise – of a community has been explored through network analysis (Jewson, 2007). The creation and use of artefacts, specifically text-based artefacts, have been expanded through the theoretical insights of literacy studies (Barton and Hamilton, 2005). Later, I discuss these and other ways of moving within and beyond communities of practice in more detail. For now, however, I want to take a step back from communities of practice and focus on learning.

Learning: Legitimate peripheral participation in communities of practice Lave and Wenger’s book, published in 1991, in which the ‘community of practice’ is first, and somewhat loosely, defined, is not about communities of practice at all; rather, it is about learning. Specifically, it is about a particular model of learning that they called legitimate peripheral participation, and that they derived from ethnographic research across a range of contexts (some of which was only

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published much later (Lave, 2011)). Lave and Wenger were interested in generating a descriptor of learning that foregrounded engagement in social practice. Learning, they argued, is an integral element of social practice, a practice that involves the whole person, rather than being ‘simply’ a cognitive function. They described learning as an improvised practice, not relying on any formal intention to teach or otherwise construct a curriculum. Instead, drawing on a broader social ontology and epistemology as well as more specifically on apprenticeship models of learning within a Vygotskian tradition, they suggested that learning happens as a consequence of participation in any social practice, but with two necessary preconditions: first, that the participation had to be legitimate – that is, authentic and meaningful and not a simulation or simulacrum of the things to be learned; and second, that the participation had to be peripheral  – that is, at a level appropriate to the newcomer, or apprentice, at the start of their practice. If some of these ways of thinking about learning seem perhaps to be lacking in specificity or in authoritative detail, then that is because they are (see also Hughes et al., 2007: 4), and both the central concept of learning through LPP and the associated concept of the community of practice as the social place where learning happens and is afforded to people (only briefly touched on by Lave and Wenger) remain in need of more thorough explication. The vocabulary of newcomers and apprentices, and of old-timers and masters, highlights quite straightforwardly the ancestral traces of different models of apprenticeship learning that underpin Lave and Wenger’s work. At the same time, the social ontology and epistemology that their work rests on can be traced to a body of wider research work that has sought more broadly to shift theories of learning – in relation to children as well as adults, and formal as well as informal educational structures or contexts – from a psychological to a sociocultural perspective (Brown et al., 1989; Chaiklin and Lave, 1996; Cobb, 1994; Lave, 1988; Rogoff, 1990). For Lave and Wenger, learning happens when people participate in practice: indeed, if people are participating in practice, then learning cannot not happen. As a sociocultural phenomenon, learning through LPP involves and entails changes to the whole person, and how she or he acts and moves within the social world. Learning changes how people think, act and speak: it changes people’s identities within their community. Consequently, as members become more expert in the practice of the community, they draw on, employ and even enhance the repertoire, tools and artefacts of the community in an increasingly fluent and expert manner. Their participation, within the community, becomes more full. Alongside an extensive literature that seeks to explore or unpack the concept of the community of practice, there is a somewhat smaller body of literature that

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seeks to critique Lave and Wenger’s conceptualization of learning as LPP. In a way this is not surprising: books and articles about different theories or frameworks of learning are plentiful, and if we accept that communities of practice rest on a sociocultural model of learning, then it is a straightforward task to conflate an exploration of communities of practice with an exploration of social practice accounts of learning more widely (Illeris, 2007). That is to say, we can look beyond communities of practice literature for insight into the processes of learning that take place within a community of practice, including those aspects of learning that Lave and Wenger, and Wenger, do not explicate as fully as we might like or require. I return to these themes in more detail in later chapters, but it is worth mentioning a few key questions at this time (although these have to wait before we can answer them more fully). Lave and Wenger (1991) assume that peripheral participation always leads to full participation: but what if full participation is not the intended goal of the participant, or is kept – perhaps deliberately, perhaps accidentally – out of the participant’s reach (Lemke, 1997)? Is the learning of full members the ‘same’ as for new members of a community (Fuller et al., 2005)? Lave and Wenger (1991) refute any sense that learning can be easily divided up into ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ practices, but might it be the case that the context in which the learning is happening (and context is central to a social theory of learning) makes a difference (Boud and Middleton, 2003)? Or is there a more fundamental problem with the theory of LPP, namely, that as a theory it explains what is done and not what is learned (Edwards, 2005)? However, perhaps the most worrisome aspect of their theory  – at least, as far as this book is concerned, as well as many other books and articles – is their stark refutation of formal pedagogy, in terms of curriculum, of professors, of a language of instruction, even of institutions. For Lave and Wenger, the organization of any formal educational institution (they refer to ‘schooling’, but the point is straightforward to generalize (Lave and Wenger, 1991: 40)) rests on the very kind of individual, cognitive, psychological model of learning that they, in their rich and ethnographic study of different forms of apprenticeship, are seeking to move away from. LPP is not a classroom strategy. If there is to be a curriculum, then it should be a learning curriculum consisting of authentic resources viewed from the learners’ perspectives, and not a teaching curriculum designed by others, which would serve only to limit rather than to expand opportunities for authentic participation (ibid., 93–98). And there is to be no special discourse ‘corresponding to the . . . lecturing of college professors’ (ibid., 108), designed to be a vehicle for instruction.

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Elsewhere, I  have referred to this as the pedagogy problem (Tummons, 2014a), and it is a problem that needs to be addressed – arguably, more extensively than is currently the case. Those articles and books that focus on what we can conveniently term ‘informal contexts for learning’ need not worry. But, surely, for all those studies that use Lave and Wenger, and Wenger to underpin studies of formal educational structures  – whether these are adult basic skills sessions, elementary mathematics classes or university-level business studies programmes  – the pedagogy problem needs to be considered? Does the lack of such a consideration speak to the broader problem of theory use that I have already referred to? In his later book, Wenger goes on to provide a concept that can allow us to address this problem: the concept of learning architecture, a concept that has been used only infrequently by other writers. I shall, of course, be returning to learning architecture later in this book. For now, it is sufficient to recognize that within Wenger’s work there are ways of thinking about formal as well as informal education and training: they simply need – and deserve – to be read, critiqued and applied more frequently than is currently the case.

One community or many? One of the key tenets of many theories of learning is transfer: that is, if we learn something in one place or about one particular thing, then we can transfer that learning to a different, perhaps new, setting, context or application. If we subscribe to LPP specifically, or to a broader sociocultural turn in theorizing learning more generally, then we can make sense of this problem in terms of the whole person. That is, if we understand learning as concerning the whole person as a social actor in the world and not simply as a process of individualized internalization of bodies or schema of knowledge, then we need to think about transfer in terms of people moving within and across different social spaces, rather than thinking about how an individual person might restructure decontextualized knowledge as a process of individual cognition. Fortunately, communities of practice do not exist in isolation. Although communities can be relatively self-sufficient, some of them establish and sustain close relations with others, and might even share aspects of their practice. Indeed, the practice of one community may be influenced by the practice of another. In order to explain how practices, artefacts or even people from one community might be able to move up, down or across into other communities, carrying meanings

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and practices with them, Wenger explores the nature of the boundaries that exist between communities. Boundaries are important for numerous reasons, not least because they make it easy for us to identify communities, and therefore focus our attention onto specific communities as objects of study and research. Boundaries help keep our exploration of learning as LPP manageable, by providing us with defined sociocultural spaces to explore: put simply, they stop our fields of research from getting too big and unwieldy (although this assumes that we are using communities of practice theory as a heuristic tool to explore learning, an approach that not everyone adopts (Lea, 2005)). I discuss the ways in which boundaries are constructed and how they help to maintain community coherence later on; for now, it is sufficient to note that they exist, that every community of practice has one and that we can think about transfer in terms of boundary crossing. Alongside the existence of boundaries, Wenger (1998) explains how elements of one practice can be introduced into another in two ways. First, this can be achieved through the use of particular kinds of tools or artefacts that are called boundary objects. These are objects that can connect people to communities of which they are not (yet) members, and that carry with them some aspect of the practice, which can be made sense of or used by non-members. Such an artefact might have been specially made as a boundary object, or it might simply be an artefact from the everyday practice of the community that can serve as a boundary object as well. A second aspect of this process is known as brokering. Brokers are those members who are able to coordinate activity and meaning across communities of practice, creating new connections between them. Brokers are therefore members who are particularly adept at maintaining a presence at the boundary of their community, while sustaining their own engagement in practice. Thus, both artefacts and members can move across community boundaries, to help create a network or constellation of practices: a collection of communities of practice that share overlapping boundaries. And this process of movement – of people as well as of things – across boundaries provides us with one way through which ideas, knowledge, bodies of thought and so forth can travel, because they are embodied within the people and the objects that are doing the travelling. Relationships between communities and the ways in which they can be linked together are neatly explained by Wenger (ibid.), who introduces the concept of alignment to explain how disparate or distinct communities of practice can nonetheless work in concert in order to achieve broader social enterprises. As people travel across and through different communities, they might choose to become permanent members of new ones. In such situations – which

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are far from uncommon – the fact of being a member of more than one community of practice at the same time has consequences for participation and, therefore, for learning. To explain these processes, Wenger provides the concept of multimembership (ibid.: 159). This is the idea used by Wenger to explain how people participate differentially in multiple communities and thus to consider the ways in which these different forms of participation impact on the identity of a member as she or he moves within and across communities of practice. That is to say, the ways in which a member participates in one community (whether fully or peripherally) are impacted on by the ways in which she or he participates in others, as a consequence of multimembership. The extent of the impact of multimembership on participation depends on the kinds of communities of which one is a member. So, if the experience of multimembership is of highly disparate communities that have relatively little in common in terms of practice, repertoire and enterprise, there will be little opportunity for a member’s practice in one to be influenced by her/his practice in another. By extension there will be little opportunity for that same member to draw on those bodies of knowledge, aptitude or competence that she or he has come to know in one community to be ‘transferred’ or ‘translated’ to another. In contrast to this, if a person is a member of several communities that are arranged in a constellation, then opportunities for such a ‘transfer’ or ‘translation’ are greater. Finally, it is important to note that any process of ‘transfer’ or ‘translation’ is not automatic; rather, it is the product of a process of negotiation and renegotiation of meaning – of more learning. Once again, questions arise from a close reading of Wenger’s theorization, this time in relation to how communities are or are not linked and how they do or do not work together. As with the other theoretical problems that I  have outlined thus far, I shall discuss these in more depth in later stages of the book. For now, it is sufficient to note that analyses of Wenger’s concepts of boundaries and boundary crossing focus on those facts that might inhibit not only the movement of people and objects across boundaries, but also the processes of negotiation and renegotiation of meaning that accompany such movement. They also focus on relationships of power between communities of practice. As well as this, we find different metaphorical constructions of multiple communities of practice: in addition to constellations, we find ecologies (Boylan, 2010), affinity spaces (Gee, 2004) and landscapes (Wenger-Trayner et al., 2014). These – and other – problematic issues relating to boundaries and boundary crossing (Handley et al., 2006) have been explored through using other frameworks such as social movement theory (Houghton et al., 2015) and actor-network theory (Swan et al., 2002).

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Change, disruption, politics and power There are two final elements of communities of practice theory that we need to open up in this introductory chapter:  change and power. In the social world, people discover new processes, learn new things, design new objects and write new texts, and through actions such as these can generate shifts in the practice of a community. The history of communities of practice can be traced through all kinds of things: the ways in which work or artefacts or habits have changed over time, for example, or the ways in which old-timers within a community talk about their experiences as newcomers. Notwithstanding the fact that some commentators think otherwise, it is clear that communities of practice do not stand still. Indeed, for Lave and Wenger, change is a fundamental element of any community of practice (1991: 116). Changes within a community of practice come about as a consequence of a number of elements that work together to generate new ways of working, talking and making. The first element of change rests in LPP. Learning in a community of practice always involves change:  new members of any community  – quite rightly – want to start to shape the practices that they have inherited, mindful of the fact that in the future they will be the established members: in this context, learning involves an imagined future. But at the same time, the existing members will not always be willing or able to see existing practices displaced or challenged. Lave and Wenger (1991) acknowledge the difficulties inherent in these relationships through the notion of contradiction in practice: the acknowledgement that competing viewpoints on practice will always emerge between the newcomers who have a stake in the future of the community and the established members, all of whom need to work to maintain continuity in practice if the community is to be sustained. This, they suggest (perhaps rather optimistically), will be accomplished through constructively naive (ibid.) input from newcomers who are supported by the established members: ‘Why can’t we do it like this?’ Wenger elaborates on some of these difficulties in his later book. He introduces the concept of the history of a community, and foregrounds the roles of memory and forgetting through an elaboration of the key concepts of participation and reification (as discussed above). Drawing explicitly on Vygotskian tradition, he imbues the tools, artefacts and procedures of a community of practice with a past that is captured in how such things are reified, how they are used and how they are talked about. For Wenger, continuity and discontinuity are inherent in participation and reification, and these explain how changes come

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about. He also acknowledges the power relations that are inherent in these practices, recognizing that relations between people within communities of practice can be unequal. The politics of participation can be characterized by influence, friendship, ambition and discrimination; the politics of reification can be characterized by policies, contracts, designs and legislation (Wenger, 1998: 91–93). Members of a community do not always have to agree with each other. Indeed, they can engage in practice in more or less divergent ways – just so long as the practice of the community is sustained. If change occurs in such a way that it is sufficiently aligned to the practice of the community to maintain coherence, then the community will keep going, and over time the practices of other members will adjust. But if the practice of the community is disrupted, then either the members responsible will leave and form a new community, or the community itself might come to an end. A community of practice is not for life. An investigation of change within communities of practice throws the problems surrounding power and politics into sharp relief. This is not to say that they are absent from other aspects of community relations, but it is in the consideration of change and disruption that they are brought into focus. However, they are only briefly discussed. In a way this is not surprising: communities of practice theory is not ‘about’ power and politics, it is about learning and about the ways in which sociocultural spaces are configured in order to support LPP. Arguably, it would be unreasonable to require politics and power to be more extensively explored (a point made by Wenger (Farnsworth et al., 2016)). For other writers, the lack of a more detailed account of power constitutes a serious deficit as it might impede or restrict opportunities for participation – and therefore for learning – for some people, while also opening up opportunities for others in a more or less iniquitous manner (Barton and Tusting, 2005; Boylan, 2010; Hughes et al., 2007). These and other authors have suggested a number of ways by which other social theories can be plugged in to communities of practice theory (in the same way that you might install a plug-in into a web browser in order to access content that you otherwise could not see or listen to properly). Examples include using critical social linguistics to explore the role of discourse within communities of practice as a vehicle for perpetuating power relations (Tusting, 2005), reconciling Wenger’s work with Foucauldian notions of power as being inherent in all forms of social action (Fox, 2000), and using Basil Bernstein’s theories of elaborated and restricted codes as a way to identify the extent to which communities might be more or less open to the creation of new forms of practice (Roberts, 2006).

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Some interim conclusions I am going to leave out the debates about ‘good’ versus ‘bad’ use of theory more broadly within educational research: this has been written about by others and they have done a better job on this than I could hope to do. For now, it is sufficient to note that theory use is a problem. What I am going to do next is think about how communities of practice theory have been used in the exploration of HE – teaching, learning and research. Through thinking about these issues I hope to portray a field of research that is lively and thoughtful while acknowledging any shortcomings in the use that the theory is put to, as well as those shortcomings (already outlined in this chapter) that are inherent in the theory itself. In this way, I am going to begin to make my case for the use of one element of Wenger’s theory – learning architectures – as a framework for exploring HE practice. But for now, we will stay with communities of practice in HE.

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Introduction At risk of stating the obvious, I start this chapter by suggesting that if we are going to look for communities of practice in HE, then we need to do several things. First of all, we need to say what the practice is and where the community is. After that, we need to drill down into the community and provide an account of the mutual engagement, joint enterprise and shared repertoire that both characterize and bind the community: the things that make the community of practice what it is. Now, I am not suggesting that every time we do this, we will end up with a series of homogeneous accounts of communities of practice in HE: quite the opposite in fact. There is no reason why a robust theoretical framework cannot also allow for variety or novelty. But what I am suggesting is that we will end up with accounts that are rigorous in their use of theory. And these in turn can help us in our explorations of practice.

Disciplines and departments as communities of practice University departments often look different from each other, and are often distinct in appearance, feel and sound. Some of this is due to architecture  – the buildings, the spaces between them, the rooms and the corridors: laboratories; seminar rooms; common rooms. Some of this is due to what the people who inhabit these spaces actually do – how they work and talk: conversations in corridors; academic staff collecting theses for examination; students signing up for workshops. And some of this is due to the material artefacts – the stuff – that are to be found in these places: the sign-up sheets for tutorials; the posters advertising departmental seminars; the leaflets for IT services or the library. Decades – if not centuries  – of academic disciplines working to further their own cause

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while also working to distinguish themselves from their neighbours or rivals have served to render the academic department, identified through an academic discipline, as being easily identifiable, leafing through a prospectus or scrolling through the pages of the departmental website, or walking around a campus. Might they also be communities of practice? Perhaps a department is sufficiently different from its departmental neighbours to constitute a distinct community? Or perhaps the different kinds of work done within a social sciences department as compared to a mathematics department, helps us to distinguish different communities? A good way to proceed, therefore, would be to suggest that people in HE (academics, students, administrators) are members of, and therefore work and learn within, a number of communities of practice, each one of which has its own mutual engagement, joint enterprise and shared repertoire. People work and learn within multiple departments  – and, therefore, multiple communities of practice – because there are plenty of opportunities for academics to visit, speak with or collaborate with people who work in other academic fields, plenty of occasions when academic staff have to do work that is required from an administrative, rather than an academic, perspective. And these multiple communities are linked together in all kinds of ways, by people, by practices and by their materialities. In her theoretically well-informed account of the kinds of work done by academics, Nalita James (2007) argues that these communities, which she describes as being collected together as networks (or that Wenger (1998) would refer to as constellations), are to be found based around research, teaching and wider departmental practices (such as committee meetings, management groups and so forth). Drawing on Wenger’s concept of the member’s trajectory within and through a community of practice (ibid.: 153), James argues that members occupy a complexity of journeys and positions, generated through the phenomenon of the community member who in one community is an old-timer, but in another community is a newcomer. It is in the ways in which these two identities relate and react to each other that the complexity is found. If James provides us with a robust way of thinking about academics’ practices, then Elisabeth Wegner and Matthias Nückles (2015) provide a similarly theoretically informed approach for thinking about what it is that students do. Drawing on Lave and Wenger (1991) as well as Wenger (1998), they follow James in framing communities of practice around academic disciplines. Within these disciplinary communities the students are positioned as the apprentices. Wegner and Nückles go on to stress the necessity of the provision of authentic opportunities for students to engage in practice, and to talk about that practice,

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as a precondition for meaningful learning:  ‘Students do not learn something about psychology; instead, they become psychologists’ (2015: 627). In this way, Wegner and Nückles draw on Lave and Wenger’s argument that for authentic learning to happen through legitimate peripheral participation, apprentices must learn through authentic practice, and not simply through talking about the practice (1991). And at the same time, the lecturers and professors are also learning: after all, if they are members of a community of practice, they must be learning, because participation entails learning as an epistemological necessity of community membership. They are developing the practice, the discourse, the artefacts and the history of the community through their collaborative work. The identification of an academic discipline as a community of practice is one of a number of discrete and identifiable approaches to the application of communities of practice theory within HE. And at first look it makes perfect sense. The idea that a department of historians constitutes a community that is sufficiently distinct from a community of physicists, but still sufficiently similar to allow us to consider them both as aspects of a larger whole – a university – seems so obvious as to be not worth describing in too much detail. There are aspects of mutual engagement that are similar: research seminars or tutorials, for example, are about different things, but follow particular forms and styles. Other aspects of shared repertoire are rather more different but still identifiable as being within a particular genre. Both communities generate textual artefacts – books, assignments, journal papers, funding bids – but these vary in style and construction as well as content or topic (for example, members of some academic communities use the first person in their academic writing while others do not). In the meantime, the joint enterprises are of course different, reflecting the different academic disciplines at work. These familiarities or overlaps allow us to imagine discipline-based communities of practice as being arranged within a constellation, the whole of which makes up a university. And following both James, and Wegner and Nückles, through constructing the boundaries of these communities in terms of academic discipline we can clearly see the objects, practices and stuff that mark out these boundaries. There are many such reifications:  the teaching spaces that vary according to the needs of different academic disciplines; the material resources that are required for work within the discipline; the displays of books, posters and papers written by members of a department; or the different genres of writing that are inscribed or otherwise manipulated within the discipline. Even how people dress can be seen as a reification of the practices that they engage in. In summary, we could say that because physics departments look, sound and feel like physics departments and

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the people who are in them do stuff that looks, reads and sounds like physics; and history departments look, sound and feel like history departments and the people who are in them do stuff that looks, reads and sounds like history, then they are communities of practice or, better, disciplinary communities of practice (see also Annala and Mäkinen, 2016). If we are to adopt this approach, therefore, it becomes a relatively unproblematic exercise to identify and then do research within or about these and other disciplinary communities. Indeed, the scope of past relevant research is wide, ranging from art and design (Shreeve, 2007) to mathematics (Solomon, 2007), teacher education (Tummons, 2008), tourism (Albrecht, 2012) and aviation (O’Brien and Bates, 2015). As well as being about what the people within them do, communities of practice are also about what people within them do not do. If we accept that it is through their distinctions, their differences and their processes of othering that communities of practice maintain the boundaries that ring-fence them or fortify them or cut them off from the rest of the social world, then we need always to consider that the practice of a community might have to be understood in terms of constructing shared understandings not only of what apprentices and oldtimers do, but also of what apprentices and old-timers do not and must not do. The scale, scope or nature of our practice is shaped in part by permissions and in part by interdictions, rewards and punishments. Our practice – what we make, what we do, how we talk, what we wear – is always, and necessarily, shaped by the power relationships that are at work within and across communities of practice, just as they are at work across any other kind of socially configured space. I talk about power within and between communities of practice in more detail later on; for now, it is sufficient to foreground the importance of power relationships within communities, mindful of the fact that the ways in which power is accounted for in Lave and Wenger, and Wenger, is invariably positioned as problematic and insufficient (Fox, 2000; Fuller and Unwin, 2004; Tusting, 2005). Notwithstanding the possible weaknesses of our chosen theoretical framework, we can nonetheless start to think about the kinds of work done by academics not merely in terms of the routinized, established or indigenous practices of a community (Lave and Wenger, 1991) – as it is self-evidently the case that academics often have to do things that they are asked or told to do – but also in terms of new forms of practice that come about due to change, innovation or improvisation, or due to new external pressures and persuasions. Changes in legislation might lead to changes in a curriculum; the impact of new research might lead to shifts in teaching practice; the expansion of provision might lead to larger class sizes and therefore to changes in assessment practice; pressure

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from university managers and governors leads to applications for funding. Many of these practices share common features across different communities, but they are also enfolded within the practices of a single community – a single department – as they are made sense of within a specific, situated context. This does mean that we are equating a department with a single discipline, however, and so when we turn our attention to those people who work across departments in interdisciplinary contexts or in those departments that rest on an interdisciplinary model, we need to draw more widely on the concepts that Wenger offers (there is nothing in Lave and Wenger (1991) that can help here). More specifically, we can theorize these kinds of interdepartmental relationships and networks through drawing on Wenger’s (1998) concepts of boundaries, brokers and multimembership. Thus, those academics who work across departments are able to do this in one of two ways. One way is through their membership of more than one disciplinary community; the second way is through more temporary engagement with or tourism within another community (Wenger, 1998). As they move across boundaries from one community to another they change trajectories, embodying their experiences and their learning as they travel. They might be (more or less deliberately) occupying a peripheral position within one or more of these in order to offer brokerage – to offer ways into the community for would-be newcomers who are not quite sure where to go, what tools to use or how to speak. We can imagine disciplinary communities of practice in an array, a constellation, with boundary crossings that allow the cross-pollination of people, of reifications, of tools and of talk. Multimembership across different  communities can, therefore, facilitate collaborative work and learning across departments  – and, by extension, across institutions (Lin and Beyerlein, 2006). But when we look more closely at the practice, at the joint enterprise of the disciplinary community, our application of communities of practice theory starts to unravel somewhat, ironically as a consequence of our rigorous approach. Imagine the members of a single disciplinary community of practice. We need to be able to make sense of the differing levels of engagement and participation of, and the different trajectories occupied by, the different members: academic staff who are old-timers and newcomers; undergraduate students and postgraduate research students; students from one department who are studying an elective module within a different department. And this is a difficult problem. It is obvious that the practices of academics are different to those of students. Academics draw on their wider disciplinary knowledge to design a module or a programme of study: students take the module or follow the programme of study – but for

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the most part, they do not shape it (except in relatively minor ways: students in one cohort might complain about the assessment format, leading the academics to redesign the assessment tasks for the next cohort), unless they are negotiating a dissertation topic (where such a provision still exists) or negotiating curriculum content within a liberal adult education context. Students write essays; academics grade them and write feedback. Academics do research; most students do not (undergraduate and postgraduate students do not always conduct empirical research). Some students aspire to full participation – to become the next generation of academics; other students adopt a much more strategic or instrumental approach to their studies; not all peripheral participants aspire to full participation (Lemke, 1997; see also Boylan, 2010). Even without addressing the pedagogy problem that I introduced in the previous chapter, the sense of an academic department/discipline as a community of practice begins to falter somewhat when we consider the very different practices of the members. Their trajectories are so diverse, their work is so different in relation to that discipline, that it becomes difficult to construct a single community that can satisfactorily encompass such diverse practices (Ashwin, 2009). We can continue to understand teaching and research as social practices – that is to say, we are not challenging the epistemological and ontological assumptions of communities of practice theory (or of any other social theory of work or learning) – but we cannot conflate them. They are different, and they must be situated within different communities of practice. Therefore, it seems logical to address this problem first by bifurcating the practices of teaching and research (having accepted these as two defining features of disciplinary work within HE), and second by arguing that a discipline can be understood as consisting of not one but two distinct communities: one based around research and the other based around teaching (there may be other communities involved as well, but we shall leave this discussion until later; likewise, and notwithstanding the emergence of constructs such as researchinformed teaching, we consider the ways in which teaching and research are related – the teaching-research nexus (Trowler and Wareham, 2008) – at a later point). In making sense of the different kinds of work done on the one hand by lecturers and professors – and students – when doing research, and on the other hand by lecturers and professors when they are teaching or assessing and by students when they are doing the work of being a student, we can draw once again on ideas about multimembership. In this way we can position academics and students as having, for the purposes of this discussion, at least two distinct but sometimes overlapping identities. One of these identities revolves around

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research work; the other revolves around the work of learning and teaching. And each of these is situated within two closely aligned and overlapping – but nonetheless distinct – communities of practice: a community of pedagogic practice (Blanton and Stylianou, 2009; Houghton et al., 2015; Malcolm and Zukas, 2007; Viskovic, 2006) and a community of research practice (Denscombe, 2008; Hodkinson, 2004; St Clair, 2008; Tight, 2004; Tummons, 2012).

Communities of pedagogic practice The last two decades have seen a proliferation of books and articles that seek to explicate learning and teaching in HE from the perspective of social theories and models of learning, reflecting a broader sociocultural turn in the social sciences. While being mindful of the fact that this is a bit of an oversimplification, we might characterize this shift as a move away from the dominance of acquisition models of learning towards that of participation models of learning; or, away from models of learning derived from behaviourist and cognitivist psychology and towards social constructivist and sociocultural models (Sfard, 1998), perspectives on learning that are derived instead from anthropology, ethnography and sociology. Through using frameworks such as academic literacies (Lea and Stierer, 2000), activity theory (Engeström et  al., 1999) or threshold concepts (Meyer and Land, 2006) as well as communities of practice, the focus has shifted away from the individual student as decontextualized learner, and towards the social and cultural spaces in which students learn and work as well as the tools or artefacts that they use in their work or learning, and the social construction and mediation of disciplinary knowledge, making sense of their work within specific spaces and places and at specific times. From this broader sociocultural perspective, we might suggest that communities of practice theory offers the researcher a framework that is ready to pick up and apply to the context or field being researched. Indeed, the very term ‘community of practice’ immediately signifies a particular perspective of learning and teaching: a social epistemology and ontology; a commitment to the provision of authentic opportunities for students’ learning; an understanding of the learning journey based on notions of apprenticeship; a focus on the ways in which students learn to behave, talk and write as new members of a specialist academic community, building and sharing disciplinary knowledge rather than merely regurgitating facts; a sense of a collaborative and cooperative endeavour between students and tutors that informs and sustains pedagogical strategies

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such as peer-teaching and peer-assessment (although we return to assessment later); and a construction of student autonomy and agency that fits nicely with broader notions of the student as an active, not passive, figure. At the same time, it also provides an appealing alternative to dominant discourses of neoliberalism and marketization in HE, foregrounding collegiality and cooperation (although this is, arguably, an overly benign approach to communities of practice  – an issue that I address later). Wenger (1998) provides a number of concepts, many of which I have already referred to, that can be drawn on to describe and theorize the student’s journey from admission to graduation – assuming that we are indeed committed to producing a theoretically informed account (which is not always the case (Tight, 2004)). So, we might position the admissions tutor as a broker, the progression from the first year of study to the final year as more and more full  – though still peripheral – legitimate participation, the books and equipment used by the student as the artefacts of the community, and the ways that people talk within different academic disciplines as the discourses of their communities. The students are the newcomers, while the staff take on the mantle of old-timers. And one of the fundamental theoretical difficulties of using this approach – that the students as peripheral participants are not seeking to become teachers as full participants – can be solved by allowing for forms of legitimate peripheral participation that will always be peripheral, and that trajectories need not always aspire to the goal of full participation. Instead, we understand students as being always peripheral by design. Students become fixed-term members of the community (membership should never be assumed to be permanent), before moving on to join other communities of practice, membership of which may depend on the successful negotiation of membership of the community of pedagogic/ teaching practice (Lemke, 1997; Tummons, 2008). For example: an individual student may spend three years studying English at university (and therefore she is a member of a community of pedagogic/teaching practice configured within and around the English department), before moving on, after graduation, to a career in book publishing. This is a career path that invariably requires graduate recruits to have a degree, very often a degree in English. Or, to put it another way, membership of one community of practice (book publishing) might be contingent on a prior period of successful participation in another community (English at university – a period of successful participation evidenced through the award of a degree certificate). And her other university contemporaries will move on to other communities of practice as well, some of whom may also require successful membership of the prior community

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(a formal graduate training scheme, for example), while others may not (not all graduates choose, or are able, to enter so-called graduate-level jobs after leaving university). And for those who decide to conduct postgraduate research, to study for an MA and then perhaps a PhD as well, their continued membership within the community of teaching/pedagogic practice will be characterized by participation that is increasingly full, but now aligned to membership of a corresponding community of research practice (unless they have already become aligned to this community through conducting research for an undergraduate project). In this way, through a nexus of multimembership (Wenger, 1998), the student participates in and learns more about doing research as a necessary element of her greater engagement in the academic discipline, an engagement that is generated through her multimembership of two communities of practice  – one for pedagogy and one for research. Communities of pedagogic practice seem to make sense, and they seem to represent an increasingly normalized way of using Wenger’s work (and to a lesser extent, Lave and Wenger’s work) in HE research, but do the practices of lecturers (as teachers) and students really belong in the same community? If we assume that our community is arranged along disciplinary grounds and that the lecturers are at the centre while the students – the apprentices – are at the periphery, then we need to reconcile the differences in their practices (Ashwin, 2009). What lecturers do and what students do are quite different things, and so it becomes necessary to consider the extent to which practice can diversify, while maintaining the coherence of any community of practice as a whole (a critical argument, raised by Edwards (2005)). If being a student is one kind of social practice and being a teacher is another, then what does this imply for the community of pedagogic practice? Arguably, if the practice of the community is to do with teaching, then we would expect all the newcomers to be undertaking apprenticeships so that they too can engage in that very same practice of teaching, but this is evidently not the case. But if we split teachers and students into two different but overlapping communities, then we have to draw on Wenger (1998) to theorize a series of patterns of interaction (something that, incidentally, Lave and Wenger (1991) provide no serious conceptual tools for), using once again the tools of brokerage, boundary crossing, the sharing of artefacts or other discursively constructed tools, and so forth. The answer might seem to be that it simply depends on how we choose to apply our theoretical framework  – which, once again, returns us not only to discussions about rigour and theory in educational research, but also to how we choose to apply communities of practice theory. Is it an applied tool for managing

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and evaluating curriculum reform within a university (Blanton and Stylianou, 2009), or a heuristic model for unpacking the everyday practices of teachers as well as students (Lea, 2005)? Is it a framework for theorizing online learning communities (Donnelly, 2008), or for theorizing the educational research done at universities (Hammersley, 2005)? In practice, it would be difficult to argue that it can be all of these: in this sense, communities of practice is just one among several theories that have been developed and applied to increasingly diverse contexts within the broader field of HE research (Tight, 2015). As such, we can make a choice: we can choose to frame our communities of pedagogic practice in terms of either the practices of teachers or the practices of students, or the practices of both. We can focus on a specific element of the curriculum, a specific faculty or department, or a specific cohort of students and teachers. The theory is sufficiently elastic, capable of being presented in a sufficient number of versions to accommodate all of these.

Communities of research practice If teaching can be situated within communities of practice, then can we say the same for research? For Phil Hodkinson, the answer would certainly seem to be ‘yes’. Having extensively  – and not uncritically  – drawn on Lave and Wenger, and Wenger, in research relating to the ongoing professional learning of secondary school teachers (Hodkinson and Hodkinson, 2003), Hodkinson (2004) has also widened his use of communities of practice theory to describe research as work and therefore as resting on a form of learning, which he situates within communities of practice. As part of his wider-ranging critique of performativity and audit cultures in HE (see also, for example, Strathern, 2000), of the growth of methodological orthodoxies in social research, and the use of published criteria as a means to evaluate and therefore to privilege some forms of educational research while downplaying the potentials or insights offered by others, Hodkinson has argued that ‘educational research is a field made up of overlapping communities of practice’ (2004: 9). For Hodkinson, it is the learning that is an inextricable element of research work that drives this use of communities of practice theory. That is to say, it is through a consideration of how researchers learn to do their research rather than how the social spaces in which research might happen are configured, that he positions research as practice within a community of practice. As such, research work takes on the characteristics of many other forms of work (as it is understood as a social practice (Smith,

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2005)):  it can be formal and highly structured, but also messy and informal. It can be learned in part through formal training (attending research methods courses, reading research methods textbooks and so forth), but also, and equally importantly, through informal practices, rooted in authentic engagement in the research practices of the communities that we join. Novice researchers do their research alongside more experienced colleagues, and learn how to research through authentic engagement with research work – through legitimate peripheral participation in communities of research practice. Hodkinson does not specify how the different overlapping communities of research practice that he proposes might complement or contrast with each other, nor does he go into detail about how they might be constituted on a caseby-case basis (a gap in his analysis that is also noted by Hammersley (2005)). However, we can make some assumptions based on what he writes in relation to the histories of communities of research practice, and the identities of people who are members of them (Hodkinson, 2004: 16–20). For Hodkinson, research communities would seem at the very least to construct their boundaries in terms of how they do their research work (interpretivist research or psychological research, for example) as well as – more loosely – the kinds of research that they do in a disciplinary sense (business studies or social policy, for example – here, looseness can be seen as accommodating interdisciplinary work) and the philosophical/political perspectives that they might inhabit (feminist researchers and adult education researchers). Likewise, Tight, in an article that is more directly concerned with theory use in HE research, states that the HE landscape consists of multiple communities of practice, some of which are related to research work. In a manner similar to Hodkinson, he positions himself as being a member of several overlapping communities of practice, including communities of research practice (as well as departmental and institutional communities), although these are only very briefly described (Tight, 2004). Hodkinson’s account of research as a community of practice is ‘illuminating’ (Hammersley, 2005: 16) but does not quite provide the kind of theoretically robust application of the framework that is needed. This is not to say that his use of Lave and Wenger, and Wenger is uncritical: he acknowledges their lack of a serious explanation of power and conflict within communities (2004: 14). He goes on to argue that resistance to such power can lead to not only a lack of legitimate participation, and hence learning (as argued by Lave and Wenger), but also difficulty and even pain (ibid.: 19). But he does not satisfactorily explain how relations between these different communities of research practice might work – or, indeed, how they might be defined or described (Hammersley, 2005).

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Hodkinson downplays the role played by formal instruction in teaching people how to be researchers (2004: 13), but does not explain what this – smaller? marginalized? – role might yet be (Tummons, 2012). He foregrounds the essential requirement of authenticity, of learning to research by doing research, but does not acknowledge that there is only so much that you can learn within any community of practice through picking things up from a colleague or through hanging about with and listening to the talk of other more expert members of that same community (Lemke, 1997; Rock, 2005). For Hammersley (2005), meanwhile, the more significant problem arising from Hodkinson’s account is to be found in the relationship between educational research and educational practice: if communities of practice reject institutionalized instruction, do they also reject institutionalized research? Will research always have to be indigenous to a community if it is to be linked to authentic and meaningful learning about the practices of that community? And what value might we attach to the knowledge that is created by researchers? Does it have to remain within the community to have any meaning? Will the knowledge produced in a community be practical or practitioner knowledge, or can a community also generate propositional knowledge or abstract knowledge? These questions are also addressed by Martyn Denscombe who aligns the concept of the community of practice with the Kuhnian concept of the research community – a group of people researching at disciplinary as well as at subdisciplinary levels, through which a research paradigm is operationalized (2008: 276). He suggests that one way of thinking about research paradigms is to think about what he terms a conglomerate of communities of research practice (ibid.: 278) that can exist at different levels and across different institutions (a model that seems to me to be capable of being satisfactorily described as a constellation, to use Wenger’s term), open at all times to new members just so long as they are committed to the practice of the community (that is, that they work within the same research field), and capable in themselves of changing over time as they respond to new research, to new research findings and to new knowledge. Denscombe also addresses the problem of power within communities of practice (ibid.: 279). He suggests that inequalities of power within research communities can be seen played out not only inside communities in terms of peer pressure (for example, peer review of academic publications), but also outside in terms of funding pressure (for example, pressure to conduct research in particular fields or using specific approaches in order to respond to the requirements of funding agencies or government bodies). For Denscombe, a communities of practice approach is not so much about learning about

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research work, in contrast to Hodkinson, but about the social life of researchers and the social spaces in which they work. That is to say, Denscombe’s focus is on the community of practice as the unit of analysis, whereas Hodkinson’s focus is on learning about and to do research as legitimate peripheral participation – a learning process that is always situated within a community of practice. This takes us back to the idea that there are different and sometimes conflicting versions of communities of practice, and I  return to these issues shortly. For now, it is sufficient to posit communities of research practice as the second component of the constellation (Wegner, 1998) of communities that make up a university.

Communities of administrative practice What are the other communities of practice in a HE constellation? Where are they situated and what are the practices that enfold and define them? Drawing on wider communities of practice literature, we might imagine that communities of practice are also to be found in an administrative context, in the context of university governance, among university caretakers and porters, or in the technical or resource-based support work that underpins the work done by academics and managers. If a call centre can be a community of practice (Brannan, 2007), then so can the admissions office in a social sciences faculty. If radiotherapists working in a medical research company can be a community of practice (Swan et  al., 2002), then so can information and communication technology (ICT) technicians working in a humanities faculty. Whatever the version of communities of practice we are working with, it is far from difficult to identify communities of practice that are aligned to all those kinds of work, other than the academic, that take place within universities. Within the extensive literature on business and management that draws on communities of practice theories, we can find case studies of particular work contexts that we might easily imagine as being sufficiently closely aligned to all the other work that is done within a university, apart from the work of teaching (standing up and delivering a lecture, running a tutorial group, grading an assignment), the work of research (writing a funding bid, delivering a research seminar, debating research ethics) and the work of studying (attending lectures, writing essays, preparing posters). Academic staff often do the kind of work that does not, at first look, appear to be ‘academic’: lecturers and professors invariably have to chair committees,

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attend meetings and evaluate admissions forms, alongside their teaching and research responsibilities. And at the same time there are a lot of other people, who are not academic staff, working in universities as well. While their work undoubtedly, and necessarily, contributes towards the overall function  – the joint enterprise – of the university as a whole (leaving aside arguments about the exact balance between universities as places of teaching, as places of research, as places for knowledge transfer, as places for nurturing enterprise through monetising invention and so forth), these people are not occupying primarily academic roles. The research office staff, for example, who help prepare funding bids or ensure that academic staff are complying with institutional and legal requirements for Open Access publication might easily be imagined as being involved within a community of research practice at some level. They are not doing the actual work of research – they do not conduct experiments, design survey instruments or conduct systematic reviews of literature, but they are nonetheless contributing through doing other kinds of work that allow research to happen. Similarly, the ICT technicians who help prepare online learning materials and the administrative staff who help to populate virtual learning environments might also be seen as being involved in communities of pedagogic practice, working as pedagogical partners (MacLeod et al., 2016) with academic staff as they carry our their teaching. The staff who provide catering and hospitality when external examiners visit, the solicitors or paralegals who work in human resources departments and advise on appointments, and the porters who help move the furniture in seminar rooms are all contributing work that sustains the university as a whole. The work of both the research and pedagogic communities clearly relies on people other than research and teaching academics. But we also need to think about these other communities of practice as well: more specifically, we need to think about how we might theorize the positions, the trajectories, of these other members of the university. One way to think about this might be to consider their position in terms of their location in relation to the periphery or the centre of the community. For example, it might be the case that within a community of pedagogic practice, the position of an administrator will be more peripheral than that of a lecturer. Both are involved in the joint enterprise of the community – the actual teaching of modules, courses and curricula to the students. But the role of the course lecturer is understood as being closer to the centre because she or he is doing the actual work of teaching, while the course administrator does other kinds of work that is still important but less fundamental to the pedagogical exchanges that are central to the community. The administrators know

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things about university teaching – about deadlines for assignments, examination dates, registers and concessions – but they do not do university teaching. However, we might legitimately reject this kind of approach, simply because the practices of the course administrators are so different to those of the course lecturers that they cannot, in this instance, in relation to this field of teaching, be members of the same community. Instead, we might put forward the notion that there are two communities of practice that are closely aligned, both revolving around the central task of teaching. One community is that of the lecturers, focused on teaching: the community of pedagogic practice. The second is that of the administrators: a community of administrative practice in relation to teaching, or to undergraduate provision, or to research students – depending on the kinds of areas of student provision that the administrative team is working in. It would be necessary to provide titles for other administrative communities as well (related to research, funding and so forth) as required – but this would depend on the scope of our research project. An ethnographer setting out to map social relations across an entire university would need to trace the outlines of a very large number of communities of practice indeed, whereas a more tightly defined research project might only need to map those communities that pertain to a single department (Herrington et al., 2008), a single area of curriculum provision (Annala and Mäkinen, 2016), a specific group of teachers (Anderson, 2008) or even to a single member of academic staff (Arthur, 2016). These communities of practice, whatever they are, will all be arrayed in constellations. Some of them overlap extensively, encouraging (for all kinds of reasons) a steady flow of traffic across their borders, exchanging tools and processes, and facilitating multimembership for some people and tourism or brokerage for others. Others might only very occasionally share their practices, resources or other aspects of their repertoires. As is the case with all communities of practice (Wenger, 1998), they do not exist in isolation.

Versions of communities of practice If a single university does indeed consist of a constellation of communities of practice, then it also seems to be the case that there are many different kinds, or versions, of communities of practice within the community. In this chapter, I have restricted my versions of communities to just three: communities of pedagogic practice, of research practice and of administrative practice – and the references that I have provided allow for these quite easily to be traced across

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the literature. But there are other ways of differentiating between approaches to communities of practice, and these are worth mentioning. Notwithstanding Wenger’s own shifts in approach (which I have already discussed and are explored in detail in Barton and Tusting (2005)), we can see three main ways in which more diverse or expansive uses of the theory have become established. By this I mean to stress that there are different ways by which this diversity has become routinized and normalized within HE research. The first of these has already been considered and is, simply, variety in usage, a variety that has played out over time (Tight, 2015): the accretion of empirical and conceptual/theoretical papers, chapters and books. But there are two other things to think about as well. The second (discussed in Chapters 4 and 5) is the augmentation of communities of practice theory through the use of other perspectives or theories that are broadly aligned to it but that offer different or more extensive insights or simply ways of answering questions that communities of practice cannot. Frequently this is accomplished through augmenting or critiquing an element of communities of practice theory with another theory. Examples of this approach include using actor-network theory (Fox, 2000), Bernsteinian curriculum theory (Tapp, 2015), Foucauldian sociology (Roberts, 2006) and linguistics (Tusting, 2005). At the same time, such critiques might also highlight particular identified flaws or weaknesses in communities of practice theory, such as an inability to address sufficiently issues of power within and across communities of practice, or to theorize critically the use of language and discourse within communities of practice. A third identifiable approach is to construct more formal classifications of communities of practice. These are versions of communities of practice that are not solely distinguished in terms of what the practice might be (‘a community of pedagogic practice’) or who the members might be (‘a community of practice of academic developers’), but are classified according to a more fundamental epistemological concern. This approach foregrounds knowledge: that is to say, it is through thinking about the kinds of knowledge and knowing that are enveloped within a community of practice, that different kinds of community emerge. Thus, following an extensive review of empirical literature, Ash Amin and Joanne Roberts (2008) proposed a four-part typology for communities of practice, differentiated according to craft knowing (midwives, technicians); professional knowing (nurses, social workers); creative knowing (laboratories, performing arts); and (arguably the weakest of the classifications), virtual knowing (online communities). In contrast to this approach, Emma Pharo et al. (2014) propose a model based on smaller, empirical foundations: through their research, they

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proposed a distinction between ‘established’ and ‘intentional’ communities, drawing on the managerialist turn of Wenger’s later works. Arthur (2016), in a theoretically lively but empirically rather restricted article, proposed a different typology, also consisting of four elements:  traditional, emerging (where both newcomers and old-timers have low expertise), distributed (where they both have high expertise) and challenged (where newcomers have higher expertise than old-timers). In their analysis of work-related training, Karen McArdle and Aileen Ackland (2007) argued for two kinds of communities: communities that are about practice and communities that are about delivering a service. And David Boud and Heather Middleton (2003), borrowing the language of Basil Bernstein, proposed that communities of practice might be seen as strongly framed (when transmission of knowledge occurs closely and frequently) or weakly framed (when it does not). Simply put, there are many ways by which we can pick up and use communities of practice theory. Some of the approaches that I  have outlined in this chapter are, to me, more convincing and more valid than others (but this is the case with any article, chapter or book that we might read). It might be the case that it does not matter too much which version we attach ourselves to, just so long as it provides an appropriate as well as robust framework or lens for us to answer our research questions or investigate those practices that we have chosen to trace and to follow.

Some interim conclusions I am more interested in how we might use communities of practice theory to think about learning and teaching interactions in HE, than I am in using it to think about research or university administration or knowledge transfer. And so, notwithstanding the pluralism that I have highlighted in this chapter, I still need to consider two problematic elements of learning and teaching that are absolutely central to any kind of use of the theory within a HE context, but that, I suggest, are particularly troublesome in communities of practice theory, partly because they are in themselves difficult to reconcile with notions of situated learning and legitimate peripheral participation, and partly because they have not always been critically and thoroughly explored in the literature. The first of these is pedagogy. The second of these is assessment. And I consider both of these in the next chapter.

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Learning and Assessment in Communities of Practice

Introduction My starting point for this chapter is to recognize that there is now extant a significant body of research literature that has sought to explicate learning, teaching and assessment principles and practice in HE through the use of social practice theories, including – but not restricted to – communities of practice (Ashwin, 2009; Bamber et  al., 2009; Brown and Glasner, 1999; McNay, 2000; Trowler, 2008). In the two chapters that follow, I focus on some of those other theoretical approaches that are sometimes used in order to answer questions or solve theoretical problems that communities of practice theory, arguably, cannot. But I do not want to move away from Lave and Wenger (1991) and from Wenger (1998) just yet. Two elements of learning and teaching in HE still need to be considered: pedagogy and assessment. These are both aspects of the work of universities that have attracted considerable attention, and that have been subjected to an ever-increasing number of inquiries that have been framed by communities of practice theory. This is particularly true in the case of assessment. Different elements of the assessment process in HE have been explored from a communities of practice perspective. Examples include the ways in which students and teachers come to understand assessment criteria, constructions of validity and reliability in assessment, and the use of portfolios in teacher education programmes (Dysthe and Engelsen, 2004; Rust et al., 2005; Shay, 2008). Perhaps unsurprisingly, some of these accounts are more theoretically and empirically robust than others, and make variable use of the theory. Explorations of pedagogy, of formal modes of instruction, are less well established and, arguably, less theoretically explicit. That is to say, there are many articles and book chapters that draw on a communities of practice analysis in exploring formal educational settings, but

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do not set out to problematize the place of formal instruction within these settings. I refer to this as the pedagogy problem.

The pedagogy problem The problem with communities of practice theory, when considering how it might be used to explain or inform HE practice, is that it rests on a particular theory of learning  – situated learning  – that rejects modes and discourses of formal instruction: In a community of practice, there are no special forms of discourse aimed at apprentices or crucial to their . . . movement toward full participation that correspond to . . . the lecturing of college professors. (Lave and Wenger, 1991: 108)

Now, at first look it might seem unfair to criticize Lave and Wenger for constructing a model of learning that does not work unproblematically within formal educational contexts such as universities, when their original research was derived from ethnographic accounts of informal learning (although they rejected any attempt to bifurcate learning in terms of ‘formal’ and ‘informal’). And the same holds true for Wenger’s later ethnographic account of claims processing. Lave and Wenger do not deny that structured resources of some kinds are necessary for learning, nor do they deny the presence within communities of practice of some people who know (in a generous sense of the word, encompassing how to act, talk, write, make and so forth) more things than other people, as well as some older people (in terms of age as well as time served) who have a vested interest in the learning of those younger members who can sustain the community in the future. But what Lave and Wenger do reject is the notion of a taught curriculum, delivered by ‘professors’ (we can safely assume that lecturers and graduate teaching assistants can be subsumed into this category), according to a public and coherent pedagogical model or strategy. But if there is no such thing as formal instruction within a community of practice, then using communities of practice theory to explicate learning, teaching and assessment within HE contexts is immediately rendered problematic. How can a theory that explicitly denies the existence of formal modes of instruction be taken seriously as a way of explicating learning and teaching interactions in HE? One approach might be to consider the distance travelled between Lave and Wenger (1991) and Wenger (1998): that is to say, if the approach taken in the later book can be used to research HE as a site of learning and teaching in

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a manner that the former book simply cannot manage, then all we have to do is leave the first book behind. But the theory of learning that the first book puts forward – LPP – continues to underscore the later book, as well as many of the books, book chapters and articles that others have since written. Sometimes, this theory of learning comes through quite explicitly, sometimes more tacitly, and sometimes as an aspect of the conceptual or empirical context to what is being written and argued, running in the background and only occasionally, if at all, being made to stand up and explain something. However people use, or ignore, the theory of learning through LPP, it remains the central element of the community of practice theory, and therefore deserves to be explored, both in relation to the broader model of learning that it rests on, as well as the specific ways in which it has been contextualized within HE research. Contemplating the proliferation of theories and models of learning that researchers, students, lecturers and trainers have to contend with makes allegiance to one model or perspective over another seem like a foolhardy task. Those people who subscribe to models of learning based on psychology occupy one end of the room, and those who subscribe to models of learning based on sociology or anthropology occupy another, with many more people around and between these two positions. Theories of learning also imply theories of knowledge or of knowing, of competence or of craft, of intelligence or of wisdom. There is not enough space here to provide any serious account of different paradigmatic approaches to theorizing or explicating the process of learning (‘behaviourism’, ‘cognitivism’, ‘social constructivism’), and in fact this task has been accomplished very successfully (as I see it, at least) by others (Illeris, 2007). What I am going to do, though, is to comment briefly on some of the ancestors of LPP in communities of practice, in order to contextualize LPP as a particular theory of learning within a crowded field.

Arriving at legitimate peripheral participation According to Lave and Wenger (1991), learning is a process that involves the whole person, and happens as a consequence of participation in real-world activities in the social world. They proposed that the term ‘legitimate peripheral participation’ be adopted to describe the kind of engagement in social practice that entails learning as an integral constituent of that practice (ibid.: 35). Their descriptions of learning drew on what might be termed ‘contexts of apprenticeship learning’ – meat cutters in supermarkets, midwives and tailors – that were

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derived in particular from Lave’s own anthropological and ethnographic fieldwork (see also, in particular, Lave, 2011). For Lave and Wenger, a key imperative was to ‘rescue the idea of apprenticeship’ (1991: 29), but also to extend particular aspects of studies of apprenticeship learning, with a close focus on learning as a practice that is rooted in particular social and cultural contexts. They described these contexts as both ‘communities of practice’ and ‘communities of practitioners’, defined as concrete social structures, but also as being ‘largely intuitive’ and otherwise left unexplored. Lave and Wenger focused on learning, not on how that learning was organized or how the social arena for learning was configured; it was Wenger’s later work that provided the three-part model of mutual engagement, joint enterprise and shared repertoire. Apprenticeship models of learning, therefore, constitute a significant element of the theoretical as well as empirical backdrop to the formation of the idea of LPP. In this context, the emergence of LPP can be placed alongside other studies that have explored learning and cognition in specific real-world settings. What I mean to stress here is that LPP is just one among several different, but related, perspectives of learning that have emerged as part of what is sometimes referred to as the sociocultural turn in theorizing learning. This does not imply that the psychological or individual theories of learning have seriously lost their dominant position: far from it. But what can be seen, reified in an ever-growing number of studies, is the use of a number of perspectives (communities of practice, cultural and historical activity theory, threshold concepts, expansive learning) that share common roots – roots that are often described as being Vygotskian, but that also trace back to Dewey’s more philosophical and less empirical perspectives regarding the importance of learning from real-life experiences as well as from schooling (Hughes et al., 2007). These studies tend to focus on particular constructions of learning in the workplace, work-based learning, as well as informal learning, learning informally or non-formal learning, invariably within workplaces but sometimes outside them. Of particular relevance to this book are those studies that explore the HE workplace (Boud and Solomon, 2001; Costley, 2011; Taylor, 1997). And within this body of literature we can find, perhaps unsurprisingly, a number of studies that seek both to critique and to re-establish communities of practice as a framework specifically for theorizing learning in the workplace (Boud and Middleton, 2003; Brannan, 2007; Fuller et al., 2005; Rock, 2005). Alongside an engagement with theories of apprenticeship learning, Lave in particular also sought to put forward a perspective that provided an alternative to what she defined, in her earlier work on the learning and use of mathematics in everyday life, as the dominant framework for thinking about learning,

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education and schooling that rested, excessively as well as erroneously, on psychology (Lave, 1988). Her first argument sought to problematize the foundations of laboratory-based psychological research. She countered the assertion that traditional cognitive experiments were assumed to be generalizable, and that cognitive processes, therefore, ought likewise to be assumed to be transferable across contexts or settings. At the same time, she argued that academic psychology had an excessive as well as a troublesome influence on the provision of formal schooling (and, by extension, on other formal educational structures, such as universities). More specifically, she argued that the psychologists’ focus on cognition effectively served to foreground intellectual work and, thus, the academic curriculum, at the expense of other forms of knowing or of competence – the ‘practical’ or ‘everyday’ – which have therefore been allocated a lower status in society. This is a phenomenon that is readily observed in the United Kingdom, both when considering relative perceptions of the academic curriculum and the vocational curriculum among policy makers (Curzon and Tummons, 2013), and when recognizing the broader social belief that vocational education is for the ‘less-able’ student while academic education is for the ‘more able’ student. In combining these two arguments, Lave therefore argued that the academic curriculum rested on the false premise that if people study particular subjects, then these studies would form a generalized mental discipline that would – in general – improve the minds of the students. Because cognition is assumed to be transferable, the knowledge that the individual student will have acquired can be carried from the school context into life after school. Notwithstanding the emergence and adoption of sociocultural perspectives on learning and teaching in HE (as well as in other educational settings), this psychological and individualist model has in recent times maintained its position partly through its alignment to dominant neoliberal discourses of education and training not only in the United Kingdom (where I am, and where my research is predominantly carried out), but in other parts of the world as well, including North America (which is the site of one of the two empirical studies on which this book rests). The neoliberal construction of the student as an individual social actor, able to avail herself of whatever occupational or training opportunities that she wishes, just so long as she possesses or is willing to work to possess the correct skill set needed in order to access and then make the most of those opportunities, sits comfortably alongside a model of student learning derived from psychology, which decontextualizes the student from her social and cultural environment and instead positions her as moving from context to context (school to college, or university to workplace), carrying with her

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a battery of internalized knowledge, skill and competence. It is unsurprising, finally, to note that a further element of Lave’s argument is that these dominant models of cognition and learning are characterized by a Western epistemology and ontology that fail to acknowledge those different ways of learning and thinking that are to be found in other parts of the world (Lave, 1996, 2011).

Learning as legitimate peripheral participation in a community of practice If we start with the notion of LPP as a form or pattern of apprenticeship, then it does not require much effort to imagine pictures or construct metaphors or analogies that richly describe the kinds of learning that LPP must entail, in much the same way as we can easily imagine what the ‘newcomers’ and the ‘old-timers’ in a community of practice look like, how they talk, how they relate to each other and so forth, whether it is the image of the apprentice in the hairdressing salon who is only – as yet – permitted to sweep up, make coffee for customers and perhaps shampoo customers’ hair before the senior stylist takes over (Billett, 2008), or the apprentice engineer who attends college on a part-time basis in order to study theory-based content while also gaining hands-on experience in the workplace (Colley et al., 2003). The long cultural memory that is attached to the term ‘apprenticeship’, notwithstanding more recent attempts here in the United Kingdom by governments of different persuasions to relaunch or rebrand them, brings to mind ideas about learning through ‘picking up stuff as you go along’, ‘trying stuff out’ or perhaps ‘watching and learning from an older colleague’. Is this all that there is to learning through LPP? In Chapter 1, I briefly outlined Lave and Wenger’s concept of LPP (1991: 35): of learning as a consequence of engagement in social practice – an engagement that of necessity is both authentic and meaningful and properly aligned to the things being learned (that is to say, legitimate), and structured in such a way that they are appropriate for someone who is new to the things being learned (that is to say, peripheral), in such a way that the learning that happens involves the whole person, within social communities (that is, communities of practice). Learning is not located ‘in the head’, but ‘in the whole person’, impacting on how we move, how we act and how we talk. I also noted that aspects of the theory are vague and lacking specificity. Nonetheless, there are three more aspects to Lave and Wenger’s framework of LPP that we need to be cognizant of, before our critique can be continued. First, it is important to note that LPP is not a ‘pedagogical

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strategy or a teaching technique’ (Lave and Wenger, 1991: 40). Instead, it is positioned as a way of understanding learning. Second, learning – through LPP – happens ‘no matter which educational form provides a context for learning, or whether there is any educational form at all’ (ibid.). And third, these processes of learning are understood as forms of social reproduction, both for the communities in which learning happens and for the successive generations of participants within them. In this way both communities and their practices are endowed with histories and traditions, ways of doing things that have been established by past generations of members. Learning through LPP might not constitute a pedagogic strategy, but it does nonetheless require a series of structures, people, resources and tools in order for opportunities, all of which are located in the social world and mediated by it – including the newcomers. In this way, Lave and Wenger dismiss any notions of learning as a process that involves internalization; instead, they propose that learning – through LPP – will always concern the whole person, acting in the social world (ibid.). They argue that learning is an improvised practice, and draw a contrast between a ‘learning curriculum’ consisting of an array of authentic resources and opportunities for newcomers to engage with, and a ‘teaching curriculum’ that in fact restricts, rather than enhances, opportunities for learning. Indeed, the learning curriculum/teaching curriculum dualism is mirrored in their rejection of didactic instruction (what we might think of as pedagogy, although it is not a term that Lave and Wenger use) in favour of authentic language use. In a community of practice, peripheral participants learn from talking within practice, not from talking about practice (ibid.: 107–108). However, the extent to which relationships between peripheral participants on the one hand and fuller participants on the other might be understood in terms of the power differentials between them is not considered. Nor do Lave and Wenger go into detail about how new knowledge, practice, competence or skill might be theorized or understood as a consequence of learning (Edwards, 2005), although they stress that communities of practice do not stand still, and that change is a fundamental quality of any community. Once again, many of these part-formed or not-yet completed notions or theories are expanded on by Wenger (1998). Thus, he expands on earlier, less well-formed, ideas about change through an investigation of the histories of communities of practice, as reified in the tools or resources that they produce, for example, as well as in the practices of community members. Practices can change, and so can the tools, resources and discourses that members employ: in this way, novelty innovation can be placed within a community of practice. He offers ways of thinking about power through the dualism of the politics of

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participation (personal influence, discrimination, nepotism) and the politics of reification (legislation, institutionally defined authority, policy). Even though it is by no means explicitly stated, Wenger offers ways of thinking about power, and about the potential for symbolic violence, within a community of practice. Issues of power, of change and of innovation within a community of practice remain contested (Barton and Hamilton, 2005; Swan et  al., 2002). And yet it seems a little unfair, as Wenger himself justifiably states, to complain that communities of practice theory does not satisfactorily explain power (in the same way that, for example, Foucauldian sociology does), when it is not a theory of power, but of learning (Farnsworth et al., 2016). LPP does not provide the same kind of account of learning as might be provided by cognitive psychology, therefore, but to require it to do so seems to me to be rather missing the point. If we take on LPP as a model of learning that involves the whole person acting on and in the world and at the same time accept Lave’s (1988) critique of individualist cognition, on which LPP clearly rests, then to look for an account of what learning is, other than a social phenomenon that changes how people work, talk, move and interact with the world around them, would be erroneous. These very changes in how people are, how they construct their identities as well as how others construct them, how they talk with and ask questions of each other, how they work (in the sense of work as anything that requires routinized effort, rather than simply being labour for which one is remunerated (Smith, 2005)), how they use or adapt some tools and artefacts while also reifying new ones, exactly characterize what learning is – a social practice that needs to be observed in context, in specific places and cultures, and that is therefore neatly aligned to the ethnographies that provide the empirical foundations of the work done, separately and together, by both Lave and Wenger (Lave, 1988, 2011; Wenger, 1998) and by other researchers and writers who have contributed to the broader theoretical and intellectual milieu from which situated learning, as one of a number of social theories of learning, has emerged (Brown and Duguid, 1991; Brown et al., 1989; Rogoff and Lave, 1984). And while the specificities of the theory, such as the exact nature and politics of participation, remain contestable (Winch, 2010), it nonetheless provides a heuristic device of both utility and value.

Situating assessment within a community of practice While explicit theoretical and/or empirical studies of pedagogy within communities of practice are relatively thin on the ground, research into assessment – in a

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variety of educational contexts in addition to HE – is more common. Assessment in itself was relatively under-represented within this body of literature at first, perhaps reflecting the fact that formal educational provision has only gradually come to be widely explored in this sociocultural context. There has, in recent years, been a proliferation of work specifically relating to the exploration of assessment as a sociocultural practice more broadly (that is to say, drawing on a number of different sociocultural perspectives, some of which are discussed in the next two chapters), as well as exploring assessment as an aspect of practice within a community of practice. But the use of the theory is variable to say the least, and while it is, I suggest, possible to locate assessment as an aspect of the work done within a HE community of practice with a degree of rigour and precision, other uses of the theory have generated instances of conceptual slippage that need to be addressed. Let me begin by providing some examples relating specifically to the use of the community of practice model that demonstrate a relatively narrow or light use of the theory. In an article that proposes a model of assessment practice in HE wherein criteria are negotiated between students and tutors in an attempt to generate a greater understanding of the assessment process among students, Chris Rust et al. state that ‘a social constructivist view of learning . . . argues that knowledge is shaped and evolves through increasing participation within different communities of practice’ (2005: 232). The article, however, makes no attempt to consider where, within a HE context, these communities of practice might be, how they might be defined or how their different practices may be understood. The focus on assessment criteria as a space for negotiation of meaning is, I think, interesting as well as valuable, and certainly speaks to those broader discourses of student-centred learning in HE that promote deeper rather than surface engagement on the part of the student. I would agree that assessment criteria are an element of assessment work within a community of pedagogic practice: I return to this point shortly, and have in fact argued this point elsewhere (Tummons, 2008). A similarly cursory use of the community of practice metaphor is found in an article by Jannette Elwood and Valentina Klenowski (2002) in reporting their research into assessment practices on a masters-level education module. In the article, two terms are employed: ‘community of shared practice’ (a rather tautological expression) and ‘community of assessment practice’, sometimes interchangeably. And yet the model of learning that the article rests on as a whole draws more on individual cognition and acquisition models of deep and surface learning, metacognition and constructivism. Assessment is equated with

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participation, but left otherwise unproblematized. Once again, the fundamental characteristics (the shared repertoire, the joint enterprise, the mutual engagement) of the community or communities of practice that the paper refers to are left unexplored. Indeed, the extent to which communities of practice are made mention of but rarely clearly or explicitly defined or operationalized, is, arguably, concomitant to the variable usage of references to and citations of the broader concept of situated learning (Lang and Canning, 2010). Suellen Shay (2005, 2008) posits assessment as a socially situated interpretive act, and highlights the tensions and ambiguities that surround emergent definitions of assessment validity and reliability, and the emergent definition of assessment criteria, within what she terms academic communities of practice. The stress on knowing as being emergent and always developing is in fact entirely aligned to the broader epistemological position held by both Lave and Wenger and in particular by Wenger (who describes learning in terms of being based on ‘evolving forms of mutual engagement’ and as based around ‘practice [which] is an emergent structure’ (Wenger, 1998: 95–96). Here again, although communities of practice are cited as a way of understanding something about the places within which assessment happens, the delineation or explication of these communities of practice is not the central theoretical concern of Shay’s research, and they are not explicitly defined (a point also noted by Trowler (2008:  95–97)). Likewise, in reporting research that focuses on the difficulties of establishing assessment reliability, Peter Knight (2002) provides an implicit definition of communities of practice as being situated within academic disciplines (as I have discussed in more detail in the preceding chapter). Knight positions these communities as local insofar as it is difficult for the assessment criteria used in one to be understood in another (ibid.:  280), but otherwise does not provide any further detailed description or analysis of how these local discipline-based communities of practice might be defined, or how they might share artefacts or discourses across their boundaries. More intriguingly, in reporting research that explores the reliability of portfolio-based assessment within a masters-level course for teachers in HE, David Baume and Mantz Yorke (2002) propose that one of the ways by which portfolio-based assessment can be defined as reliable is through the development of shared understandings of what the assessment process entails between course participants, course tutors and the course team (the academic staff who create the course in question) – a position that is closely aligned to that set out by Rust et al. (2005). They go on to propose that the ways in which these three sets of actors interact and work together ‘come close to constituting a “community

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of practice” ’ (Baume and Yorke, 2002:  23). But there is no further discussion about how this community might be understood. Nor is there any discussion about what it is about this group of actors and their shared endeavours within the course that means that they only ‘come close’ to being a community of practice: what is stopping a ‘community of practice’ from emerging, and why? None of this is to deny the merits of the analyses put forward in these as well as other articles and chapters that seek to explicate assessment from a community of practice perspective. What I simply mean to stress is the fact that ‘community of practice’ as a descriptor has in part become normalized or habituated in such a way that the rich possibilities for exploration and heuristic analysis have been lost sight of (cf. Lea, 2005). It is perhaps, in cases such as these, an example of ‘theory talk’ (Thomas, 2007), rather than theory as a critical and explanatory framework (Gee, 1996; Tight, 2015). At the same time, there are more theoretically saturated accounts that can be drawn on to inform our discussion: a body of literature that can be defined as being thoroughly enfolded within communities of practice theories, where the paradigmatic components of the theories, usually derived from Lave and Wenger (1991) and Wenger (1998) are elaborately and critically foregrounded, used in depth in the analyses presented. Thus, in a discussion on assessment practice in general, Thomas Rømer (2002) explores the differential aspects of communities of practice theory as they evolve over time: that is, as the theory shifts from the position inhabited by Lave and Wenger (1991) to the positions later inhabited by Lave (1996) and Wenger (1998). In this way Rømer’s account neatly anticipates many of the arguments made regarding the evolution of communities of practice from an empirically derived model for analysis, to a topdown model for evaluation (Barton and Tusting, 2005; Hughes et al., 2007). Rømer suggests three different aspects of theorizing assessment within a community of practice, which rest on the following differing iterations of the theory. The first posits assessment as acknowledging the ‘right and proper way’ (Rømer, 2002: 235) of showing knowledge/practice that has been gained/ acquired over time, based on tacit and intuitively grasped criteria. In this, he makes use of the epistemology of communities of practice theories, stressing the socially constructed nature of knowledge to argue that externally set criteria or standards are incompatible with the more ‘organic’ way by which a community generates and mediates knowing (a standpoint shared by Rust et al. (2005)). The second highlights the power relations that must be established between apprentices and old-timers:  Lave and Wenger have insufficiently investigated power relations that, in common with other writers, Rømer argues. The third, drawing

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additionally on postmodernist discourses, suggests that ways of knowing are necessarily multiple and complex. By drawing on aspects of Wenger (1998) in contrast to Lave and Wenger (1991), Rømer stresses the multiple trajectories and multiple ways of knowing that legitimate peripheral participants can and do occupy, necessitating similarly complex assessment processes (a standpoint shared by Knight (2002)). Rømer’s work is highly theoretical and presented in abstract terms. In contrast to this approach, other writers have used communities of practice theory to provide more grounded, empirical examples of research into practice that isolate specific elements of Wenger’s framework in particular to make sense of assessment as an aspect of practice within a community of practice. Specifically, we can draw on the concepts of reification, boundary objects and boundary crossing, and learner trajectories. Olga Dysthe and Knut Engelsen (2004), in their analysis of portfolio-based assessment in teacher training in Norway, focus on portfolios as reifications of teaching practice, and seek to problematize the extent to which portfolios can capture or document authentic participation in practice in order to ensure the validity of the assessment process as a whole. In this way, they exploit Wenger’s notion of the double edge of reification (1998: 61–62), by which any reification can mask a deep and proper understanding of the phenomenon in question. Asa Lindberg-Sand and Tomas Olsson (2008) also focus on the objects or artefacts created by assessment practices within the communities of practice that they identify within the different departments that make up a single faculty of engineering at one university in Sweden. In their analysis (which primarily consists of an exploration as to why particular groups of students fail), they position assessments as boundary objects with a double function: first, to reify learning within the community of practice that equates to the course or module that has just been studied; and second to provide reified evidence of learning as students move across boundaries to begin studying another module (Lindberg-Sand and Olsson, 2008:  172). Jeff Jawitz (2007), in an ethnographic analysis of a single department at a university in South Africa, suggests that this academic department consists of two communities of practice, one of which is centred around teaching and the other around research (as discussed in Chapter 2). Although normally quite distinct, with academic staff aware of the different practices and repertoires that each one enfolds, Jawitz suggests that it is through the assessment of a specific piece of work – an honours-level ‘long paper’ (equivalent to a third-year undergraduate dissertation at HE level six) – that these two communities overlap. Also drawing on Wenger’s concepts of learner trajectories and

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boundary crossing, Jawitz uses the artefact of the ‘long paper’ to explore how academics move within and between the teaching community and the research community. What Jawitz accomplishes here, therefore, is to use communities of practice theory in such a way as to build a bridge between the community of pedagogic practice and the community of research practice.

Disambiguating the many facets of assessment practice in higher education It would seem to be the case that there are enough prior studies that use communities of practice theory in a sufficiently robust manner as to provide us with serious and well-informed accounts of different facets of assessment practice in HE. And these are constituted in such a way that even if we are not so sure as to which kind or version of communities of practice we subscribe to, we can still make use of them to construct theoretically and well as empirically well-informed accounts of practice. But before we leave assessment behind, it is necessary to explore one final problem, which is the simple fact that for students and for lecturers, not to mention university administrators, second markers and external examiners, assessment constitutes different kinds of practice. Consider the example of assessment criteria: to position these as a space for the negotiation of meaning would seem at first look to be neatly aligned to a key tenet of Wenger’s theory. But while it may well be the case that as a lecturer I can and should spend time going through the assessment criteria with my students (to do so appears to be the rule rather than the exception within a student-centred pedagogy, although the benefits of the process are debatable) the meaning of them is not negotiable in this context. Where there is room for negotiation is in how these criteria are – differentially – interpreted by myself and by my colleagues, as we discover when attending moderation meetings (Bloxham et al., 2011; Ecclestone, 2001). If we accept that a series of assessment criteria constitute a text-based artefact, then through a series of logical steps we can establish that different members of more than one community of practice will use it differently. Students need to learn how to interpret or use this particular artefact, in order to be able to access other aspects of their learning within the community – the aspect in question being the capacity and ability to accomplish certain tasks to do with, say, academic essay writing, in order to demonstrate their progress through accreditation and certification (when I talk about ‘essays’, I do not mean to gainsay the increasingly diverse assessment landscape within HE:  some students

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write essays, while others engage in performance, in demonstration of mastery of a particular embodied movement or display of other kind of work). But the lecturer, who occupies a position of power in relation to how the use of the artefact is to be understood, will necessarily mediate the students’ interpretation. Students can only use the artefact in ways that are approved by the lecturer. By contrast, different members of staff have the capacity to negotiate the meaning of the artefact, within certain boundaries, in order to carry out a series of value judgements on these same academic essays – first when each essay is marked, and then again when the marks are compared and contrasted at moderation or internal examination meetings. These processes of negotiation reflect the double edge of reification: the inability of any reified form perfectly to capture the occasion and purpose of its production. In this sense, assessment criteria operate as permissive guidelines (Hamilton, 2009). After this, external examiners or reviewers may choose to scrutinize the criteria. In this way, we can follow the artefact: we can trace the movement of the assessment criteria within a community of pedagogic practice and note the different ways in which it is used and understood by different members of that community, according to their positions and trajectories within it. If a set of assessment criteria can be analysed in such a way, then what of the artefacts of assessment themselves? What kinds of functions or what kinds of meanings as artefacts within a community of pedagogic practice might we ascribe to the actual essays, lab reports, theses or other artefacts produced by students in order to demonstrate their learning? How should we make sense of the student handbooks that tell the students what their essays should be about and how they should be structured, or of the transcripts and certificates that students take with them when their studies have been completed? All such artefacts are waiting to be unpacked and theorized, and I provide one further example here, derived from prior empirical research that I conducted into assessment within teacher-training programmes in England (Tummons, 2008). Through exploring the ways in which student handbooks were used and understood by the different members of the pedagogic community of practice of teacher training that I was researching, I concluded that student handbooks worked in two main ways. First, I posited that a student handbook constituted a literacy artefact that reifies aspects of the practice of the teacher-training community. In this mode, the process of interpreting the assignment (one of the key purposes of producing such handbooks) is an activity by which students participate in the work of the community. Students learn both something about the practice of the teacher-training community and something about some of

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the other communities within the constellation of which that community is a member: that is to say, they learn about ‘teaching’. But a handbook also functions as a literacy artefact that reifies a milestone along the community’s paradigmatic trajectory, which has to be negotiated by the student (Wenger, 1998: 156). In this mode, the assignment brief encapsulates a particular activity (assessment), the successful negotiation of which will demonstrate the student’s fuller competence and experience in the practice of the community (ibid.: 216). That is to say, they learn about what to do for the assignment, about how to ‘be students’ for the purposes of accreditation. These examples all serve to illustrate what can be achieved through a critical and thorough use of communities of practice theory. In these cases, key elements of the theory can be employed in order to provide an explanatory framework that allows us to interrogate the assessment activity in question. In the light of these worked examples, it is a straightforward exercise to position a transcript or degree certificate as both textual artefact and boundary object. There is no reason why they cannot be both. Any object or artefact that is generated within a community of practice has the potential to travel and be used in another community of practice: it is simply the case that if an artefact does travel to another community, then how it might be used or understood will be subject to meaning making by people who are not members of the indigenous community, which may in turn lead to problems in translation.

Assessment: Reliability, validity and authenticity If we accept that assessment criteria are contestable and are incapable of being interpreted in any one way (as a consequence of the double edge of reification – which in effect posits the notion that any and every text is capable of multiple interpretations, a perspective shared by literacy studies and theories of literacy as social practice (Barton, 1994; Barton and Hamilton, 1998)), then the consequence is that assessment reliability is rendered problematic. At the very least, we have to acknowledge that reliability in assessment is something that is constructed, and not something that in any way occupies a position of certainty, and while it is certainly possible to generate assessment judgements that are robust and reliable at a local level, attempts to make these assessment results more generalizable across different contexts – across different boundaries – are fraught with danger (Knight, 2002, 2006a, 2006b). The products of assessment – the reifications – are not straightforwardly transferable, not least because, as artefacts,

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they necessarily embody the double edge of reification. Thus, their meaning, importance or significance have to be re-established as they travel across boundaries to new communities of practice. In this way, assessment reliability – the extent to which an assessment judgement can be seen as being robust and trustworthy – is problematized. Reliability is not the only problem. Lave and Wenger, as part of their wider critique of formalized educational structures, dismiss formal evaluation through positing a dualism: a contrast between learning to know – the authentic consequence of LPP – and learning to display knowledge for the purpose of evaluation – an inauthentic representation of learning that is forced on the learner by any formalized curriculum or institution (1991: 112). It is difficult to escape a sense that this is a rather unfinished concept: if LPP is indeed to be taken seriously as a reworking and revalidation of the concept of apprenticeship learning, then at some point (borrowing from the gendered language of apprenticeships in England that can be traced back several centuries), the moment must come when the master judges the work done by the apprentice before he can become a journeyman, or when the journeyman can become a master and take on an apprentice in his own right. Apprenticeship models are suffused with notions of judgement and evaluation of the work being done, of work that must be done to the standards and according to the traditions followed, and sustained over time, by the old-timers of the community. Surely it must be the case that the authentic work done by an apprentice can and should, in some sense, be evaluated? The answer is, of course, that it can and should be so evaluated. Lave and Wenger, we might assume, are drawing the kind of distinction that is all too commonly discussed in the assessment literature that relates to any number of vocational, technical or professional curricula in particular:  the need for students to complete authentic, and hence valid, assessments. Simply put, we might find it easier from a quality assurance perspective or a resource perspective to ask trainee electrical installers to write an essay about how to wire up a lightning conductor, but a valid assessment would be to ask them to actually do so – and on more than one occasion. In just the same way, we would expect apprentices working in a hairdressing salon to actually give haircuts to a number of clients, and for trainees working in a travel centre to book travel tickets for a number of different customers. We do not need to be particularly well versed in the literature relating to assessment in vocational or technical education to come to this position. A more theoretically satisfactory way to problematize the authenticity and hence the validity of assessment, from a communities of practice perspective,

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comes through recourse once again to the double edge of reification. If we accept that one of the consequences of any act of reification is a loss of meaning and a focus on the product at the expense of the process that underpins and surrounds it, then what might this mean for the authenticity of the work that is submitted for assessment? If we follow this line of inquiry, then we raise difficult questions about knowing. What do we mean when we say that we know something? And can we straightforwardly take what we know and reproduce it for an external person or group of people? If knowing is a process that involves the whole person acting in the world (Lave and Wenger, 1991: 40), surely it is only through doing or embodying the things that we know, that we can express what it is that we know? This works quite straightforwardly for the apprentice hairdresser, but not so much for the student of history. Historians ‘do history’, but they do not really write short essays about specific historical topics. Historians know a lot of history, but if a body of historical knowledge has to be reified into a text-based form, will this text always, automatically, embody the double edge of reification? However, it is important to remember that we can pose challenges to assessment validity and assessment reliability from any number of theoretical as well as empirical perspectives. It is not a unique or even particularly distinguishing element of communities of practice theory, that assessment validity and reliability can be challenged in the way that I outline here (Brown and Glassner, 1999; Knight and Yorke, 2008; Kvale, 1996). Rather, the point that I wish to stress is that as part of a theoretically saturated account of any learning process, key aspects of assessment theory are rendered problematic, and they need in some way to be argued through, accounted for or otherwise satisfactorily discussed.

Returning to the problems of formal education and pedagogy (for a moment) The problem of the history student and her essay takes us back to the broader problem of the formal educational structure and curriculum:  such structures are, simply put, inauthentic. Lave and Wenger problematize formal educational organizations through a simple, consistent and persuasive argument:  schools are social institutions and therefore, as socially configured places where learning happens, constitute very specific contexts (1991: 40). To put it another way, when you go to university, you learn ‘how to go to university’: more than this cannot be assumed, because learning is not straightforwardly transferable. And

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when you study a particular subject at university, such as history, then what you learn is ‘university history’, not ‘being a historian’. In this context, we are learning from talk about history, not to talk as historians (Lave and Wenger, 1991: 109). At the same time, we can argue persuasively that for some kinds of learning, merely ‘hanging around’ practitioners will never be sufficient, and some kind of process of formal instruction will always be necessary (Lemke, 1997). In order to solve this problem, the first step is to accept the role of the community of pedagogic practice (as discussed in the previous chapter). And if we accept in turn that some of the artefacts of assessment, such as empirical dissertations or theses, or, ‘long research-informed papers’ (Jawitz, 2007), which are reified within the community of pedagogic practice, might act as a boundary object and be capable of travelling across to the community of research practice, then we can establish a meaningful link to a site of authentic practice and, therefore, of authentic learning.

Some interim conclusions Assessment has an unavoidable element of gatekeeping that needs to be explored (Lillis, 2001). This has to wait for now, because in order to find some satisfactory ways of dealing with this issue, we need to consider more broadly how power operates within and across communities of practice. Power is a problem for Lave and Wenger, and for Wenger, and this has been highlighted on several occasions (Barton and Tusting, 2005; Hughes et al., 2007). It is not, I suggest, necessary to reject communities of practice theory because of this lacuna, however. I hope that this chapter, as well as the two that precede it, have demonstrated that communities of practice theory is a theory that provides a meaningful explanatory framework for particular social phenomena to do with learning and teaching in universities. Nonetheless, in order to solve some of the difficulties and address some of the concerns, such as power, that Lave and Wenger, and Wenger leave hanging, it is necessary to augment communities of practice theory with other ontologically and empirically compatible theoretical perspectives: some necessary extensions.

4

Necessary Extensions, Part 1 – Actor-Network Theory, and Literacy Studies

Introduction This is the first of two chapters in which I talk about the ways in which some of the (more or less justifiable) concerns relating to, or deficiencies within, communities of practice theory can be addressed. This is by no means a novel approach to take: as might be anticipated, the work of Lave and Wenger and of Wenger has been subject to a number of both theoretically driven and empirically informed criticisms (Barton and Tusting, 2005; Brown and Duguid, 2001; Hughes et al., 2007; Kirshner and Whitson, 1997). Some of this literature seeks to address or otherwise provide a remedy for those moments when communities of practice theory breaks down or simply fails to address a particular problem or concern because the conceptual tools for doing so are not available. The ways in which power relations, both among newcomers and old-timers within a community of practice and between different communities of practice, are made sense of provides a standout example. Other authors have sought to expand on Lave and Wenger, and Wenger not because of a theoretical gap or inability of the theory to address a particular issue, but because an alternative approach provides a more enhanced or more robust body of theory with which to go about the work of answering whatever questions are being researched. The ways in which artefacts are constructed, used and interpreted within a community provide a good example of this area of concern. In exploring and evaluating these theoretical or conceptual augmentations, I am concerned about establishing the ways in which these other approaches can enhance and enrich our use of communities of practice theory (mindful of the overall approach that I am adopting through this book, namely, that the ‘version’ of the theory that I am focused on is derived from Wenger (1998)). I am also concerned about subjecting these augmentations to the same kinds of critical

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exploration that I have applied thus far to the communities of practice literature more generally. That is to say, I continue to subscribe to the definition of ‘theory’ that I  have already established, while accepting that pluralism in theory use, if rigorously and carefully considered, can enhance our explorations and our research (Ashwin, 2009; Thomas, 2007; Tight, 2004, 2015). By this I  mean to stress the need to consider the ways in which the different theories that I draw on – and which, in turn, have been drawn on by other researchers and writers as well – are aligned in terms of both epistemology and ontology to communities of practice theory. The two theoretical approaches that I draw on in this chapter are not theories of learning in the ways that communities of practice theory is a theory of learning, but they do have something to say about how we might make sense of learning within a community of practice, if we add them to our theoretical repertoire. And they both share a number of characteristics that help us to establish these two theories as providing meaningful and robust insights. First, they posit a social epistemology: that is, that knowledge is socially constructed and mediated. Second, they posit a social ontology: that is, the understanding that what constitutes the world around us is also socially constructed. Third, they stress the role of artefacts in the reification, mediation or negotiation of meaning and understanding. And fourth, they stress the role of people in relation to these artefacts: how the artefacts are created, understood, used or manipulated is contingent on the understanding, knowledge and biographies of the people involved. The first theory that I draw on is actor-network theory; the second is literacy studies, or theories of literacy as social practice. In both cases, I do not attempt to provide an exhaustive account of their development and application – to do so would require a much longer book. Rather, I provide a brief outline, before moving on to consider in more detail those specific aspects of the framework in question that can be used to augment, and sometimes to critique, communities of practice theory, drawing on empirical as well as conceptual and theoretical work.

Actor-network theory The roots of actor-network theory are to be found in post-structuralism (the traces of which can be discerned through actor-network’s rejection of overarching sociological explanatory frameworks, in favour of ‘ground-up’, fine-grained

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accounts of research), and then in turn across a variety of disciplinary contexts, most conspicuously in science and technology studies, a discipline within which the ethnography of laboratory work done by Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar (1979) is the landmark text. At the same time, actor-network theory has been taken up by a diverse group of researchers, ranging from geographers and archaeologists to medical researchers and ethicists. It has been relatively underused by education researchers (Fenwick and Edwards, 2010), although a number of relevant important studies can be identified. Perhaps appropriately, bearing in mind its antecedents in post-structuralism, actor-network theory defies a simple definition. It has been described in several ways: as a component or characteristic of ethnography (ibid.: 151) that is concerned with ‘the processes of ordering that generate effects such as technologies’ (Law, 1994: 18); as a ‘way of talking . . . [that] allows us to look at identity and practice as functions of ongoing interactions with distant elements (animate and inanimate) of networks that have been mobilized along intersecting trajectories’ (Nespor, 1994: 12–13); and as a ‘sociology of the social and . . . [a] sociology of associations’ (Latour, 2005: 9). Notwithstanding the problems that we might set for ourselves in attempting to produce a uniform definition, the literature nonetheless allows three key themes to be teased out in such a way that a working definition of actor-network theory can be established. First, it is sociology of association (Latour, 2005), or of ramifying relations (Law, 2004). It is a way of exploring how social projects are accomplished, ‘how stuff gets done’, in ways that can be traced, across networks or associations or links. Such networks can consist of concentrations of all sorts of stuff:  stories, people, paperwork, computer simulations, routines, texts and voices. It is not concerned with what such stories or routines might mean, however; rather, the focus of an actor-network account is on what such stuff – people as well as objects – might do once they have been linked or associated into a network (Fenwick and Edwards, 2010: 8; Fox, 2000: 864). This emphasis, on doing rather than meaning, leads to the second key theme:  actor-network theory provides ways of thinking about how networks or associations both carry influence and influence each other, and foregrounds the ways in which people are made to do things across networks of geography or time or across institutional boundaries. ‘How to make someone do something’ in a particular way, or at a particular time, is a central concern (Latour, 2005: 59). In order for any social project to be accomplished, the network (of people and things) needs to be brought together. A network can be established through persuasion, inducement, coercion or any combination of these. It is

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important to note that actor-network theory is not concerned with explaining or justifying such networks, but is concerned with simply accounting for how they might expand or retract, so that the project they wish to carry through can be successfully accomplished. A network can break down, either temporarily or permanently, at any point or link. Consequently, the social project can be slowed down, misdirected or even lost, whether the broken link is an object (for example, a text-based document that has been lost or misinterpreted), or a person (for example, someone who has decided for whatever reason not to act in the way that the network requires). Both people and objects can make or fail to make other people do something; that is to say, both people and objects are granted agency within actor-network theory. This insistence on analysing people and things in the same way introduces the third key theme: the principle of symmetry, which states: ‘Humans are not treated differently from non-humans . . . Humans are not assumed to have a privileged a priori status in the world but to be part of it’ (Fenwick and Edwards, 2010: 3). In an actor-network analysis, therefore, it makes no difference whether the network constituents being explored are people or things. Both human and non-human elements can come together and be held together in order to ensure the performance of the social project in question. Indeed, it may well be the case that both human and non-human elements are always present and need to be so. This is not because such a mixture of people and objects can make a network seem to be more sustainable than if it was made up of just people or just stuff. Rather, this is a reflection of the fact that to attempt to bifurcate people and things when considering how the social is enacted creates a false dichotomy. It is simply the case that the one cannot be without the other (Latour, 2005: 75–76).

Actor-network theory: Earlier analyses One of the earliest actor-network accounts in education is that of Jan Nespor (1994). It consists of an ethnography of learning and teaching within two rather different curricula within a US university: physics and management. Both these areas of inquiry generate a number of interesting insights, but it is his study of the undergraduate management curriculum that is of particular interest here. This is because the management department, as he describes it, is so complex: the management courses are delivered at different times, to constantly rotating student groups, arranged across a number of institutional sites (an institutional and a temporal complexity that echoes the kinds of complexities of university

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provision that in the earlier chapters of this book I  have suggested might be explored using concepts derived from Wenger (1998), such as constellations and boundary-crossing). In considering the complex provision that is at the centre of his ethnography, Nespor poses questions regarding the spatial as well as temporal distribution of people who come together at particular times as dictated by the programmes that they are studying, before moving away and doing more or less different things until the next time that they are required, by the curriculum, to do something else. For Nespor, an actor-network approach provides theoretical affordances that allow him to explore, through empirical research, how these people work together with and through the curriculum. A qualitatively different kind of actor-network account by Richard Edwards (2003) explores differing, and sometimes conflicting, discourses of lifelong learning, and considers how these might shape actor-networks, which he analyses from a theoretical rather than an empirical perspective. He posits three dominant discourses of lifelong learning: a neoliberal model that positions the individual learner as someone who acquires and then drops particular bodies of skills throughout her/his working life; a model that looks back to the liberal adult education tradition of ‘learning for learning’s sake’; and a model that equates lifelong learning with social inclusion (Edwards, 2003: 64–65). Admittedly, these three models are by no means new (Morgan-Klein and Osborne, 2007; Wallis, 1996). What, for Edwards, an actor-network sensibility provides, however, is a particular insight that analyses of these discourses otherwise lack. Arguments about lifelong learning as social capital rarely acknowledge that self-fulfilment or learning can have negative outcomes. Similarly, neoliberal analyses of individual learners fail to acknowledge those factors that require individuals to upskill in order to sustain their employability. For Edwards, the central question is the extent to which these learners, enfolded within networks, ‘feel their interests to be represented’ (2003: 66). Each of these three dominant discourses positions the individual learner as agentive: what an actor-network account provides, by contrast, is a way of thinking about how such individual learners are acted on. A third example of an actor-network account that focuses on education is that of Radhika Gorur (2011), who uses actor-network theory to unpack the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), a tool established by the Organisation for Economic and Cooperative Development (OECD) and used in all OECD member countries to assess three constructs: reading, mathematics and science (whatever those might be – assessing any construct is troublesome at best and these kinds of constructs are rendered troublesome by any number of social theories). In her article (which is one of several actor-network

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articles gathered in a special issue of Educational Philosophy and Theory), Gorur uses actor-network theory to unpack the ways in which the results of the PISA assessments are, first, established and, second, translated into educational policy discourse. Her analysis explores the ways in which the results of the PISA assessments become matters of objective fact, established as being rational and scientific, and therefore capable of being used by policy makers for decision making. She focuses in particular on the ways in which the PISA results are employed in a manner that does not take account of the very diverse sociocultural contexts within which the actual tests are being taken, instead being rendered straightforwardly transferable. For Gorur, the problem rests in how ‘PISA knowledge . . . establishes its apparent universality’ (2011: 81). And while she describes the scope of the article as ‘modest’ (ibid., 91), her conclusions – that the results of the PISA assessments should be a matter of concern, properly understood as resting on ‘fragility and provisionality rather than . . . validity and certainty’ (ibid., 90) – are compelling.

A brief note on versions of actor-network theory In her article, Gorur positions her research within an ‘early’ or ‘classic’ actornetwork model or approach as epitomized by Latour and Woolgar (1979): for Gorur, the PISA assessment is her laboratory, and the ways by which the results of the PISA assessments are translated into objective policy statements are her scientific facts (2011:  78). Perhaps unsurprisingly, actor-network theory, akin to communities of practice theory, has evolved over time, however, and different versions of it can be relatively straightforwardly identified. Later approaches tend to be identified as ‘after’ actor-network theory, and other terms that are used to denote an actor-network informed approach include material semiotics and method assemblage – a plurality of approaches that reflects a postmodernist standpoint. At the same time, it might be suggested that some of the people who use actor-network theory actively resist defining it in any specific way, referring instead to the possibility of a multiplicity of versions and a concomitant undesirability to define just one (Fenwick and Edwards, 2010:  2). It remains, self-avowedly, a collection of more or less disparate approaches, an assemblage of methods of exploration and of frameworks for analysis that need to be understood in terms of empirical, and not abstract, inquiry (Law, 2008). As such, we need to maintain a critical perspective as to the use of actor-network theory, as we do in relation to any other kind of (social) theory in education research (as

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discussed in Chapter 1). Explorations of the theoretical and empirical assumptions that lie behind as well as the consequences of different versions of actornetwork are outside the scope of this book. For now, it is sufficient to note that this plurality exists. My preference is for ‘early’ or ‘classic’ actor-network theory, not least because I  am an ethnographer and I  find my approach to empirical research aligned to the kind of work done by Gorur (2011) and Nespor (1994), or by John Law (1994). At the same time, I  draw on actor-network literature more widely in order to further this exploration of communities of practice theory.

Plugging actor-network theory into communities of practice How might actor-network theory contribute to an exploration of a constellation of communities of practice and, specifically, an exploration of the ordering that exists between different communities, in terms of how people or artefacts might move between and across them, or how the discourses from one might impact on the practices of another? What can an actor-network account contribute to an analysis of coordinated activities across social settings that communities of practice theories do not sufficiently address? As I have already acknowledged, the argument that I put forward here is by no means unique in explicitly drawing on actor-network theory in order to – in part, at least – critique or otherwise challenge aspects of communities of practice theory. A number of writers have drawn on actor-network theory to critique or challenge particular elements of the work done by Lave and Wenger, and Wenger. For example, Nespor (1994) challenges Lave and Wenger’s original theorization (1991), arguing that it is problematic because it lacks any means of explaining temporal and geographic relations within and between communities of practice. Arguably, the 1991 ‘version’ of communities of practice is a relatively soft target, because it remains so loosely defined by Lave and Wenger within their book (as I have already discussed) and, in turn, Wenger addresses these issues in his later work through establishing the related constructs of constellations, boundaries and boundary objects. But these later constructs are also troubled by an actor-network sensibility. Actor-network theory provides what I refer to as shifts of emphasis in a number of ways. First, we can argue that what an actor-network approach affords us, as researchers, is a move away from an individual community as our unit of analysis, concentrating instead on the wider fabric of social relations, configured by people and by things that subsume and absorb different, more or less

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disparate, communities (Swan et  al., 2002). Such a shift does not dismiss any aspect of Wenger’s framework, however: it is, if anything, a prompt or reminder to the researcher to consider how communities of practice always, necessarily, work with each other and therefore need always at some point to be considered in relation to their neighbours. Second, we can argue that an actor-network approach helps us to think differently about artefacts, about the materiality of a community. The principle of symmetry provides us with an elegant conceptual framework for considering the ways in which human agency can be extended across institutional, geographical and spatial boundaries (Law, 1994). More specifically, actor-network theory leads us to reconsider the qualities and functions of boundary objects, of peripheries, and of brokers and brokerage. For Wenger, these related processes provide a conceptual schema that allows us to theorize the work done at the ‘edges’ of communities of practice:  as meaning and intention are carried across a constellation, as community members visit some practices and welcome visitors to their own in turn. And all these are processes that can be enhanced if people carry artefacts with them as exemplars – reifications – of the practices that they are representing (1998: 106–118). But whether purposefully or not, the constructs that are employed – boundaries, peripheries and edges – would seem to indicate that all these practices happen alongside and around the borders of a community of practice. By using actor-network theory, however, we can conceptualize these practices rather differently. First, we can theorize the practices of brokerage in terms of engagement and enrolment: acts of persuasion that can occur anywhere across a network and not only at the edges; indeed, an actor-network might not have any clearly defined boundaries at all, and an actor-network account would not seek to establish how big or small the network might actually be (Fox, 2005). And second, drawing on the principle of symmetry, we can understand such acts of persuasion or diplomacy as being phenomena that any actor – human or non-human – might become enrolled in, more or less permanently, at any point across a network. These two shifts of emphasis raise questions that any communities of practice account ought to consider, irrespective of the particular theoretical perspectives being taken or versions being followed. But a third factor also needs to be considered, and this is arguably the most significant critique of communities of practice theory to be addressed thus far: power. Wenger’s conceptualization of power as a constituent element of member identity within a community of practice has been criticized for failing to address power relationships between communities and for being overtly benign, lacking a critical perspective (Boylan, 2010; Roberts, 2006; Tight, 2015). In order to inform counterarguments, a number of

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writers have drawn on actor-network theory to provide a way of accounting for power  – and, specifically, the ways in which inequalities of power are enacted between social actors – within socially configured spaces (Barton and Hamilton, 2005: 31–32; Fox, 2000: 857; Hamilton, 2001: 180; Swan et al., 2002; Tummons, 2010a). I have already alluded to the inequalities of power that are distributed between and across different communities of practice within a university-bound constellation, and these are inequalities that we can see being enacted in all kinds of ways: in relations between faculties and individual departments, for example, or in the ways in which university-wide research policies are enacted at a more local, departmental, level. As such, both power and its differential experience can be understood as an integral part of the practice of this constellation as well as of the constituent communities. But to follow Wenger, and say that power exists as an element of identity, is insufficient in terms of providing a serious analysis of how it is enacted and experienced by social actors (Fox, 2000: 857). Rather, it is necessary to account for how this ‘power’, as an aspect of the social, is brought into being or, to use the language of actor-network theory, is produced or composed (Latour, 2005: 64). Rather than treating power as a nebulous social force that is somehow ‘out there’ to be drawn like water from a well, an actor-network account instead seeks to establish the practical means – the routines, objects and people – that are enrolled and mobilized in order to make things happen. Power, therefore, can be accounted for by exploring the social actions accomplished by both people and things, which are always given agency, and by exploring the ways by which things, once they have been made concrete, can accomplish power as a consequence of their material durability (Latour, 2005; Law, 1994).

Actor-network theory, and theory The final aspect of actor-network theory that I wish to foreground at this time relates to the broader perspective on social theory that it proposes. For subscribers to a post-structuralist social theory also to comment on the use and utility of theory more generally seems, to me, to be entirely apposite: if nothing else, it represents a reflexivity on the part of the theory user that is often lacking and that, arguably, militates the excess of theoretical slippage or theory talk that I have already referred to, and that has been identified by other writers within education research more broadly (Ashwin, 2009; Thomas, 2007; Tight, 2004). An actor-network sensibility foregrounds two aspects of theory work that are of relevance to the argument that I am constructing here. First, reflecting

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its post-structural roots, actor-network posits an epistemology that will always be more complicated than peoples’ capacities to know them: consequently, any account of the social world will always be partial and prone to degrees of oversimplification; and second, therefore, it falls to the researcher and the reader to be mindful of this partiality, to be modest in the claims that are made and to be mindful of the effects of the oversimplifications that are used (Law, 1994, 2004). Throughout the research process, which necessarily includes the writing of the research account (for Latour (2005), the written page is the laboratory of the social scientist), it is imperative that the uncertainties that are bound up in the research are foregrounded. Such a sensitivity to the flaws as well as affordances of the theoretical framework being employed seems to me to be commendable, and – perhaps unfortunately – lacking in some of the communities of practice accounts that I have drawn on thus far.

Literacy studies Literacy studies is a way of thinking about literacy that focuses on literacy practices, those general ways that people use written language in all sorts of social contexts, whether at work, at home or elsewhere. These practices are to be found within particular social interactions or exchanges that are referred to as literacy events. Such events, which can be observed in order to find out more about the practices that underpin them, take place within different social domains, which in turn can be differently regulated by organizations, institutions and people (Barton, 1994; Barton and Hamilton, 1998; Baynham, 1995; Belfiore et al., 2004; Gee, 1996; Lankshear and Knobel, 2011; Lillis, 2001; Street, 1984, 2005). Literacy practices can be seen in all kinds of contexts and genres. Examples include the paperwork required when making a hospital appointment, sending text messages to a friend, booking train tickets online, writing poetry for a magazine or reading the instructions that come with a child’s toy. The work done within universities is suffused with literacy practices. Consider the paradigmatic activity of assessment within a HE community of practice, which I discussed in the preceding chapter. How assessment gets done and how it is thought about and discussed by students and lecturers and external examiners is afforded entirely through the creation, distribution and inscription of different kinds of texts, at different times of the academic year, created for different readers. Some are created at institutional or departmental levels: course handbooks, guides to American Psychological Association or Harvard referencing,

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and worksheets. Individual lecturers create others, perhaps as teaching aids or as part of a seminar room–based activity: PowerPoint presentations, posters or handouts. Students in turn create many different kinds of texts, some of which become assignments. They keep notes using folders or laptops, update references using Mendeley or Endnote, and write essays that they invariably submit for assessment using an online system that they will access in turn to obtain grades and feedback. This feedback will have been written by the lecturers who might refer to module criteria or marking schemes when writing comments and deciding grades. Yet more texts are generated through the various quality assurance processes that any individual module or entire degree programme is required to complete: feedback forms, internal moderation reports and external examiners’ reports. The majority of such documents are circulated, manipulated and worked with in electronic form, although a physical form, printed on paper and collected into portfolios or handbooks, does persist. Assessment is just one example (although perhaps the largest in scale and certainly one of the most important in terms of outcomes) of the kind of work done at a university that is bound up in literacies and relies on as well as creates a hierarchy of textbased documents. And all these practices can be observed in different literacy events:  tutorials, seminars, examination boards and mitigating circumstances panels. However, literacy is not the same across contexts: there are different literacies, enfolded in different literacy practices, which are identifiable and which belong to different social domains. The ways in which social science students write their essays are quite different from the ways in which arts and humanities students write theirs. The use of the first person in academic writing is an issue that clearly demonstrates boundaries between different academic communities. Lecturers employ different tones and vocabularies when writing feedback, and when writing end-of-module reports. And just as literacies vary across contexts, the ways in which meaning can be taken from written texts vary as well. Readers bring their prior experience and knowledge to their reading of a text, mediating their understanding. A member of academic staff might read an article from a peer-reviewed journal more quickly, and with a more immediate understanding, than a student might. This is because the lecturer has a greater working knowledge of the kinds of issues and themes discussed in the journal more generally. But it is also because the lecturer is more used to reading texts within the genre of academic journals than the student is (Swales, 1990). Much literacy learning takes place within relationships of unequal power, where some literacies are acknowledged and encouraged (dominant literacies)

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and others are marginalized or deemed inappropriate (vernacular literacies). Arguably, one of the dominant genres of academic writing that is of most relevance to this book is essayist literacy (Gee, 1996; Lillis, 2001), the way in which university students (although it would apply to other educational contexts as well) are expected to write their assignments, aspects of which include expectations as to the use of literature or other secondary sources (which have to be correctly referenced using appropriate academic conventions), the creation of a linear narrative and often (though by no means always) the use of the academic third person when writing. At the same time, students also employ vernacular literacy practices, during email exchanges with their lecturers, which might be written in a less formal register, or when establishing peer support groups on Facebook. Finally, it is important to note that social practice accounts of literacy rest in part on the fact that learning and knowledge are likewise understood as being constructed through social practices, best understood through ethnographic research (Street, 1984): thus, there is an epistemological and ontological alignment between literacy studies on the one hand, and communities of practice on the other.

Literacy studies: Earlier analyses Within literacy studies there has been a number of analyses of the different kinds of work done by both students and lecturers in HE. Much of this work focuses on assessment, perhaps unsurprisingly, as it is within the practice of assessment that we can see students and lecturers engaging with a variety of dominant as well as vernacular literacy practices. Such work has focused in particular on the acquisition of academic literacies (Street, 1999), and specifically essayist literacies, although other genres of assessment, such as reflective writing, have also been explored (Creme, 2000, 2005; Hoadley-Maidment, 2000; MacLellan, 2004). In addition, attention has, for some time, been paid to the discombobulation that is experienced by students who are unfamiliar with academic writing, both in terms of actually getting the work of writing done (focusing on those students who have had time away from formal education, or who have come to university after following a ‘non-traditional’ trajectory) and in terms of their constructions of themselves as expressed through discourse (focusing on those students for whom the requirements of the dominant discourses of academic writing conflict with their own vernacular literacy practices) (Ivaniç, 1998; Lillis, 2001; Parry, 1989).

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Some accounts focus directly on the differences of power that can be traced when contrasting the demands of dominant, academic literacies, with the vernacular literacies that people bring with them, perhaps from their workplaces, and perhaps from their home lives. Mike Baynham (2000) explores the shift into academia of nurse education as a consequence of the reprofessionalization of nursing, considers the ways in which student nurses bring both theoretical and practical knowledge into their discursive practices, and explores the tensions between these, tensions that are also present in the academic writing of the pharmacy students researched by Karen Scouller et  al. (2008) and the social work students researched by Britta Schneider and Angela Daddow (2017). Mary Scott (2000) argues for a critique of the competing discourses of academia and the workplace through an analysis of the writing practices of student teachers, focusing on the contrasts between the ways of writing required by a university programme of study and the ways of writing required by the workplaces – the schools – that the student teachers are preparing to enter. Barry Stierer (2000:  193) challenges the ways in which universities position trainee teachers as students aspiring to be novice academics rather than more effective professionals, in constructing expectations of academic writing that foregrounds the theoretical rather than the experiential. Turning to the teacher as agent rather than focus, both Deborah Hicks (2001) and Jennifer Rowsell and Dorothy Rajoratnam (2005) offer critical perspectives on pedagogic practice as informed by literacy studies, drawing attention to the literacy practices that school students are required to acquire, and contrasting these with the domestic, vernacular literacies that students bring with them. Gina Cervetti et al. (2006) provide a curricular blueprint for teacher education programmes that seeks to recognize these same multiple, vernacular literacies. Grounded accounts such as these highlight the tensions that can be found when competing literacy practices need to be reconciled, and when people (schoolchildren, student nurses, student teachers) move from one practice setting (their homes or workplaces) to another (their classrooms or other sites of study). Other accounts that provide close-up analyses of the literacy practices of students within HE draw on rich ethnographic accounts of research (an approach to research that in itself provides a meaningful as well as recognizable empirical link to communities of practice). Roz Ivaniç (1998) and Theresa Lillis (2001) produce accounts of the ways in which the student writers who are the focus of their research (all part-time and, in the case of Lillis’s research, all women writers) construct images of themselves in their writing. They also account for ways by which student writers feel that opportunities or freedoms for particular

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forms of expression are excluded by the genres within which they are required to write, thereby once again highlighting power differentials, this time between tutors and students. Fiona Hallett’s (2013) study of academic literacy support in one institution is a phenomenographic study, which explores the provision of generic study skills support that rests on a discourse of individual student deficit. Hallett instead proposes a more contextualized, situated approach to study skills support informed by academic literacies, an argument echoed more broadly by Julia Hathaway (2015) in her call for a ‘mainstreamed’ approach to supporting writing in HE through an academic literacies approach, and in relation to specific curricular contexts by Neil Murray and Shashi Nallaya (2016) in their investigation of the inadequacies of standardized high-stakes language testing in predicting the academic writing capacity of international students. Literacy studies research focuses on much more than the writing work done by students, however:  it has also been used to explore a variety of aspects of wider university practice. Tamsin Haggis (2003) uses academic literacies to critique the dominant discourses of ‘deep’ and ‘surface’ approaches to learning in HE, which are frequently used in books relating to teaching. She argues that these are discourses that are created, defined and then sustained by lecturers – gatekeepers – that need to be understood in terms of power, and that they serve to perpetuate particular forms of exclusion from HE: the same kinds of exclusion that Ivaniç (1998) and Lillis (2001) have explored. Mary Lea (2004) focuses on course and curriculum design, arguing that the creation of new curricula through an academic literacies perspective can facilitate the meaning-making practices of all students, not just those who might be defined by their nontraditional or ‘marginal’ status, about which much previous research has centred (see, for example, Street, 2005). Other work also focuses on the explicit use of assessment as a vehicle for academic literacies acquisition (Saltmarsh and Saltmarsh, 2008) the ways in which academic literacies are understood and evaluated by students (Scouller et  al., 2008), of literacies acquisition as a manifestation of Bernsteinian power relationships (Coleman, 2012), and of their relationship to the vernacular or everyday ways of both physical as well as digital/virtual writing practiced by students (Goodfellow, 2011; Lea and Stierer, 2011). And finally, it is important to note that literacy studies has been used to inform accounts of the research and writing practices of academics. There are two aspects to this. The first is the stress that is given to particular methodological perspectives concerning, as well as tools for doing, research. These are invariably expressed in terms of anthropology and ethnography (Street, 1984), and this ethnographic lens is applied to a range of practices, including the use

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of photographs, understood as ‘ethnographic images’ (Hamilton, 2000), ethnography as a collaborative and participative endeavour (Barton et al., 2007) and the application of an ethnographic framework to the study of digital literacies (Bhatt et al., 2015). The second aspect to consider is the use of literacy studies to evaluate and critique academics’ writing practices. For example, through their ethnographic exploration of the texts generated by researchers in different countries, Lillis and Mary Jane Curry (2010) provide not only methodological tools for the researcher/writer, but also an exploration of the social practices that encompass academic writing, including issues of power (in exploring the consequences of writing in a second language, usually English) and of agency (in exploring the role of others, referred to as ‘brokers’, in the production and then distribution of academic texts). Power and the effects of power are also discussed by Lynn Nygaard (2017) in her account of the mediating factors that impact on academic writing in terms of not only what kinds of research are done and written, but also how these different kinds of research work are valued in terms of academic productivity within an audit culture.

Plugging literacy studies into communities of practice It is important to recognize that Wenger, and Lave and Wenger provide several conceptual tools for thinking critically and carefully about how text-based documents, or artefacts, are created and used. Two of these are transparency and communicative ability (the two others, already discussed, are participation and reification) and all can be used to interrogate text-based artefacts. Lave and Wenger discuss the transparency of artefacts, the interplay between the use of an artefact and the understanding of its significance, as an aspect of participation. As participation becomes more full, so artefacts become more transparent to the practitioner (Lave and Wenger, 1991: 101–102). The more we learn within a community of practice, the more easily we can make use of the artefacts that are to be found within it. In part, this is simply because we know more: therefore, we can do more stuff. And in part it is because as we know more, we are better able to understand the full significance or utility of the resources of the community, including documents. Wenger develops this further through the concept of the communicative ability of an artefact (1998: 64). Communicative ability rests on two factors: participation, which relates to the extent to which a member of a community understands the significance of the artefact as a consequence of the extent or depth of her/his participation; and reification, which relates to the

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extent to which an artefact, once in reified form, manages to continue successfully to embody meaning. Meaning making remains problematic, however, due to the double edge of reification (ibid.: 68), which renders any artefact incapable of perfectly reproducing the practices that led to its conversion into a concrete form. Lave and Wenger acknowledge that access to artefacts is liable to manipulation, for example, through the actions of old-timers in restricting newcomers’ access to aspects of community repertoire, but they do not analyse the causes and consequences of any such manipulation beyond any impact on transparency (1991: 103). Similarly, Wenger only briefly refers to the causes or consequences of the deliberate misuse or misappropriation of artefacts (1998: 64). The potential for political influence within a community of practice is raised, but this is couched in terms that are essentially affirmative:  politics as a force for beneficial intervention, not for intervention that might lead to undesirable consequences (ibid., 91–93). Communities of practice theory opens up ideas about how differences in power might have an impact on participation (a community member cannot participate fully if the repertoire is kept from them) and, by extension, might also have an impact on learning (if participation is less than full for illegitimate reasons, then learning is affected), but does not address them in an entirely satisfactory manner. Nonetheless, literacy studies has been taken up by a number of researchers and writers who have sought to examine or amend those elements of communities of practice theory that they have found to be underdeveloped or lacking in criticality when considering the ways in which literacies are employed. These arguments tend to rest on two themes. The first theme relates to text-based artefacts themselves, focusing in particular on the lack of a sufficiently thorough framework within Wenger’s (1998) work that accounts first for the ways in which artefacts move across spatial and temporal spaces and boundaries, and second for the differential ways in which artefacts might be used or misused by people within communities, shifting the locus of explanation of understanding away from the reification of the artefact (the double edge of reification) and focusing instead on the user or reader, and on how the artefact is used or misused and why. The second theme, drawing on the use/misuse of literacy artefacts, is power, and this can be considered not only in terms of the ways that texts can be persuasive or can require people to represent themselves in certain constrained ways, such as when filling in forms (Fawns and Ivaniç, 2001; Hamilton, 2009), but also through the ways by which people and institutions can encourage or permit some forms of literacy – dominant literacies – and discourage or ignore others – vernacular literacies.

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As such, it is perhaps unsurprising to find studies that draw on both communities of practice and literacy studies to explore specific aspects of university work. Cecilia Jacobs (2005) positions communities of practice in HE as being situated within academic knowledge disciplines (discussed in detail in Chapter 2), simultaneously arguing for a transdisciplinary community of practice (which remains tantalizingly undefined) that would revolve around learning and teaching issues generally, and academic literacies specifically. A similar perspective is adopted by Elizabeth Hirst et al. (2004) in their account of student learning on an Education Studies degree. For Hirst and her colleagues, the students constitute a community of practice, and it is through participation in this community that academic literacies can be acquired. Jane Tapp (2015) also combines theories, drawing on communities of practice, literacy studies, and Bernstein’s concepts of recognition and realization rules. Using this lens, and drawing on empirical research, she argues that academic literacies need to be explicitly framed within pedagogy if they are to be realized as potentially empowering by students. Lea (2005) uses literacy studies to solve a specific theoretical problem: she argues for the use of academic literacies to fill the gap in ‘the situated learning paradigm, which has paid so little attention to any explicit account of language practices or the complex relationship between language and learning’ (ibid.: 191). In my own work, I have argued that assessment in HE, as a textually mediated practice, similarly benefits from being explored through a literacy studies lens, through considering the literacy events as well as practices within which assessment work is situated (Tummons, 2008). The unpacking of the discontinuities of practice that can be discerned between assessment and feedback as functions of audit and as functions for learning that are explored by Charles Crook et al. (2006), foregrounds the development of students as writers in the sense that identity is discursively constructed (cf. Ivaniç, 1998). Crook et al. describe student learning in terms of ‘participation in educational practice’ (2006: 113), although they do not provide a more specific or rich account of what this participation might entail. Similarly, Simon Pardoe (2000) argues for a clearer and more critical distinction to be drawn between the product of assessment in HE on the one hand, and the social practices through which assessment is created on the other, going on to argue for research – specifically, ethnographic research – to focus on the latter if students’ writing is to be properly understood. Thus, we might discern an overarching theme: Wenger’s empirical studies in claims processing are rooted in a rich textually mediated world, but, it is argued, the central role of texts in this world is not always sufficiently foregrounded and therefore needs to be explained (Barton and Hamilton, 2005),

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drawing on other theoretical frameworks where necessary so long as they are epistemologically and ontologically aligned. It is not so much the case that communities of practice theory is incapable of helping, but it can, nonetheless, be augmented.

Literacy studies, and theory University departments and faculties – communities of research practice and of pedagogic practice – are socially configured spaces within which the different kinds of work that people do are bound up in texts. That is to say, the practices of students, academics and administrators are textually mediated, and literacy studies affords the researcher with a number of conceptual tools for exploring these practices. And it is in the consideration of practice that the alignment between literacy studies and communities of practice is most conspicuous:  it is the practice in literacy practice that is aligned to a community of practice (Barton, 2001). In this way, we can identify literacy studies as being one among several related theoretical and empirical frameworks or approaches that are encompassed within the ‘social turn’, characterized by the significant expansion of theorization, driven by empirical research, of everyday social practices, including – but by no means restricted to – different uses of literacy (Baynham and Prinsloo, 2001). Literacy studies foregrounds two aspects of theory work that are of relevance to the argument that I am constructing here. First, it clearly enjoys an epistemological as well as ontological alignment to communities of practice theory, notwithstanding the extent to which literacy studies has been posited as a framework that purports to rectify or to solve some of the more problematic aspects or deficiencies of Lave and Wenger and, in particular, Wenger’s theory (Tusting, 2005). Second, much work within literacy studies foregrounds the empirical, resting on ethnography, anthropology and social psychology – a methodological standpoint that sits neatly alongside communities of practice research. This is not to deny the need to be mindful of criticisms of literacy studies, particularly in terms of the focus on the local that threatens to become parochial and to impede serious attempts at theory-building (Brandt and Clinton, 2002; Collins and Blot, 2003) – although any sense that research is compelled to be generalizable is debatable at best (Alasuutari, 1995). Literacy studies and communities of practice are two frameworks that share much, and that can work together in a critical and constructive manner.

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Some interim conclusions An argument for theoretical rigour should not be conflated with an argument for theoretical essentialism: I am not advocating (nor am I sympathizing with) arguments for ‘bricolage’ methodologies or ‘eclecticism’ in theory use. But it seems to me to be entirely appropriate to position not only the argument that I am presenting through this book, but also similar arguments put forward by others who have grouped together the three frameworks discussed thus far, as demonstrating rigorous as well as appropriate use of theory within educational research. It is in a shared focus on the social and on practice that allows communities of practice theory, actor-network theory and literacy studies to be gathered together, to be combined – in different ways or proportions – in a theoretically coherent manner. Using one theory to enrich another is by no means novel – and, in fact, there are several examples of research work that have drawn, in a critical as well as complementary way, on the three frameworks that I have been discussing up to this point (Clarke, 2002; Fox, 2000, 2005; Vickers and Fox, 2010). The point I wish to stress at this moment, therefore, is that if we are to use communities of practice theory well, in a thorough, critical, and theoretically and empirically robust manner, then this use might involve  – or even necessitate, should the theory not be able to answer fully all the questions that we are seeking to answer  – the employment of at least one additional theory, two of which have been outlined and their relevance and utility for being so employed, in this chapter. In the chapter that follows, I introduce and argue for two further necessary extensions.

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Necessary Extensions, Part 2 – Threshold Concepts, and Activity Theory

Introduction This is the second of two chapters in which I talk about the ways in which some of the (more or less justifiable) concerns relating to, or deficiencies within, communities of practice theory can be addressed. As before, I am concerned with establishing the ways in which alternative approaches can enhance and enrich our use of communities of practice theory in a manner that demonstrates their alignment in terms of both epistemology and ontology to communities of practice theory. The first theory I draw on is threshold concepts; the second is activity theory, which rests on and in turn helps to establish the theory of expansive learning. As before, I provide a brief outline, before moving on to consider in more detail those specific aspects of the framework in question that can be used to augment, and sometimes to critique, communities of practice theory, drawing on empirical as well as conceptual and theoretical work.

Threshold concepts Threshold concepts is a framework that is indigenous to HE practice. It is a framework that emerged from a funded research project (Enhancing TeachingLearning Environments in Undergraduate Courses, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council from 2001 to 2005)  and was further established through a series of initial landmark publications (Land et al., 2005; Meyer and Land, 2003, 2005, 2006), all centred in and around learning and teaching practices in HE. In this sense, therefore, threshold concepts is quite different to the other conceptual frameworks that I discuss in this book because it has not been imported into the field of HE research; rather, it is a product of that field, one

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that has generated a significant – and still growing – number of research publications and projects (Tight, 2014). Threshold concepts is a framework for exploring learning, teaching and assessment within disciplinary and interdisciplinary contexts in HE. It is a framework that affords researchers a lens through which they can gain a point of entry into isolating and defining those elements of any particular curriculum that are problematic or troublesome for a student – the threshold concepts – but that, once they have been learned or mastered or acquired, provide for the student significantly new ways of understanding or conceptualizing the curriculum, in turn opening up new connections to previously studied concepts, and with the potential to have a transforming effect on the learning and behaviour of the student. Once the concept has been grasped, the student moves – as if across a threshold – through a liminal state to a new state or condition of understanding, application or knowing. A  threshold concept can be understood in two ways, therefore: first, as constituting a product (that is, as something developed within the mind of the student); and second, as constituting a process (that is, as a trajectory along which a student travels, requiring the successful negotiation of one or more liminal stages). Any threshold concept can be made up of five different aspects, although no single such concept needs to be constituted of all five of these at the same time (Meyer and Land, 2006). The first aspect is that threshold concepts can be transformative (in the sense that education more broadly can be transformative, as argued by, for example, Mezirow (1991)), and can lead to not only a shift in understanding, but also a shift in the identity of the learner. Second, they can be irreversible  – indeed, they might well always be irreversible; certainly, it is suggested that once a threshold concept has been grasped, it is impossible for the student to ignore or sidestep the more complex or nuanced concepts that they have now acquired. It cannot be forgotten or ‘unlearned’. Third, threshold concepts are integrative in that they can illuminate previously unrealized aspects of the curriculum or subject at hand, and build on previously acquired bodies of knowledge and understanding (highlighting the constructivist epistemology that tacitly underpins the theory). Fourth, they tend to be bounded within a particular conceptual space that is predominantly defined in terms of specific academic disciplines, but that is increasingly to be found within broader crossdisciplinary domains as well. And finally, they are potentially troublesome. This final element is of particular interest, as it is in David Perkins’s earlier conceptualization of troublesome knowledge that some of the roots or ancestry of threshold concepts can be identified (1999). According to this model, troublesome

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knowledge can be identified as possessing one of four different qualities:  as being inert (something known but rarely used); as being ritualized (routinized, but lacking any underpinning explanation or justification); as being conceptually difficult (counterintuitive, often requiring the synthesis of several distinct elements, often juxtaposed to prior experiential knowledge); and as being foreign (constructed from a different, alien, standpoint) (Perkins, 1999, 2006). It is important to note that although a curriculum, specialism or bounded field of knowledge may contain many concepts, they are not all threshold concepts, which need to be distinguished from core concepts. Core concepts, though important, do not afford the learner with the same potential for transformative thought or a significant intellectual or emotional shift. A further key element of the threshold concepts framework that needs to be considered here is that the practice or state of the student is not the sole concern:  the practice of the lecturer is also of importance. It is a framework for thinking not only about students, but also about lecturers. If we accept that it is in the exploration of those elements of a curriculum that are troublesome or prone to misconception that a threshold concept might be identified, then our enquiry needs to focus not only on the student who is ‘stuck’, but also on the lecturer – in terms of how the lecturer has constructed both their understanding of the threshold concept and their expectations about what the student ‘should’ be able to do in relation to it (Lucas and Mladenovic, 2007). This focus on the curriculum from both the student’s and the lecturer’s perspectives, both focusing  – albeit from different standpoints  – on the threshold concept that is currently occupying the student within a liminal state, foregrounds the disciplinary specificity of threshold concepts, as a framework, that characterizes much of the work done by researchers in this field (as evidenced by the extensive list of disciplines compiled by Tight (2014), ranging from biological sciences and business, to engineering and social work, among others). At the time of writing, over 170 different disciplinary and professional contexts have been explored using threshold concepts (Land et al., 2014). Consequently, although threshold concepts is quite clearly a framework for empirical as well as conceptual research within the field of HE, it lends itself relatively straightforwardly to adoption by researchers within other academic disciplines (such as biological sciences, business, engineering or social work) who can approach their exploration of threshold concepts from their position as disciplinary specialists rather than education researchers  – a relative ease of applicability that is not always to be found within education theory. In this way, it can be argued that disciplinary specialist researchers are prompted to analyse and to unpack their subject

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specialism, rather than their teaching practice – a difference in researcher standpoint that allows the specialist to conduct their enquiry within the known field of their subject specialism, rather than the relatively unknown (to them) field of HE or pedagogic research (Cousin, 2007). Before moving on to a brief survey of the literature (necessarily brief, as the corpus of literature is quite considerable in scale), I want to return to the concept of liminality, which is itself – it might be (ironically, and perhaps mischievously) argued – troublesome. Within the threshold concepts literature, the liminal state remains ‘relatively ill-defined’ (Land et al., 2014: 199), and in some ways is best understood as a by-product of the threshold concepts model itself: if someone is wrestling with a threshold concept that has not yet been fully mastered, then they are described as being within a liminal state – a condition that is ontologically different from someone else who has yet to undertake the process of mastering the threshold concept in question (they would be described as being in a ‘pre-liminal’ state). That said, the liminal state might be explored or unpacked as an object of theoretical or empirical inquiry in its own right. There are two key theoretical strands to consider here. The first is the extent to which the liminal state might be considered as a more or less discrete social semiotic space, a social configuration that we might explore from the perspective of the meaning making that is to be found within it (Land et al., 2014). The second is the extent to which the mastery of threshold concepts, and by extension the broader practice of learning within HE, might be understood in terms of emotion or affect, with the liminal state understood as being a space or site that includes – but is by no means restricted to – emotional as well as intellectual struggle in addition to an ontological as well as epistemological shift, focusing attention onto the affective dimensions of the discombobulation that students (and staff ) might encounter when entering a liminal state, including the extent to which they might feel willing or comfortable, as distinct from able or unable, to do so (Cousin, 2006; Gourlay, 2009; Meyer et al., 2010; Rattray, 2016).

Threshold concepts: Earlier analyses In comparison with the other frameworks that I have discussed in the preceding as well as the present chapter, there is no significant usage of threshold concepts within a field other than HE. Instead, the interest for the researcher lies in the ways in which threshold concepts has been put to work in not only a disciplinary context, but also wider pedagogical contexts. Examples from disciplinary

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contexts are very easy to find and range from explorations of teaching and learning in biology (Taylor, 2006) and disability studies (Morgan, 2012) to management (Wright and Gilmore, 2012) and health sciences (Barradell and Peseta, 2017). Examples from wider pedagogical contexts are fewer in number, but are nonetheless of interest. These encompass a number of cross-disciplinary issues, including particular pedagogic approaches such as problem-based learning (PBL) (Savin-Baden, 2006), as well as cross-curricular issues such as professionalism (Neve et al., 2017) and – of particular interest within the context of the argument that I  am constructing in this book  – academic literacies (Gourlay, 2009). A third strand of work uses threshold concepts to explore aspects of the kinds of academic work done by researchers that I  have already discussed in this book from different theoretical perspectives, including the teaching and development of research methods and methodologies (Salmona et  al., 2016; Timmerman et  al., 2013), the learning and supervision of research students (Kiley and Wisker, 2009; Wisker, 2016), and the use of theory by research students (Trafford, 2008). Within the disciplinary-specific literature, what might be termed a ‘methodological consensus’ can be observed. The majority of empirical studies are relatively small-scale (I should add that this is not inherently problematic, although I return to the issue of scalability below), usually focusing on either a specific institutional and curricular context, or a small number of research participants working within the same academic discipline, but across different institutions. This approach is exemplified in eleven chapters based on empirical research that appear in the two early, landmark, collections of thresholds concepts work (Land et al., 2008; Meyer and Land, 2006). Nine of these chapters report on research that is situated within single institutions and vary in approach from interviewbased studies with seven students and four academics (Taylor, 2006) to extensive data collection across an entire year group using questionnaires, interviews and analysis of course materials (Baillie and Johnson, 2008) to the content analysis of student formative and summative assessments (Shanahan et al., 2008). At the same time, other chapters in these two collections occupy what might be termed a more ‘reflective perspective’: that is to say, they are not rooted in any serious empirical work, but rest instead on reflections on teaching practice, theorized in hindsight through the use of the thresholds concept framework (Flanagan and Smith, 2008). Taken together, these approaches are well established and are also to be found in the wider thresholds literature (Land et al., 2016). The literature that explores wider pedagogical issues is similarly rooted in conceptual as well as empirical research. In this body of work, notions of troublesome

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knowledge are particularly strongly foregrounded. Thus, PBL, a common pedagogical strategy within the professional HE curriculum and in particular within health and social care and medical education (Taylor, 1997), is reframed as troublesome in terms of how it is defined and enacted, as well as in terms of how it is perceived by the staff and students who are asked to adopt such approaches: in a culture of audit and accountability, such open-ended and flexible pedagogies can be seen as being at odds with dominant discourses of behavioural learning objectives and observable outcomes (Savin-Baden, 2006). Similarly, the troublesome nature of academic writing is foregrounded by Lesley Gourlay (2009), in her academic-literacies informed exploration of the writing practices of new students at one UK university. For Gourlay, academic literacies are troublesome points of struggle, to be negotiated by ‘new students in transition’ (ibid.:  183). Academic literacies are unstable, contested and plural. Consequently, it is perhaps difficult, or certainly unsatisfactory, to construct them as a single threshold concept:  Gourlay uses the term ‘threshold practices’ to stress the multifaceted nature of the troublesome practices that she is seeking to unpack. A similar theoretical shift is employed by Hilary Neve et al. (2017) who, in their exploration of the troublesome nature of ‘professionalism’, draw on the notion of threshold concepts as necessarily plural, as ‘networks of concepts’ (104). This cross-disciplinary body of literature also encompasses explorations into research work, in terms of becoming a researcher (for example, through completing doctoral studies), teaching researchers and using theory for research. Themes such as these speak to broader issues of work within HE – the work done by academics and by those who are (to draw on the model that I have discussed at length in Chapters 2 and 3 of this book) apprentice academics, travelling along a trajectory towards fuller participation within an academic community of practice. Within this field we find a focus on both specific, operationalized threshold concepts and the liminal state. Examples of the former are those identified by Margaret Kiley and Gina Wisker, which include constructs such as ‘knowledge creation’, ‘analysis and interpretation’ and ‘theorizing’  – all positioned as discrete constructs of troublesome knowledge that have to be acquired by doctoral students (2009: 439). An alternative and holistic approach is advocated by Vernon Trafford and Shosh Leshem (2009) who posit the broader construct of ‘doctorateness’ as a threshold concept. Other writers have focused on liminality, drawing on notions of ‘being stuck’, of learning through ‘mimicry’ to join an academic community, and focusing on the lived experience of being a doctoral student as distinct from a focus on specific attributes of doctoral study (Keefer, 2015). A more specific focus on academic writing practices can be found in, for

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example, the exploration of the effectiveness of writing workshops for doctoral students by Robin Humphrey and Bob Simpson (2012) who position the writing up of qualitative data as a threshold concept. An alternative theoretical approach is taken by Wisker and Maggi Savin-Baden (2009), who argue that writing is not so much a threshold concept as it is a troublesome process.

Plugging threshold concepts into communities of practice It is not difficult to discern traces of communities of practice theory within threshold concepts. While it is by no means the case that all the thresholds literature is equally conceptually or theoretically literate, traces of social constructivism, of discourses within communities and of apprenticeship from an anthropological perspective can all be found and used to think about the ways in which threshold concepts might be plugged into an augmented communities of practice framework. This is unsurprising, not least because threshold concepts is a self-avowedly eclectic perspective that ‘in its analysis of how learner identities undergo transformation as new knowledge is encountered, has affinities with social learning theory, particularly the work of Wenger on communities of practice’ (Land et al., 2008: xi). It is a straightforward process to take the construct of ‘academic jargon’ and position it on the one hand as a threshold concept or as embodying troublesome knowledge, and on the other as representing a specialized discourse from a specific community of practice (Shanahan and Meyer, 2006; but see also Land et al., 2014, for a further, albeit brief, discussion of the meaning of words as mediated within specific social spaces). Likewise, progress through a liminal state can be understood in terms of being a rite of passage, a necessary journey towards becoming an academic in a manner akin to the successful negotiation of an apprenticeship within a community of practice (Kiley, 2009). Moving within a liminal space, via a process of mimicry towards a process of full understanding of the discipline being studied, foregrounds the importance of authentic practice in learning within a community of practice. The necessity of ensuring that, for example, ‘students not only [begin] to understand “how historians think”, but . . . begin to “think like a historian” ’ (Land et al., 2008: 199) echoes the necessity, within a community of practice, not only to talk about practice, but also to learn in an authentic manner through engaging in authentic practice (Lave and Wenger, 1991). While the foregrounding of practice, participation and context that is paradigmatic of a communities of practice approach is not always equally or

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sufficiently found across the threshold concepts literature (McCormick, 2008), spaces for overlap, and for a synthesis that is in epistemological as well as ontological agreement, are readily identifiable. Thus, both Glynis Cousin (2008) and Humphrey and Simpson (2012), among others, highlight the anthropological lens that is common to both frameworks: aligning peripheral participation (the ‘legitimate’ is omitted) with liminality. Trafford (2008) discusses liminal states in reference to the Vygotskian construct of the zone of proximal development, thereby highlighting the shared sociocultural foundations that underpin both frameworks (as do Land et al. (2016) and Cousin (2008)). But these two frameworks are nonetheless different, not in terms of their epistemological or ontological outlooks, perhaps (although some conceptual confusion has been identified by McCormick (2008)), but simply in terms of what they are trying to do and what they are interested in. And it is in considering these differences that opportunities for thresholds to be plugged into an augmented communities of practice framework become apparent. The first way in which I argue that communities of practice can be augmented is through considering the explicit focus on knowledge (whether it be explicit knowledge, tacit knowledge or troublesome knowledge) within threshold concepts. For Wenger, and Lave and Wenger, knowledge is socially constructed and socially mediated. But there is no explicit theory of knowledge within communities of practice; instead, within a community, the focus is on the knowing and the knower. Within the original configuration of the theory, there is no place for a formal curriculum or for any formal instructional model (Lave and Wenger, 1991:  40). And although Wenger’s later model (1998) provides us with richer tools for understanding the role of discourse, of artefacts, of routine and of habit within a community of practice, an explicit statement concerning the nature of knowledge within a community is not given. What people do and how people talk within a community of practice change over time, as a consequence of history, of innovation, of conflict or of influence from outside – but what about what people know, or how they talk about or otherwise inscribe their knowledge? Surely there must be more to being knowledgeable than being able to perform a particular task that an old-timer can watch and then evaluate? If we accept the criticism that communities of practice theory lacks a theory of knowledge (Winch, 2010), then threshold concepts provides us with an easily applicable alternative: a focus on disciplinary contexts (of obvious value when translating communities of practice into HE settings) that provides the researcher with ready access to a construction of subject-specific, disciplinary knowledge, and a simultaneous focus on those aspects of knowledge within the discipline that are troublesome.

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The second way in which threshold concepts might inform a communities of practice inquiry is in considering the affective nature of liminality in relation to LPP (Meyer et al., 2010; Rattray, 2016). I have already outlined the ways in which notions of liminality can be mapped alongside LPP. But what I want to add is a consideration of the being stuck and of the disorientation that is increasingly explored within threshold concepts (Keefer, 2015; Kiley, 2009), as an element of the identity of the student or researcher that is (re)formed, in part, through emotional struggle (Gourlay, 2009; Wisker and Savin-Baden, 2009). Academic writing, and academic literacies more specifically, provides a good example of the point I wish to make. In the preceding chapter, I outlined the contribution that literacy studies (including academic literacies) can make to an augmented theory of communities of practice. In fact, academic literacies provides what might be termed a perfect theoretical intersection that encompasses and informs not only literacy studies and communities of practice, but threshold concepts as well. In this way, we can not only acknowledge academic writing as a site of struggle as well as of identity formation (Ivaniç, 1998; Lillis, 2001), but also construct struggles over writing (in an increasingly diverse university landscape, and affecting both new undergraduate students and doctoral students alike, not to mention academic staff ) not in terms of a skills deficit but in terms of something to be expected, though by no means always found, as an aspect of transition through a liminal state (Gourlay, 2009), or socialization within a community of practice (Lea, 2005).

Threshold concepts, and theory The sheer amount of work that has been done and continues to be done within threshold concepts is such that to consider an exploration of learning, teaching, assessment or research practice within HE without recourse to the work of Jan Meyer and Ray Land might seem perverse. Nonetheless it is still necessary to critically evaluate the theoretical basis of threshold concepts, so that the broader theoretical direction and commitment that I have outlined thus far can be maintained. So, what sort of theory is threshold concepts? Is it a theory of (troublesome) knowledge, of pedagogy or of something else? Can or should it be be used to draw generalizable conclusions, to hypothesize or theorize? The first issue to consider is the identification of threshold concepts (Barradell, 2013; Tight, 2014):  are the different thresholds that are identified within research papers the ‘same sort of thing’, or are they ‘just a ragbag of aspects of learning

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in disciplines in HE that particular teachers have found difficult to get across’ (Tight, 2014: 260)? It seems incredible to assume that some, if not most, of the concepts that are now labelled as ‘threshold concepts’ had previously avoided being identified as ‘troublesome’ or ‘difficult’ – and at the same time, it seems equally incredible that they are always difficult for all students. How many students have to find something difficult, and how difficult does it have to be, for it to qualify as a threshold concept? In a later work, Land et al. describe threshold concepts as containing, inter alia, a ‘discursive aspect’ (2014: 200). Taken to a logical conclusion, we might argue that if a threshold concept is discursively constructed, then almost anything might be defined as one – and drawing on the insights afforded by literacy studies, if we consider these as dominant discourses, then the politics of threshold concepts become a matter for concern. Threshold concepts range from specific uses of terminology to academic writing to doctorateness – an already very diverse field. How much more diversity can the theory accommodate while still maintaining a level of utility? Related to the problem of identification and definition is the methodology that underpins threshold concepts research (Quinlan et  al., 2013), which tends to lack an empirical, as opposed to a phenomenological, focus (Rowbottom, 2007; Timmerman et al., 2013: 695), and which often highlights the subjectivities surrounding threshold concepts – subjectivities that can be aligned to a highly situated definition of threshold concepts as discursively constructed, but that cause difficulties if we are seeking to translate these thresholds across disciplines, or across geographical or institutional boundaries while staying within the same discipline. Nor are temporal boundaries considered, an issue that is addressed by communities of practice theory (change is a necessary element of any community of practice), but that is absent from threshold concepts. Curriculum theory stresses the importance of considering curriculum change and curriculum renewal, whether through changes in pedagogy or changes to the body of knowledge that underpins a curriculum: can something be a threshold concept at one point in time but become a ‘core’ concept later on? These difficulties with threshold concepts as a construct mean that for the purposes of the analysis that I  am presenting here, the notion of a ‘threshold concept as being situated within a community of practice’ – as an element of the repertoire of the community, perhaps, or as an aspect of the discourse of the community – is too nebulous to be helpful. But the specific construct of ‘liminality’ is more helpful. The anthropological roots that liminality can be seen as resting on (as noted by Gourlay (2009) and Kiley (2009)) allow it to be positioned as being in ontological alignment to communities of practice theory, and the

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trajectory of the student or teacher across a liminal space (however defined) can be considered akin to the concepts of the learner trajectory towards fuller participation in a community of practice – a trajectory that, as it leads to a permanent change in identity, might well include the affective (Rattray, 2016) as well as the technical, intellectual or practical. Becoming a claims-processor – as argued by Wenger (1998) – might well be accounted for in terms of requiring the new member of staff to travel through a liminal space as she or he becomes acclimatized to or apprenticed within the sociocultural practices of claims processing.

Activity theory Activity theory can be understood as a direct descendant of the theories of Lev Vygotsky (Axel, 1997). It is not specifically a theory relating to formal or schoolbased education, in contrast to Vygotsky’s original work. Rather, activity theorists are interested in a wide range of related subjects such as language acquisition, the nature of knowledge, the relationship between individuals and their social environments, and so forth. The main focus of this discussion is the work of Engeström who positions activity theory (the first theoretical component to be discussed) within the broader theory of expansive learning (the second theoretical component to be discussed) (1987, 1993, 2001; Engeström et al., 1999), and which are predominantly focused on learning at work, as distinct from learning within formal educational systems. At the same time, it is important to note that there are different iterations of activity theory, changing over time. The basic unit of analysis within activity theory is the activity system. It is a way of thinking about the places and spaces in which people go about their work, what tools or equipment they have to use, which other people are involved and so forth, in order for learning to happen. There are a number of different elements to an activity system, all of which are linked together. The first is the subject  – the person or group of people who are engaged in the activity that will lead to learning. The second is a set of rules, the accepted ways of working, regulations and so forth, that shape the environment being researched. The subject has to work within and towards these rules. The third element consists of artefacts or tools (I follow Ashwin (2009) in using the term mediating artefacts). These might be the equipment, texts, notices and so forth that are used, manipulated or referred to by the subject. It is important to note that tools are not necessarily physical objects, but might also include routines, processes and ways of doing things. Fourth, there is community. Community refers to the wider group

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of people who are also involved in the same physical or social space of work – in the context of this book we might imagine the community as consisting of other members of academic staff, research students and so forth. The fifth element is division of labour, which refers to the ways in which work done by the subject is differentiated from the work done by other people in the space of work or activity system. Finally, there is the object, the focus or target of the work that the subject is engaged in – the direction in which the activity system is travelling. All six elements are interconnected within a single activity system. That is to say, each element relates to, refers to or is otherwise linked to all the others. The activity that is being explored cannot happen without all six elements being identified and explicated as appropriate. Activity theory rests on five underlying principles (Engeström, 1999). First, the activity system is the main unit of analysis within activity theory. Individual activities or goals can only properly be understood when explored against the backdrop of a collective activity system. Second, activity systems always contain multiple points of view and perspectives – they are not homogeneous. Participants have different points of view depending on how their work is divided. Different rules that have accumulated over time will offer different perspectives, as will the different tools that are used within the activity system. Third, activity systems take time to become established and take shape. The history of any activity system becomes an important issue, therefore: what happened before in relation to the activity system may still be of relevance to current participants. Fourth, change is a necessary aspect of an activity system, and occurs as a consequence of a specific type of process called a contradiction. Contradictions within activity systems are those moments when, for example, a new process or technology is introduced. When the new technology causes conflict with the existing rules or tools of the activity system, this is referred to as a contradiction. Contradictions such as these become resolved as new ways of working emerge to accommodate the changes. And finally, the work done by activity systems can change, and these changes can be profound. Contradictions can accumulate and aggravate the work of the activity system, and this can lead individual participants to work on a collective basis to change the object of the activity system. Activity theory is underpinned by a specific theory of learning called expansive learning (in a similar manner to the way in which communities of practice theory is underpinned by LPP), which always takes place within an activity system. Expansive learning theory seeks to explicate who learners are, what motivates them to make the effort to learn, what the content and consequences of their learning are, and what the processes or actions that are central to their

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learning are. These are integral to the theory of expansive learning and always need to be considered together. Expansive learning is a cyclical process, made up of seven epistemic actions (Engeström, 1999): questioning (stimulated by contradictions); analysis (which can be historical or empirical); modelling of a new solution (to address the question); examination of the model (so that it can be evaluated); implementing the new model; reflecting on the process (and also on any new practices that the model has stimulated); and consolidating the practice as a new, stable element of the work of the activity system.

Activity theory: Earlier analyses Sidestepping for the present time any arguments relating to the versions or generations of the theory that might be referred to (‘activity theory’, ‘activity systems theory’, ‘cultural-historical activity theory’), prior empirical as well as conceptual research drawing on activity theory has explored many of the issues that I have already noted as being researched through the other theoretical perspectives that I have discussed up to now. This includes a range of cross-disciplinary issues in HE, such as assessment practice, research methodology or academic writing practice (although it should be noted that, in contrast to threshold concepts, activity theory has been widely used to explore a range of educational contexts, ranging from early years’ education to the workplace learning of medical professionals). It also includes research into specific disciplinary contexts ranging from astronomy to second-language learning. At the same time, the broader interest that activity theory has in the wider context of ‘work’ adds a further level of relevance as well. Universities are, after all, places of work, and if we draw on a generous definition of ‘work’ to include anything that requires effort, is intended and involves some kind of acquired competence, we might argue that the work done by students as well as by lecturers can be considered through the lens of activity theory (as argued by Worthen, 2008). The research cited here rests on a by-now familiar methodological pattern. Many of these papers report on relatively small-scale (in terms of sample sizes and so forth) case studies, drawing on data constructed from focus groups and one-to-one interviews (Bennett et al., 2015; Brown, 2010; Fanghanel, 2004; Trowler and Turner, 2002), as well as document analysis (Barab et al., 2004; Pratt et al., 2015; Scanlon and Issroff, 2005), although ethnography and ethnographic methods are also drawn on (Havnes, 2004; Kent et al., 2016). The HE contexts or fields that are researched are by now familiar, although it is noteworthy (particularly in the light of the research that

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I discuss in Chapter 8) that several of the activity theory accounts I refer to here are rooted specifically in medical education and cover issues such as learning communication skills and then transferring them to different work/social contexts (Brown, 2010); the extent to which peer-assisted learning, as a pedagogical strategy, can be implemented in a clinical setting as opposed to a classroom setting (Bennett et al., 2015); and the nature of inter-professional learning relationships among different student groups such as nurses, occupational therapists and pharmacists (Kent et al., 2016). Several different aspects of the work done by university lecturers have been explored through an activity theory lens. These empirical studies have included explorations of professional learning and development for people who teach or intend to teach in HE – both established lecturers required to gain professional accreditation as university teachers (Fanghanel, 2004) and new doctoral students who are beginning to teach while continuing with their studies (Hopwood and Stocks, 2008). Joelle Fanghanel (2004) focuses on two linked activity systems as units of analysis (the theory of expansive learning is not utilized) – an academic practice course and a departmental context where teaching takes place  – and explores several dissonances between, for example, espoused theory and theoryin-use, or the extent to which in-course learning can be satisfactorily transferred to real-world teaching practice (a theory-practice gap that has been explored in depth in the literature on professional learning within HE (Taylor, 1997)). Nick Hopwood and Claire Stocks take a different approach, drawing explicitly on the different elements of an activity system in order to theorize their findings: thus, for example, their exploration of the tensions felt by doctoral students in positioning their work within an academic department in terms of the relative importance attached to research as distinct from teaching, are explained in terms of community, and division of labour (2008: 195). Alongside these studies of more formalized structures for learning can be placed explorations of university workplace learning as an informal practice of acculturation (Knight et al., 2006; Trowler and Knight, 2000), as well as analyses of university lecturers’ work in relation to other aspects of being an academic, ranging from engaging with assessment systems (Havnes, 2004) to engaging (or not) with technology in the classroom (Blin and Munro, 2008; Scanlon and Issroff, 2005). Once again, these studies draw on the activity system as a unit of analysis, but do not discuss learning (expansive or otherwise), with the exception of Knight et al. for whom the main focus of research is the professional learning of academics, explored in terms of the twin dichotomies of non-formal and formal learning and non-intentional and intentional learning rather than the theory of expansive learning (2006: 327).

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Other research, meanwhile, has focused on the work done by students (although, mindful of one of the key concepts of any activity system, I would follow Ashwin and agree that it is difficult if not impossible to subtract a consideration of the work done by lecturers from a consideration of the work done by students (Ashwin, 2009: 59)). The cross-disciplinary themes that have been explored in this way include academic writing for new students (Johnson, 2008), or learner agency among students for whom English is not a first language (Xu, 2012), the tensions between the ‘doctoral student’, ‘academic’ and ‘professional’ identities that are negotiated by students on professional doctorate courses (Pratt et al., 2015), and the design and use of online learning resources for preservice teachers of mathematics and science (Barab et al., 2004). These papers draw more liberally on a ‘sociocultural framework’ or ‘social practice perspective’, rather than more explicitly on the tools afforded by activity theory, however, and in the case of E. Marcia Johnson (2008), activity theory is positioned as underpinning the research methodology that she employed. More striking is the use of learning theory derived from Wenger (1998) rather than Engeström (1999) in the paper by Nick Pratt et al., who use the broader term of ‘learning experiences’ to describe the learning that takes place across the activity systems that they describe (2015: 45). Indeed, overlaps between activity theory and communities of practice are not uncommon and are to be found in several of the papers cited here, as well as others.

Plugging activity theory into communities of practice Mindful of the Vygotskian ancestry that underscores both theoretical frameworks, it is unsurprising to note first, that communities of practice theory and activity theory are often found together (although the extent to which this theoretical symbiosis is the product of a serious critical application rather than simply a more impressionistic reference to ‘social practice’ theory is a matter for investigation), and second, that activity theory has been used by other writers to address perceived deficiencies within communities of practice theory. This position is perhaps best captured by Sasha Barab et al., who argue for ‘the application of complementary theoretical perspectives, especially when their assumptions employ us to acknowledge multiple scales and foci for analyses, that theory can have the greatest practical significance’ (2004: 45). In the literature cited above we can find several statements regarding the relationships between activity theory and communities of practice, but some of these applications are rather

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cursory: Paul Trowler and Knight, in positing an activity system ‘complemented’ (2000: 28) by communities of practice, simply substitute the ‘community’ label that is positioned as one of the elements of an activity system by Engeström (1999) for ‘community of practice’ – but the analysis goes no further than this and the links between the two frameworks remain tacit. Johnson suggests that tertiary-level students enter ‘several new, and possibly contrasting, communities of practice’ (2008: 239), but does not delineate or define these (in common with some of the literature that I discussed in Chapter 2). More interesting, arguably, is the frequency of recourse to a conceptualization of learning derived from communities of practice theory, notwithstanding the fact that there is a perfectly robust model  – the model of expansive learning – ready to pull down to theorize the learning that takes place within an activity system. Much of the activity theory literature talks about learning and, more specifically, workplace learning, but rarely in terms of an expansive learning cycle. Pratt et  al. draw on a model of learning that they derive from Wenger (1998) in terms of experience, identity and community belonging (2015: 45). Deirdre Bennett et al. foreground LPP as a model of workplace learning, describing medical students as learning ‘while they participate, peripherally, in the practice of medicine’ (2015: 597, emphasis added). Similarly, Jianwei Xu positions the second-language learners who are the subject of his research as being able, through learning, to ‘develop knowledge, skills and identities, which indicates the progress from limited and peripheral to fuller participation in the given community of practice’ (2012: 587). Slotting activity theory alongside communities of practice theory is by no means controversial or difficult from an epistemological or ontological perspective, therefore, but it still needs a robust justification. Simply to slide from the one to the other because they both fit within the broader church of ‘social practice theory’ lacks rigour. To provide a specific example, the theory of expansive learning is posited as a corrective to the theory of learning as LPP (Engeström, 1999:  12). My question, therefore, is:  if learning within an activity system is properly to be understood in terms of expansive learning, then what are the consequences for our use of theory – and, by extension, of the claims that we might make based on our theorization of our research – if we sidestep expansive learning and draw – more or less critically – on LPP instead? I have already discussed some of the ways in which we might problematize LPP, particularly in the light of the criticisms raised by Jay Lemke (1997). A similar argument is made by Engeström, who highlights the lack, within LPP, of any sense of movement by learners/novices in unexpected or outward (as opposed to inward, towards the

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centre of a community of practice) directions, of instability and contradiction, of criticism, and of how knowledge is created (1999:  12). This is exemplified in the analysis of Jeantine de Feijter et al. (2011), who foreground the contradictions experienced by students learning to become medical doctors, when also needing to provide safe care for patients, using these as a way to exploring learning within complex workplaces, while at the same time drawing on LPP to model the relationship between the student (the novice in the workplace) and the supervisor who teaches them (356). If this critique of LPP constitutes one possible augmentation of communities of practice theory by activity theory (albeit an augmentation that is, arguably, underemployed), then a second can be found in activity theory’s discussion of artefacts. However, while expansive learning might be understood as being, in part, a critique of LPP, Engeström’s unpacking of the nature, quality or use of artefacts within expansive learning is, simply, a richer framework than that provided by either Lave and Wenger (1991) or Wenger (1998), offering the researcher an increased number of theoretical affordances in a manner similar to those insights offered by social practice accounts of literacy (as discussed in the preceding chapter). Engeström posits four different categories of artefact, all of which impact on the object that constitutes the work, practice or focus of the output of the activity system being researched:  what artefacts (which identify and describe objects); how artefacts (which shape practices between different objects); why artefacts (which explain how objects behave); and where to artefacts (which anticipate the future development of objects). For Engeström, any artefact might shift across one or more of these forms. Activity theory offers us two possible ways to enhance a communities of practice account, therefore: an enhancement of the theory of learning that we might draw on and an enhancement of the ways in which we might understand the artefacts that are a necessary aspect of our learning and participation in practice.

Activity theory, and theory Activity theory is not without criticism, both in terms of how it has been applied (Bligh and Flood, 2017) and in terms of the theoretical tenets that it rests on. I want to discuss, briefly, four such areas of criticism. The first is activity theory’s particularism or localism. Both in terms of learning and knowledge and in terms of history and wider social factors, activity theory can be seen as lacking the capacity to make sense of wider social relations. This might be in terms of

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acknowledging wider social patterns as a way of accounting for power relationships within activity systems (Avis, 2009), or in terms of fundamental changes over time from a historical perspective, such as digitization and the growth of information technology and the World Wide Web (Rückriem, 2009). The second is the extent to which activity theory, as a theory of organizational learning, can draw conclusions relating to either learning in other contexts where organizational structures are weak or absent, or learning that takes place within specific and specialized contexts but that might not be useful or relevant when explicating new work roles or the impact of new processes or technologies on the workplace. The third relates to the identification and definition of the different elements of an activity system: if the ‘subject’ is a specific, named individual or a group of individuals, or an abstraction, does this make a difference? Can the tenets of an activity system equally be used to explore the work and object/outcome for the lecturers within one academic department, as well as ‘lecturers in universities’ (Ashwin, 2009)? And the fourth area for criticism is the emotional and affective: how can ‘imagination’, ‘feelings’ or ‘memory’ (as distinct from ‘history’) be made sense of within an activity system (Davydov, 1999)? I do not have the space here to explore these criticisms in depth. But I wish to stress that activity theory is no more or less prone to critical inquiry than the other theoretical frameworks that I  have discussed up to now. Lave and Wenger, Wenger, and Engeström all look back to Vygotsky, although they offer two rather distinct models for both understanding learning as a social process, and identifying the social and cultural spaces or structures within which learning might take place. Activity theory, as well as the other theories explored in both the preceding chapter and this one, does not stand still. The notion of the ‘runaway object’, an object that, no matter how fast or how efficiently the activity system works, remains sometimes ill-defined, sometimes elusive, sometimes constantly changing, is a conspicuous example of the ways in which activity theorists have sought to make sense of work within a globalized, fast, capitalist society (Edwards, 2009; Engeström, 2007). An activity system is not a community of practice; nor is the ‘community’ element of an activity system straightforwardly commensurable with a community of practice as defined by Wenger (1998). Expansive learning, however, does provide a more complicated, certainly more nuanced, model of learning, which can be reconciled to a communities of practice perspective, as demonstrated by de Feijter et al. (2011). And while activity theorists may well search ‘in vain for discussions on the conditions of implementing communities of practice in highly rationalised hierarchical massproduction organisations’ (Engeström, 2007:  43), the counterargument might

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well be that such a search is moot, the messiness of social reality leading to only partially successful attempts at applying the activity system model to such a context and that, on closer inspection, would turn out not to be highly rationalized at all (Law, 2004; McArthur, 2012).

Some interim conclusions In the previous chapter, I argued for two necessary extensions to communities of practice theory as a required step for being able to answer questions that communities of practice theory, standing alone, might not be able to explore sufficiently clearly or critically. The two theories that I have briefly outlined in this chapter – threshold concepts and activity theory – provide two further sources for extension. As before, I am not advocating ‘eclecticism’ or ‘bricolage’ – I am trying to make sense of a more or less diverse body of theoretical as well as empirical work in such a way as to maintain theoretical rigour. Thus, both theories discussed in this chapter once again foreground the social and practice. And they offer two valuable theoretical tools. From threshold concepts we can take the notion of liminality as a way of enriching our understanding of the paradigmatic trajectories that members of a community of practice follow. From activity theory we can take the model of expansive learning as a way to think about the restrictions placed on a conceptualization of learning that are imposed by LPP. But if we are to maintain an overall focus on the community of practice as our unit of analysis (which I am doing), then we still need to think some more about how we get to these communities of practice in the first place. I have thought about what they consist of and how they are structured, and I have discussed how they are defined and how their make-up, practices, habits, tools and materiality might be further explored through the use of other, sympathetic, theoretical frameworks. But I have yet to discuss how they might become established. And so it is to the emergence of a community of practice through the establishment of a learning architecture that I now turn.

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Introduction Much of the research that has been done with communities of practice theory has understandably, and quite correctly, focused on what has been termed ‘informal learning’ (Boud and Middleton, 2003; Rock, 2005; Viskovic, 2005). This is emphatically not because communities of practice theory posits a distinction between ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ learning, however; indeed, any such bifurcation or categorization of learning is absent from both Lave and Wenger (1991) and Wenger (1998). The insistence that communities of practice theory focuses only on ‘informal’ or ‘workplace’ learning are later accretions. Learning, as a social process involving the whole person, is the same across all contexts – it is in the context that specificity and/or difference are to be found. Arguably, this focus on workplace or informal learning is a reflection of Lave and Wenger’s (1991) rejection of the notion of pedagogy as a discrete form of instructional discourse, mirrored in the empirical and ethnographic contexts that their book rests on (meat cutters, midwives, naval quartermasters, tailors and members of Alcoholics Anonymous – all very far from occupying formal contexts for learning). And it is a profound and thorough rejection, echoing Lave’s earlier promulgation of ‘a different approach to cognition and to schooling than that embodied in functional-schooling theories, educational ideologies, and cognitive theory’ (1988: 14). The ethnography that underpins the work done by Lave (1988, 2011) and Lave and Wenger (1991) is derived from a variety of contexts, all involving learning, but none involving the kinds of instruction – an intentional pedagogy, reified within a formal curriculum – that would be found in a college or university. In his later book, by contrast, Wenger (1998) addresses the construction of formal educational structures head-on. Anticipating the more ‘applied’ communities of practice model to come (Wenger et al., 2002; and see also the discussion

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in Barton and Tusting, 2005), Wenger draws on the components of his theoretical framework (for example, the ‘double edge of reification’ or ‘boundary crossing’) in order to provide a conceptual framework that can make sense of formal educational systems and structures from a communities of practice perspective. Through the use of a model that he refers to as a learning architecture, the position of pedagogy – of teaching – within a community of practice can be explained in a theoretically coherent and consistent manner. That is to say, through recourse to the learning architecture model, we can resolve the central paradox that surrounds the notion of a community of (pedagogic) practice by satisfactorily addressing the pedagogy problem. In comparison to other elements of Wenger’s book, it can be argued that learning architecture is relatively under-explored (Brosnan and Burgess, 2003; McLoughlin and Lee, 2008; Sorensen and Ó Murchú, 2004). I argue that it is deserving of a more thorough explication as well as application.

A learning architecture In order for students and lecturers to do their work of studying and lecturing, writing and experimenting, they need places where they can engage (lecture halls, libraries, seminar rooms), resources and experiences through and with which they can learn about the world of the practice that they are engaged in (books, websites, placement visits) and ways of having an effect on their practice in such a way as to allow their actions to achieve something meaningful (organizing a conference, writing a laboratory report, leading a seminar discussion). All these things come together to make up a learning architecture. The learning architecture model allows the researcher to put pedagogy, assessment, curriculum and other elements of formal educational provision into an account of learning that rests on a socially situated paradigm and specifically on LPP. It also, in effect, forces the researcher to take the time and space to define and describe the communities of practice where this learning is located – as we shall see, and as I go on to illustrate in the next two chapters, any account of a specific learning architecture demands close attention to detail, and the researcher is required to provide the kind of rich, ethnographic descriptions of the communities of practice being explored that hark back to the ethnographic and anthropological roots of Lave and Wenger’s (1991) and Wenger’s (1998) original works, in order to provide similarly rich, authoritative and convincing descriptions of the learning architectures that are being explored.

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A learning architecture is a design for learning that emphasizes the need for the design (the curriculum, the environment, the people and so forth) to afford the learners who are enfolded within the learning architecture opportunities to participate in the practice of a community – and hence be afforded opportunities to learn – that are defined in alignment to Wenger’s (ibid.) wider communities of practice theory. The establishment of a learning architecture (which can, as I  go on to explain, be the product of a specific process of planning) leads in turn to the establishment of a community of practice (the nature of which cannot be specifically designed or predicted). A learning architecture needs to provide opportunities and resources for the three central elements of any community of practice: mutual engagement, joint enterprise and shared repertoire (as discussed in Chapter 1). Or, to put it another way, the establishment of a learning architecture in a HE setting is a necessary precursor to the emergence of a community of pedagogic practice in that setting. A  learning architecture consists of an assemblage of components or resources that can allow learning to happen. Such an assemblage of resources might consist of a place (laboratories, seminar rooms, workshops, libraries, information technology suites), tools and equipment (tools, laptops, textbooks, materials, handbooks, reading lists), people (librarians, lecturers, teachers, technicians, students, support workers) and activities (experiments, seminars, tutorials, practical tasks, assignment tasks), all designed to create a specific, bounded context within which learning can then take place. One of these resources – which has historically been so problematic when considering the application of communities of practice theory to formal educational contexts – is teaching, which is understood here as being one element of a learning architecture, rather than a separate process that stands outside it. Teaching becomes part of the repertoire of the community of practice that emerges within and through the learning architecture. Therefore, and in common with other elements of the repertoire of any community of practice, it – that is to say, the practice of teaching, of instruction – is a cultural tool that can be employed by those members of the community who have the appropriate expertise (derived from prior membership of a different community of practice, one related to teacher education, for example) to access it: the teachers. However, as has already been discussed, the introduction of teachers, and by extension of teaching, into a communities of practice framework raises profound theoretical problems when Lave and Wenger’s rejection of a language of formal instruction is recalled. According to this earlier perspective, it is the emergent and improvised quality of learning that precludes a discourse of formal instruction. Learning is simply too fluid, characterized by subjectivities and ambiguities,

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to be reconciled with the kinds of formal curricula that are to be found within universities. But Wenger later provides an elegant solution to this problem, suggesting that ‘learning is an emergent, ongoing process, which may use teaching as one of its many structuring resources’ (1998: 267, emphasis added). Learning architectures always need to be carefully planned and designed, therefore, but these processes are not to be conflated with the actual learning that might happen. Through positioning teaching as just one component among many others within a learning architecture, Wenger argues that the practice of teaching is no more able to straightforwardly shape, predict or control learning than are textbooks able to be read and understood in only one way. This has profound implications for how the practice of teaching is evaluated in relation to the practice of learning. Wenger argues that ‘teaching does not cause learning: what ends up being taught may or may not be what was taught, or more generally what the institutional organisation of instruction intended’ (ibid., emphasis added). Statements such as this that seek to problematize the relationship between what is taught and what is learned can be found in other fields of educational research, most conspicuously in curriculum theory and specifically in the relationship between the curriculum as planned and the curriculum as received. Later, I discuss this uncoupling of learning and teaching, which are distinct cultural and social practices. But first, I  turn to the essential components of any learning architecture. According to Wenger, a learning architecture must always be built around four key theoretical elements of communities of practice theory. More accurately, these elements are referred to as dualities, and are so called because each element consists of two interrelated aspects. The four dualities are reification and participation; designed and emergent; local and global; and identification and negotiability (Wenger, 1998:  271ff.; see also Brosnan and Burgess, 2003: 26–27; Sorensen and Ó Murchú, 2004: 190–197), and I now discuss each of these in turn.

Reification and participation Learning through LPP involves the whole person: learning is not simply a cognitive process, but a process involving knowing in action, doing, talking with people, trying things out, and both seeing how things work or are done and being allowed to do those same things. In order for new members to learn the practices of a community, they need to be afforded opportunities to take part in the authentic work of the community:  to participate. Participation is

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peripheral at first and then becomes more full over time. Trainee hairdressers do not attempt, nor are they allowed to attempt, complicated hair styling during their first few days at work in a salon: instead, they perform smaller jobs such as helping to fetch equipment or shampooing a client’s hair, as well as other less critical tasks (Billett, 2008). Likewise, new undergraduate students are not required to conduct a small-scale piece of empirical research in their first few weeks as students: instead, they are, typically, directed towards a prepared list of resources or another equivalent body of materials, which they are advised to work through and write an essay or report about, before moving on to locate new secondary sources for themselves. These two examples illustrate the fact that the participation of the newcomers is always, necessarily, characterized not only by doing things, often with the use of particular resources or tools (scissors, textbooks, diffusers, library catalogues) going to particular places and spaces (different rooms in a salon, different rooms in a department) and talking with longer-standing and more knowledgeable/experienced members of the community (senior stylists, professors), but also by making things, by having a concrete impact on the practices at hand, even if only peripherally (blow-drying a client’s hair after cutting and styling, writing a formative essay, filling out an appointment form, requesting a library book). That is to say, participation also always involves the creation of things, objects and other stuff that encapsulate, make visible and make (more or less) permanent the work being done by the newcomer within that the community: participation always involves reification. The reification/participation duality focuses attention, therefore, on the balance that has to be established to allow learners first to come to know about, use or otherwise draw on the existing tools, objects and artefacts of a community, and second to amend, add to, edit or reconfigure these same tools and objects, and to use them to create, shape or alter other things as well. It is through a process of ‘negotiation’ (Wenger, 1998: 264) between both participation and reification that people are able to learn. If the learner is provided with opportunities for participation that do not include reification, then learning is impaired. The participation becomes illegitimate because without reification, it cannot be authentic. A trainee bicycle mechanic cannot learn very much if she is only allowed to watch what happens in the workshop: she needs to be allowed to pick up and then use different tools, to learn their names (‘fourth hand tool’, ‘crank extractor’) and when best to use each one, and in turn to establish her own work routines or procedures (which job to do first, how best to note down the spare parts that needed to be replaced). But for the university student, a further aspect to practice needs to be considered first: the curriculum. A curriculum is a reification

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consisting of lots of other reifications, such as textbooks, journal articles and so forth, and as such invites and requires participation from the students who are enfolded within it. But to what extent does this reification codify ways of knowing or talking that relate to practice, as distinct from codifying a body of knowledge into a curriculum in such a way that the reification thus generated constitutes an additional artefact for the student to negotiate  – ‘an additional problem that may not exist in practice’ (Wenger, 1998: 264)? Students as well as staff have to invest some amount of time (which varies according to context) in learning to use these abstractions, because they are a necessary first step towards practice, entailing a pedagogical cost (ibid.) that ought to be evaluated not in terms of whether a particular reification ought to be used, but in terms of when such reifications ought to be used, translated from other communities or reified in the first place, so that the right balance between reification and participation can be maintained. Students might attend essay writing workshops and read any one of the large number of guides to ‘writing good essays’ that are available to buy – but for learning about essay writing within their academic discipline to be authentic, the best practice – the authentic practice – is to write an essay, not to talk or read about writing one.

Designed and emergent Learning through LPP is a fluid, complex and somewhat troublesome phenomenon. It cannot be predicted or straightforwardly codified. It is possible to specify elements of the conditions that are required for learning to happen (access to practice, authenticity, acceptance by acknowledged expert practitioners and so forth), but it is not possible to specify exactly what will be learned – only that learning will be taking place as an epistemological consequence of participation. Consequently, the design of a learning architecture has to be mindful of the different ways in which learners will go about the work of learning – how they will talk about and work with the resources that have been afforded them, the ways in which different teachers will interact with their students, the ways in which the use of tools or materials might change over time and so forth. Factors such as these can all make a difference to how learning happens – that is, to the lived experience of LPP within the practice of the community, as experienced by the newcomers within it. When designing a learning architecture we can anticipate, to a high degree of appropriateness and accuracy (derived from our own knowing, our own

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trajectories, and our own time served within the community), the stuff that we as lecturers might need – the reifications that we create for use with our students (lectures that have to be written, activities that have to be designed, formative assessments that have to be agreed among the teaching team) as well as the reifications that come from outside our immediate community or constellation of communities, but that can be brought across boundaries into ours (new workshop or laboratory equipment that we might need training in how to use before term starts, textbooks purchased for the library, journals that are subscribed to online). We have pretty fixed ideas about the kinds of teaching accommodation that we want allocating for our classes (although we might not always get the best seminar rooms or the fastest computers), when we would like our classes to be timetabled (no seminars at 4 pm on a Friday, please) and about how we might plan our teaching differently if we have only a small group of students compared to last year. All these elements are part of the design for the learning architecture, and these elements can be listed, audited and even put on a checklist. But these elements cannot be straightforwardly or unproblematically evaluated. We can never know exactly how different students will react to our choice of activities, our experiments or our lectures, from one cohort to the next. Some prefer a particular textbook despite our recommendation that, although it is quite a good choice, an alternative will provide a more thorough or critical account of the matter at hand. The activity that worked so well with one student group might not work so well a second time. The meanings that lecturers intend students to glean from a journal article might not be the meanings that the students go on to construct (as literacy studies, discussed in Chapter 4, informs us). And, most importantly, each student is an individual, enfolded within an individual biography and history that impacts on their learning as they travel along their unique trajectory within the community of practice. Consequently the nature of their participation is similarly unique, although it may well be the case that the trajectories of a cohort of students, considered as a group, and the natures of their respective participations are very closely aligned, are very similar, in several ways. But it is not the case that just because students participate, they do so in ways exactly determined by lecturers. Learning is an emergent process and teaching is just one of the structuring resources that students might use – but what matters is not a focus on how teaching impacts on learning – because it is hard to directly link the two – but rather, how teaching and learning can ‘interact so as to become structuring resources for each other’ (Wenger, 1998: 267). Notwithstanding the difficulties that we face in defining accurately the community of pedagogic practice that we might be engaging with (an issue

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that I explored in Chapter 2), a focus on learning architecture allows us to sidestep these difficulties and focus instead, in this particular instance, on the relationship between teaching, which is designed, and learning, which is emergent, while being mindful of the fact that this relationship is always characterized by uncertainty: practice – and, therefore, learning – is not the result of design, but an emergent response to it.

Local and global Communities of practice do not exist in isolation:  they are all connected to greater or lesser degrees in networks that Wenger (1998) refers to as constellations (discussed in more detail in Chapter 1). These constellations allow for the movement of both people and objects between different communities of practice that are more or less closely related. No community of practice, therefore, is isolated or entirely indigenous in its culture, but the extent to which the practices of one community are shared with or borrowed from another community, of course, varies according to the nature of the relationships between different parts of the constellation. In this way, every community of practice consists of elements that are both local (that is to say, native or indigenous) and global (that is, borrowed, donated, stolen or shared from elsewhere in the constellation). Sometimes communities of practice might have close relationships with their neighbours, allowing members and materials to cross the boundaries between them, while at other times boundary crossing might be restricted or even discouraged. The links from one community to another can be plentiful and obvious, or minimal and difficult to identify – but they are always present, and might be found within the artefacts, histories or discourses of a community. The necessity of acknowledging the connections that exist between different communities of practice lies first in the fact that no single community is capable of encompassing or reifying the total sum of practice or knowledge that pertains to the joint enterprise of the community, and second in the obligation of the community to enable those experiences that newcomers need so that they can not only participate and learn, but also move between practices within the constellation – or even across to a new constellation (remembering, as argued by Lemke (1997), that membership of one community of practice may entail prior membership of a different community (as discussed in Chapter 2)). The difficulty comes in balancing the need for authentic and rich local engagement with the need to engage in the wider landscape of practice. Thus, the design of

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any learning architecture needs to balance the demands of the global and the local during the process of establishing the structuring resources that will be employed, while simultaneously reconciling the presence, or traces, of the global within the local. The balance between the global and the local can be traced in all kinds of ways. Some of these balances have to be considered in terms of the balance of influence or power between communities – for example, in the ways in which particular university curricula are required to map onto an externally prescribed professional framework, a boundary object, so that a professional endorsement or process of accreditation might be available to students, or the ways in which an external examiner, working as a broker, can provide insights from the wider landscape of practice that might be applied at the local level. Other traces of the global are perhaps more benign, such as the way in which a textbook can provide a window into a wider constellation of practices than might otherwise be practicable, or the ways in which a seminar group can be enriched through the contributions of a number of exchange students, tourists, who may more or less knowingly carry traces of different practice between the communities that they visit and those that they have travelled from. The relationship between the global and the local is established through the movement of both people and things across different kinds of geographical, institutional and even temporal boundaries. The local/global bifurcation is a central element of any learning architecture, therefore, but remains a matter of concern rather than a matter of fact (Latour, 2005). It might not always be necessary to trace those networks through which the global impacts on the local, or along which the local reports back to the global, but if they are to form a focus for inquiry, then we need to be mindful of how they are constituted in terms of the relationships between the human and non-human elements, or actors, who make up the network. How far and how fast they can travel, how successfully they travel, and the extent to which they rely on local practices in order to mediate meaning making may all need to be accounted for.

Identification and negotiability Membership of a community of practice always involves identity. As a newcomer engages in practice – in the enterprise of the community, working with or creating reifications, learning the talk of the community – and therefore learns

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through LPP, she begins to reconstruct her identity in terms of her participation. And at the same time the community of practice adjusts around her, and the other members come to know who she is – a legitimate participant – and to acknowledge her identity as a member. Sometimes identification is accomplished through a process of recognition involving things rather than people: the wearing of a uniform (unlikely for a university student), the wearing of an identity or library card in a lanyard around the neck (more likely), the carrying of a laptop and a sheaf of notes (also likely) are some of the ways in which reifications also work to embody participation and thus impact on the formation of identity. Identity can only be made sense of in terms of both the person and the context, however. It is a product of mediation between a person – her prior history, her experiences, her wearing of a lanyard, her decision whether to carry her laptop under her arm or inside a leather satchel  – and her environment. All of these newcomer’s practices involve negotiation, the capacity to ‘shape the meanings that matter within a social configuration’ (Wenger, 1998: 197). That is, it is through being able to contribute to the actions, discussions or reifications of a community of practice in a meaningful way that participation is not only engaged but also deepened. Such meaning making is always contingent on the trajectory and position of the participant, however; a newcomer often cannot modify or control the meanings that are being negotiated to the same degree as a more established participant. Nonetheless, negotiation is always present. If a community of practice is going to thrive (which is by no means guaranteed – communities always have to work to sustain themselves), it needs to allow all the members to reconcile the need to match the requirements or standards of the community on the one hand, with the ability and opportunity to act independently within it on the other. If our student feels powerless or ignored within any particular community of practice, then she will become alienated from it and consequently will not feel able or willing to participate and as a result will not be able to learn. If, however, learners are able to make some kind of choice or informed input regarding aspects of their practice, then their participation within the community of practice, and hence their learning, will be deeper and more meaningful. Therefore, a balance needs to be struck regarding the extent to which members identify with the practices, goals or aspirations of a community, and the extent to which members can negotiate aspects of their practice. But the identification/negotiability duality is inherently and always problematic because it necessarily involves power, which, within a community of practice, is enfolded within a phenomenon that Wenger refers to as an economy of meaning (1998: 204). Different meanings possess different values or

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currencies, most conspicuously demonstrated through considering the meaning making of the student to that of the lecturer who is taking the class – both mediated by the wider sociocultural context of the community of practice, but within that community, it is the lecturer, not the student, who has more power (rendered through length of participation, trajectory, greater familiarity with the resources and history of the community, greater skill at reification, and so forth) to affect or control meaning making. It is important to remember that the establishment of economy of meaning is contingent on location: meaning might be reified within an artefact, for example, but if that artefact were to travel across a boundary to another community, a new process of meaning making, mediated by the people, resources and habits of the new community, would have to follow. The establishment of the balance between identification and negotiability that is required for the community to function involves all members of the community (newcomers and old-timers) engaging in two different – but complementary – modes of work (Wenger, 1998: 220): identification work and participation work. Identification work describes those ways in which people work to help others feel part of a community, as well as establishing themselves as members, and requires things such as acceptance, making a commitment to the community, drawing on inspiration, sharing histories and such like. Our student will commit to doing her preparatory reading, doing intellectual work, and being willing to consider alternatives to prior understandings or established meaning. Participation work describes those ways in which members not only engage in the practice of the community, but also build their relationships with other members, and requires things such as listening to other perspectives, coming to a consensus, managing confrontation, compromise and so forth. Our student will work with her peers, in seminars or in the library or in a laboratory, debate and dispute others’ as well as her own perspective or meanings, and challenge as well as be challenged by the content of lectures or the comments of lecturers.

Learning architectures, legitimate peripheral participation and communities of practice We now know enough to tie together the three constructs that underpin the argument that I  am putting forward in this book. These three constructs are necessarily intertwined, and they are incapable of being considered in isolation. An account of learning through LPP requires a consideration of the social, geographical, institutional or semiotic spaces and places in which the learners are

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doing their learning work: the community of practice. Likewise, an account of a community of practice – the shared repertoire, the boundaries, the artefacts, the mutual engagement, the reified milestones – always has to consider what the learning is that is taking place within that community, who the learners are in terms of their trajectories, and who the established members of the community are in terms of the history and tradition of the community. And in order to satisfactorily translate this conversation into a formal educational setting, we need to explore the structures for learning – the learning architecture – that has been established in order to provide affordances for participation, and hence for learning, to the people who are enrolled within this community (I use the term ‘enrolled’ here to draw on the concept of enrolment that is found within actornetwork theory). Through exploring the four theoretical dualities that underpin a learning architecture, the ontological as well as epistemological relationship between a learning architecture and a community of practice can be established. All that remains is for the causal relationship between a learning architecture and a community of practice to be made clear. It is not the case that all communities of practice require the establishment of a learning architecture in order to emerge, grow or evolve. Communities of practice, as has already been argued throughout the earlier chapters of this book, are organic, more or less purposefully formed social and cultural figurations. But they are not only this. They can also be encouraged in a more immediate manner, within more tightly defined institutional or cultural contexts, than the accounts put forward by Lave and Wenger, and Wenger might suggest. But to focus on the establishment of a community of practice as the unit of analysis for exploring institutional change or reform, for example, or as a new departmental forum for professional development, is to not only miss the point of what a community of practice is and how it works, but also implicitly reject the foundational elements of communities of practice theory  – as emergent social spaces where learning takes place through LPP. Instead, what might happen is this: a learning architecture can be specified, designed or otherwise established. People will be brought together, cajoled to attend or required to do so; spaces and places will be found, redecorated or built for the purpose; tools will be obtained, adapted or borrowed; and new habits, processes or systems will be established, abided by or aligned with. The intent behind the construction of a learning architecture can be quite explicit: indeed, in the next two chapters, I explore the learning architectures that underpin two curricula at two different universities. But through the establishment of a learning architecture, a community of practice then emerges, drawing on the tools, people and places that have been laid down in order to generate

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indigenous practices as well as co-opt others, take up and then add to shared repertoires of artefacts or of ways of talking, and trace new paradigmatic trajectories for the people who have come to work – to learn and to teach.

Learning architectures and audit cultures As I  write this, the results of the first iteration of the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF), a method for measuring teaching quality at UK universities, continue to be discussed on Twitter, in the senior common room at the department in which I work, and in the pages of newspapers, some two weeks after their publication. A critical account of the TEF methodology is beyond the scope of this book – for the present, it is sufficient to note that the TEF is, simply put, another example of the machinery of audit culture: a culture characterized by audit, inspection and the dominant discourses of quality assurance that shape so many aspects of current as well as recent professional practice in HE (Dill, 1999; Shore and Wright, 1999, 2000). Indeed, the expansion of UK HE after 1992 has been characterized by the growth of performativity cultures that have interposed themselves into many aspects of academics’ lives: audit and inspection (the Quality Assurance Agency); documentism; the steady increase in the bureaucratic and management duties of the academic; planning and documenting regimes for both teaching (specifically, the growth of outcomes-based models of teaching in HE based on behaviourist theories of learning (Illeris, 2007)) and research (the Research Excellence Framework). And parallel processes can be readily discerned within other national HE systems. Technologies such as these – and it is the dominant outcomes-based approach to learning (and by extension, to teaching and assessment as well) that are of the greatest importance and relevance here – rest on notions of manageable accountability that in turn rest on the idea that what people learn, and the way that other people teach it, can be straightforwardly measured and evaluated. Consequently, we find ourselves, as academics, as managers, as parents and as students, surrounded by university league tables (including, now, a TEF league table of sorts, with institutions grouped according to their results from the process), by inspection regimes, by auditors and by quality managers, enveloped within an account of learning and teaching in HE – or, better, a dominant discourse of learning and teaching in HE – which assumes that these constructs can be measured. However, from a social practice perspective, there is a fundamental problem with this account, with this dominant discourse. Communities of practice

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theory tells us that learning is emergent, fluid, and difficult to predict or to control. Learning architectures theory allows us to understand that the structures created within formal educational institutions will undoubtedly support or provoke or sustain learning, but that what kind of learning it will be, when exactly it will happen or exactly which elements of the architecture will be most efficacious in creating a context for learning are more problematic and difficult to quantify. Put simply, even with the most rigorous and comprehensive architectures – planning, curriculum, resources, staffing, procedures, meetings and so forth – it is impossible to state exactly what will be learned, how it will be learned and when. The use of learning architectures has allowed us to solve the problem of how to position pedagogy – a discourse of instruction – within a community of practice. Once we have established that teaching is part of that architecture, then the presence within a community of practice of pedagogy  – of a language of instruction – no longer necessarily conflicts with the more general point that learning is both improvised and emergent. Or, to put it another way, I suggest it is only through using Wenger’s learning architecture framework that it becomes possible for us to use communities of practice theory to describe formal educational provision, such as provision within a university. But the argument that I have presented here is not solely concerned with establishing robust theoretical foundations for ethnographic research in education. Communities of practice theory, as just one element of the broader sociocultural turn that is increasingly foregrounded in research (pedagogic or otherwise) in HE, also provides us with ways of investigating a number of issues of wider pedagogical and political importance, including how – if at all – learning and teaching might be measured or evaluated.

Some interim conclusions The establishment of a learning architecture leads to the emergence of a community of practice, many of the elements of which are aligned to the structural resources for learning and teaching that make up the architecture. It is impossible to predict with certainly what the practice of the community will look like, how people will learn through their participation in that practice or how the community might change over time. In part this is because of the nature of learning itself, as an emergent process, mediated by people and things that change over time. And in part this is because of the nature of communities of practice,

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which are similarly emergent. A community of practice cannot be measured or evaluated in an unproblematic manner, although it can of course become the focus of rich descriptive ethnographic research, but a learning architecture can be. Thus, in order to explore with some degree of specificity the establishment of a university curriculum from the perspective of the theories of Wenger and Lave, and Wenger, we need to consider the learning architecture that underpins a curriculum, before moving on to consider the community of practice that has emerged around and through that architecture. In the next two chapters, I draw on two different ethnographies of education in order to explore two university curricula in this way.

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Introduction This is the first of two chapters in which I draw on prior ethnographic research in order to construct an empirical account of learning and teaching within a specific HE context, drawing on the learning architectures framework that I established in the preceding chapter, in order to make sense of the practices of both students and lecturers as members of different communities of practice. These have been generated through the structuring resources of the learning architectures that have been established in the first instance by the university that is at the centre of the research. The data that this chapter rests on has two provenances. The first is my PhD research funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, several elements of which have been elaborated on and published elsewhere (Tummons, 2010a, 2010b, 2011, 2012, 2014b). The second is my subsequent published research into teacher education and teacher professionalism (Tummons, 2014c, 2014d, 2016), which also includes some collaborative research (Atkins and Tummons, forthcoming; Ingleby and Tummons, 2012, 2017), although the analysis that I  present here is entirely my responsibility. The specific focus of this research has been to explicate aspects of the learning, assessment and professional development of trainee teachers, drawing on communities of practice theory, augmented with literacy studies and actor-network theory. In this chapter, I adopt a more holistic, synoptic perspective, drawing on all this research more broadly, as well as on insights derived from prior theoretical and conceptual work that I have outlined in the preceding chapters of this book, in order to explore a learning architecture for teacher training.

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Setting the scene Holgate University is a university in the north of England, with a long history of training teachers. Specifically, it has, for over fifty years, been one of the leading universities in England for preparing teachers who are going to work in the further education (FE) or learning and skills sector, also referred to as the postcompulsory education and training (PCET) sector, the majority of whom will be employed within further education colleges (FECs), although it also offers a teacher-training curriculum for school teachers. FECs in England are responsible primarily for the provision of technical and vocational education for 16– 19-year-olds, for some adult education provision (particularly relating to basic skills in English and Mathematics) and for a small proportion of universitylevel courses (approximately 9 per cent of university-level provision in England is delivered in FECs (Tummons et  al., 2013)). Teachers in FECs gain their professional teaching qualifications (as distinct from their subject-specialist qualifications) in one of two ways. A minority of trainee teachers (perhaps onefifth) will study full-time for their teaching qualification, over one academic year. During this year, they will not only attend university lectures and seminars, but also go on two or three teaching placements in FECs in order to gain practical classroom experience. While on placement, the trainees are observed by university lecturers and also receive mentoring support from a designated member of college staff. The majority of trainee teachers study for their teaching qualification on a part-time basis, however. They commence their studies (which take two years, attending either evening or weekend classes) after they have obtained employment, which might be part-time or full-time; in order to access the course, all potential students need to be teaching on at least a part-time basis. Almost all FECs offer part-time teacher-training courses such as these. That is to say, the majority of new FE teachers study for their teaching qualification on a part-time basis at the college where they work. Some such part-time programmes are created and managed by qualifications-awarding bodies (one of the largest and best-known of these is the City and Guilds of London Institute) and others are created and managed by universities such as Holgate. Colleges can choose which programme to offer, subject to meeting the quality standards of the awarding body or university in question. The Holgate FE teacher-training programme is one of the larger such part-time programmes in England. At any point there are over 1,500 part-time students and 100 members of staff (although not all of the staff work solely as teacher-trainers:  some continue to teach in

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other curriculum areas), delivering the programme across approximately thirty different colleges in the North of England, a long-standing network that has expanded greatly since 1992 (as has HE provision in England more generally). At each college there is a designated course leader who both teaches on and locally manages the programme; in addition, there are other course tutors. Some colleges offer only a small programme for perhaps twenty or thirty students, while the larger colleges have cohorts that are three or four times this size. The course is available as a postgraduate certificate in education to graduates, or as a certificate in education to non-graduates. All students are teaching either parttime or full-time in different contexts in the FE or PCET sector. These teaching contexts include FECs (the majority of students on the course), accredited adult education and HE. The recent history of the course provides for a number of interesting issues that serve to illustrate the vacillating nature of national policy in relation to teacher training both for this sector and for other sectors of compulsory education. Having long been voluntary, teaching qualifications for new staff in the FE sector were made compulsory for the first time a year after the publication in 1999 of the first ever set of professional standards for teachers in the FE sector. These standards were superseded by a new framework just six years later; a third framework was subsequently introduced in 2014, at around the same time that the professional qualification was once again returned to a voluntary state (mirroring a wider process of neoliberal educational reforms enacted by the then coalition government in England). While the status of professionalism within the sector remains nebulous (Tummons, 2016), government agencies maintain an element of oversight of the wider curriculum for teacher training, and the Holgate programme, in common with other qualifications, is subject to external scrutiny through inspection by both the Office for Standards In Education, Children’s Services and Skills (Ofsted) and the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education.

A learning architecture for teacher training As is the case with any teacher-training programme or with any programme that is delivered across more than one site, the Holgate teacher-training programme rests on a complex assemblage of material objects, people, routines, places and texts – an assemblage that I refer to here as a learning architecture. This learning architecture has a number of interesting characteristics: the course is delivered

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asynchronously across multiple institutions; some of the teachers on the programme never meet their counterparts at the other colleges; the nature of the provision at the individual colleges varies according to the other work being done at that college; and so forth. For now, it is sufficient to note that how the learning architecture is employed can and will be mediated according to specific context. In many ways, the learning architecture of this course is similar to other such architectures, and is straightforwardly recognizable to the onlooker. It rests on place, and is delivered in seminar or lecture rooms of varying kinds, although other places are needed as well, such as libraries, ICT suites and the places where the trainee teachers do their own teaching in turn. Some are ‘base rooms’, that is, they are classrooms earmarked for sole use by the teacher-training team and this ownership of space is reflected in the material discourses on display: posters advertising other courses at Holgate that completing students might move on to; examples of student work; notices relating to assignment deadlines; and posters that illustrate or otherwise capture key aspects of the curriculum (posters of educational psychologists such as Vygotsky or Jerome Bruner, for example). At other colleges, the Holgate teacher-training programme might be too small in terms of student numbers or too insignificant in terms of local college policy to warrant a base room, and the teacher-training students may find themselves in a biology lab one week and a general purpose seminar room the next. In these cases, it is common to see the teacher-trainers carrying or wheeling boxes of tools and equipment from their staffrooms or offices to the classrooms:  textbooks, flipchart pads and pens, module handbooks, portfolios and laptops, for example. Their counterparts who enjoy the facilities of a base room simply have to go to a cupboard or drawer to pull out the resources they need. Sometimes, though, opening a cupboard might instead reveal portfolios from previous student cohorts that have been returned to the college after external examining, but have not been collected by the students, or a stack of old and unused module guides, or copies of a now out-of-date textbook; the history and archaeology of the teacher-training programme are not always difficult to unearth. The people who are enrolled within the Holgate teacher-training programme are similarly lacking in homogeneity. The characteristics of what might be described as the core teaching team for the programme are varied. Some are new teacher-trainers, while others have many years’ experience. Some are employed entirely or predominantly as teacher-training lecturers, while others take on a teacher-training role alongside their other teaching, which might range from modern languages to engineering. Some run seminar groups, while others visit

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the students for observations of their teaching practice – a key assessment component of the course. And there are other, more peripheral, people involved as well: guest speakers, college managers, admissions tutors, inspectors and quality assurance administrators, internal and external examiners, and representatives of the endorsing professional body all occasionally spend time within what I  shall refer to as the teacher-training community of pedagogic practice within the college (a cumbersome label, and not one that I  am inclined to repeat at all frequently), coming in as tourists or as brokers in order to allow particular things – external examining, financing, quality management – to be accomplished. The other significant group of people to consider is, of course, the students, who are, likewise, characterized by diversity. Some have studied a university-level programme before, while others have never taken part in any professional or academic (as distinct from technical or vocational – a bifurcation that I am aware is problematic but that is convenient for the present time) education or training. Some are working as full-time teachers and enjoy a permanent contract of employment, while others have only fractional posts, sometimes because they are balancing work with family or caring commitments, sometimes because only fractional contracts are available and at the start of each academic year they are never too sure how much paid teaching work they can obtain. Some students value the opportunity for professional learning and development that a teacher-training programme affords them, while others attend more because of the promise of a pay rise, or a confirmation of a contract of employment, if they complete the programme successfully. The most immediately visible aspects of the activities that characterize the work done by both the students and the teacher-trainers can be seen in the pedagogic practices of the classroom or workshop, such as the discussion groups, PBL activities, poster exercises or peer presentations. At the same time, many activities within this community of practice are not necessarily directly visible in the classroom at any fixed point in time, but they nonetheless leave traces of various kinds. A class-based discussion to introduce a new topic of study or a new modular element within the curriculum might rest on past events such as a reminder of previously completed classwork, or a previously submitted portfolio (perhaps by one of last year’s students, who has agreed that their work can be used as an exemplar for the new cohort). Equally, the discussion might rest on an imagined future event, such as a series of teaching observations that is yet to be carried out but that can still be planned for, or a forthcoming peer-learning workshop that the students will need to arrange by themselves. The activities that are to be found within the learning architecture can happen in a number of

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different places, at different times and involve different members of the community – different social actors – drawing on different tools or pieces of equipment. But they are all nonetheless elements that can be arranged within a learning architecture and that in turn make up the key elements – the joint enterprise, the mutual engagement, the shared repertoire, of a teacher-training community of pedagogic practice.

Reification and participation As might be expected for a professional programme designed by a university to map onto a set of professional standards, the shared repertoire of the Holgate teacher-training programme is rich in texts, which constitute – by some degree – the dominant genre of artefact within the community of practice. Artefacts such as handouts, web pages, individual learning plans, feedback forms, textbooks, PDFs, and posters all come together, working in different ways in order to accomplish the programme. Some of these texts are designed to be read and then acted on, while others are designed to be interacted with, to be augmented with superscriptions or marked up with a highlighter pen. Students collect varieties of texts in order to construct their portfolios: some of these texts will have been created within the teacher-training community of practice (essays, reflective learning journals), while others will have been created by the students during their work as teachers (lesson plans, schemes of work) and will be imported into the teacher-training programme for use as assessment objects. And a similar variety of textual artefacts is constructed, used, borrowed or adopted by teachers. Handouts, posters, tracking documents, PowerPoint slides, module guides and so forth are all used in different ways: to facilitate pedagogic activity within the classroom, to provide evidence of student participation and engagement, to provoke learning or to make meaning. Taken together, all these artefacts, which are all reifications (albeit with differing provenances), provide a variety of affordances for participation within the community of practice, for both students (as they learn through LPP) and teachers (who continue to occupy a position as ‘learners’ as the community shifts around them, and as they deepen or extend their practice). These processes of participation happen in different ways. Some of these affordances for participation coalesce around the creation of a text, such as an essay, which both reifies the current state of learning of the student as well as one element of the pedagogic dialogue that has been constructed between the student and the teacher.

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Other affordances centre on a pre-existing text, and draw on processes of dialogue or of conversation as well as more readily identifiable teaching practices such as peer-group presentations in order to generate forms of participation, practices that will shift and be shifted in response to the text in question: a seminar activity based around the reading of a book chapter may well be different to an activity based around the requirements of lesson planning, for example. A rich and complex intertextual hierarchy can be traced between many of these. The creation of an essay rests on the prior reading of textbook chapters and perhaps academic journal articles as well, and in turn leads to the creation of written feedback. A lesson observation leads to the generation of an observation report form, which in turn will be used by the student in writing their own reflective commentary on the observed lesson, evaluating their own practice as well as responding to the written comments of the observer. A focused seminar activity will lead students to create notes based on what they have been asked to read, notes that in turn will find their way into their essays. Even from just these few examples, we can already see traces of activity that cut across different communities of practice. The teacher-training community of pedagogic practice within the college, like any other community of practice, is situated within a constellation of communities, and the nature of the relationships between these communities varies. When the teachers at one college mark the essays that the students have written (a form of participation – assessment – that leads to reification  – feedback), they make reference to marking criteria that are reified at Holgate and then circulated across the college network. When teachers from all the different colleges that deliver the Holgate programme meet in order to moderate their students’ work (another example of participation that leads to a reification – in this instance, a moderation form that in turn will feed into Holgate’s wider quality assurance system), they bring together the work from distinct but related teacher-training communities of pedagogic practice from several colleges, all within what might be termed ‘the Holgate teachertraining constellation’. At Holgate, the aggregated comments from these moderation meetings (several such meetings are held within the network of colleges during a single academic year) find their way not only into university-wide processes, but also into quality assurance systems that work across universities, mediated by government departments and by statute (Ofsted inspections being the standout example), in turn requiring other forms of participation (inspection) and reification (report writing), which eventually find their way back to the local level of the individual college, for example, in determining elements of the curriculum, or of the ways in which students are assessed.

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The teacher-training learning architecture that I discuss here necessarily has to provide a variety of opportunities for participation and reification, therefore, so that the work of accomplishing the teacher-training programme can be done. However, this establishment of processes and this gathering or creation of resources are both predicated on participation and reification, which are paradigmatic elements of a community of practice. Without affordances for participation, there can be no learning (that is, learning through LPP), no opportunities for students to learn about particular elements of the teacher-training course, or for the teachers to learn about the wider workings of the teacher-training sector. At the same time, it is through being able to employ, alter and create a range of reifications that students and teachers are all able to make their participation concrete, to have a tangible (‘readable’ is perhaps more apt, bearing in mind the predominance of texts among the community’s repertoire of artefacts) impact on the community of practice, as a necessary aspect of engendering a sense of membership, of participation that is meaningful.

Designed and emergent Any learning architecture has to balance the designed and the emergent, and this balance is to be found within the space between what can be specified or directed as elements of a design for learning, and the capacity for members of a community of practice – irrespective of their trajectory or position – to adapt or improvise these elements in response to changes in circumstance, to issues of interest, or to other unplanned or unanticipated exigencies. Year on year, teachers adjust or reinvent their teaching materials, their classroom activities and their formative assessment strategies, responding to their own changes in thinking about or experiences within the community of practice. Sometimes they make adjustments in response to the evidenced or espoused needs of their newest group of students, who in turn exhibit different behaviours, preferences or experiences to their predecessors. Students change their practices as they learn, as their participation within the community deepens as well as lengthens: they read more challenging or more complex journal articles, express their developing conceptual understanding in essays and portfolios that take on a more critical as well as thorough tone, and revisit their own teaching practice with an increasingly critical gaze. Or they may learn how best to meet the requirements of the course while expending a minimal amount of effort, how best to complete their assessment portfolios without attempting all the required reading and private study,

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or how to navigate strategically between the demands of their studies and the demands of their family or work lives. Similarly, the ever-changing political, social and cultural landscape within which the students and the teachers do their work necessitates a capacity for change and flexibility. Thus, the work of the teacher-training community of pedagogic practice within the college changes over time. Some of these changes are driven from outside the boundaries of the community, such as when changes have to be made to the curriculum in order to respond to a new iteration of national professional standards. This kind of change might necessitate a process of programme-level revalidation, generating a number of processes that might include curriculum revision, site visits, and meetings with staff from Holgate, from the colleges and from the professional body. Other changes are smaller-scale, sometimes even trivial, and entirely indigenous to the community, such as when changes are made to teaching timetables due to changes in teaching accommodation. This kind of change might involve the teacher having to adjust their planned pedagogical activities due to the restrictions or affordances of the new room that their class has been allocated. Changes such as these provide examples of how agents or practices from outside the immediate community of practice can effect change. Other kinds of changes in practice are indigenous, driven by the nature of the interactions between the teacher and the students as they do their work of being teachers and students. Some of these are entirely uncontroversial, and similar practices are easily identifiable in other universities and other communities of practice, such as in the provision of a negotiated assessment brief that allows students to adapt the ‘standard’ assessment for a module or even to negotiate an entirely bespoke sequence of assessment tasks. Individual learning plans can also work in a similar way in allowing different kinds or genres of response from the students, all of whom may choose to respond to the plan in slightly different ways while still meeting the requirements of the module or curriculum element. This process of negotiation might be driven by intrinsic interest, such as for the student who has a strong or powerful interest in a particular theme or theory and who wishes to use her assessment as a vehicle with which to explore it. Or it might be driven by an embodied interest, such as for the student who is deaf and who uses British Sign Language (BSL) and therefore needs to have her assessment tasks constructed in such a way that they meet the requirements of the course while also being practicable (a BSL interpreter may be needed; reading book chapters and writing about them in an essay may take longer because English may be her second language, and so forth). Conversely, a teacher may have a conscious or unconscious bias towards some areas of the curriculum over

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others, or a preference for one textbook over another, and may shift classroom activities and the expectations of the assessment process accordingly. Indeed, any of the formal elements of the programme can be seen as being capable of more or less generous interpretation: module and programme guidelines are not rigid; rather, they are of necessity permissive, inherently capable of being interpreted differently within particular contexts and by particular people – as is the case in fact with any literacy artefact (an insight provided through literacy studies, as discussed in Chapter 4). The curriculum – the handbooks, the guidelines, the processes – is a design, but is always, to some degree, capable of being differently interpreted and acted on and is therefore always, to some degree, emergent, produced through an ongoing process of negotiation and renegotiation between community members, mediated by the tools and processes of the immediate community as well as others within the constellation. At the same time, the course as a whole is structured in such a way that it can accommodate certain degrees of negotiation or reinterpretation. Or, to put it another way, we might argue that the teacher-training communities of pedagogic practice that are gathered within a constellation centred around Holgate University (the more powerful community of practice as it is from Holgate that the programme derives) draw on a shared repertoire and a series of practices that are capable of differing levels of interpretation and consequent action, but that remain aligned to the joint enterprise of the communities. The balance between the designed and the emergent is neither, therefore, simply an alternative theorization of curriculum as ‘planned’ and curriculum as ‘received’, nor is it synonymous with constructs such as ‘planned’ and ‘unplanned’ learning. Rather, it entails a more subtle understanding of the inherent qualities of any curriculum or programme of study, as reified within processes, manuals, assessments and handbooks. Students and teachers will always be learning slightly different things because they are participating in slightly different ways as a necessary ontological consequence of the designed/emergent bifurcation. But they will always be learning sufficient things to maintain the joint enterprise of the community of practice, which in turn is able to accommodate these same differences in interest, in enthusiasm and in practice.

Local and global In this chapter I have already referred to some ways through which the wider landscape of practice within the teacher-training community of pedagogic

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practice in the college sits. An individual community at one college is nested among others at other colleges, which are all looked over/after by the franchising university, Holgate. In turn, Holgate is one of several universities that offer professional qualifications in teacher training for the FE sector, which we might also imagine as constituting a constellation, and which all have established relationships with other interested and engaged communities such as the relevant professional organization or funding bodies. And across all these communities of practice we can discern a shared repertoire of: student handbooks and assessment specifications – written at Holgate in part according to specifications set down by the professional body as well as according to the broader practices of HE institutions; textbooks and journal articles – curated and championed, but sometimes ignored, by Holgate staff as well as college staff, and written by a range of people from across the wider landscape of practice; quality assurance documents – written by Holgate staff following input from college staff in response to instructions given from outside the constellation; and assessment portfolios, written and compiled by students at each of the colleges, oftentimes including materials and documents taken from their own teaching practices (another constellation of communities), and distributed across the Holgate constellation for moderation and examination purposes. Through all these tools and artefacts we can see the local – a community of practice within the college – linked to the global – the other colleges, the university and the profession. But it is important to remember, mindful of the insights derived from actornetwork theory, that this web of texts and processes is accomplished in part through the mediation of people. Even at a time when the use of ICTs allows for mostly effective web-based contact and collaboration between teachers and students within and across the constellation of colleges, it remains necessary, even desirable, for people to meet in real life, to travel across colleges, to attend lectures and seminars, to convene for plenary meetings at Holgate, to convene staff-student panels and to visit the places where the students teach. During the decade or so that I have been enrolled within this teacher-training network, the websites have improved, the onus for the provision of hardware has moved from institution to individual (memories from over a decade ago of pushing a cabinet full of laptops from staffroom to seminar room seem archaic – for current students, the VLE can more easily be accessed from their smartphones) and reams of documentation have moved into an online space (not only journal articles, but also assessment portfolios). But the necessity for people to physically as well as virtually move around the constellation of colleges has not lessened: students and teachers occupy a variety of positions and travel across a variety of

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paradigmatic trajectories within the constellation, and sometimes they bump into brokers or tourists from elsewhere, such as external examiners or representatives from professional bodies, who bring traces of their indigenous practices with them insofar as they pertain to their work of brokerage or tourism. At the same time, the communities of pedagogic practice within the Holgate constellation will overlap with communities of research practice and of administrative practice (and these in turn will link up across time and place with counterparts and interested others within other constellations of practice). Some of the teachers within the Holgate programme will also be active researchers, and will carry traces of that research with them in their teaching, in how they talk with their students and in how they design their seminar activities. And although research work is not something that many of the teacher-training students might have considered on commencing their studies, for a small number an imagined future trajectory and identity can be opened up and as they complete their teacher-training qualification they will be looking to go across boundaries into research communities either at Holgate or elsewhere, and perhaps also to remain within the teacher-training community, but as a teacher not as a student. Meanwhile, the communities of administrative practice will, among other activities, be responsible for recruitment and admission to the programme, and will sometimes ask teachers to act as brokers, to travel outside the boundaries of the community in order to encourage new people to join, to become participants. Once we have established what we mean when we talk about the local, which might be an individual college where the course is offered, or it might be the Holgate constellation as a whole, we can then position the global around this. And so we might see the ways in which Holgate attempts to make its presence felt at the local, college level as an example of the global impacting on the local in a way that is relatively straightforward to observe: in order to make the students feel like university students rather than college students and the teachers feel like university teachers and not college teachers (although they are not employed by the university), Holgate might distribute posters with prominent university logos to put on the walls of the seminar room or USB memory sticks with the university logo on one side, and will send university staff to college-based staffstudent panel meetings in order to ascertain the extent to which students at the college feel like they belong to the university. On other occasions, representatives from national inspectorates or organizations will visit Holgate and perhaps some of the colleges as well, in order to accompany processes or artefacts that embody dominant discourses of audit and inspection. Inspectors or auditors

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might only be tourists within the teacher-training community, but they are powerful tourists and have the potential to shape practice at a local, as well as at a global, level. And they provide a conduit to the global, a way for students as well as teachers to experience at a local level some aspects of the global practices that all these teacher-training communities are enrolled within, a conduit that is as potentially meaningful as a visit from an external author or researcher, or watching a video online.

Identification and negotiability Members of any community of practice can construct their identities and negotiate aspects of their practice in several ways, notwithstanding the nature of the practice at hand. Within the teacher-training community of pedagogic practice within the college, possibilities for negotiation and identification are perhaps somewhat restricted in comparison to some of the affordances that might be offered within other communities, but they are nonetheless present, although they are not without complexity and ambiguity. For students, identification with the joint enterprise of the community through crossing the boundary into it and taking on the identity of the ‘student’ might seem at first look to be a straightforward process, but the details of the inbound trajectory of the student – join the course, engage within and become a legitimate peripheral participant, learn some things about teaching in the post-compulsory sector and complete some assignments, leave the community and in turn take on a more full level of participation at work  – mask a number of issues around power, motivation and purpose. For some students, joining the course is entirely optional while for others it is a contractual obligation. For some students, successful completion of the course is imagined in terms of professional learning and development while for others it is imagined in terms of receiving a pay rise or a permanent contract of employment. These differing levels of participation are often constructed and discussed in terms of engagement and motivation, or in terms of a ‘deeper’, a ‘surface’ or a ‘strategic’ approach to learning, perhaps. Within a community of practice, however, the focus shifts towards the student as a whole person and to the extent to which the student identifies with the community of practice, with the work that is done within it, the discourses that are shared by participants, the repertoire that the community draws on and so forth. It may be the case that a student simply does not wish to identify with the community in anything more than a peripheral way and does not wish to deepen her participation; such

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a student might choose to remain right at the boundary, and it may well be the case that such a willing level of peripheral participation is permissible or achievable without disrupting the work of the community in question. It may also be the case that a student is prevented from moving beyond a peripheral level of participation, either due to a more or less temporary inequality reified by an object, artefact or a person, or due to circumstances that impact on the student but that have been engendered within a different community. In all such cases, it is the extent to which the student is able to identify with the practice of the community that is the matter of concern. Identity formation is a central aspect of membership of a community of practice and is necessarily bound up in participation and, therefore, in learning. And while students are by no means required to take on homogeneous ‘student’ identities, they are all required – not least so that the coherence of the community can be maintained – to take on, to negotiate, at least some aspects or elements of such an identity. Consequently, students need to negotiate their identity, to establish what they do or do not want to do, what they are or are not permitted to do differently, or to change or to ignore. A student might want to negotiate a particular aspect of her assessment portfolio (focusing on a specific topic area, for example), a particular pattern of behaviour within the seminar room (not being comfortable or willing or able to speak during whole class discussions, but more than happy to make a positive discussion to small group work) or a particular relationship to the joint enterprise of the community as a whole (acknowledging that she has been required to study for the qualification and therefore displaying or voicing a sense of reluctance, but acknowledging also the instrumental need to participate at a peripheral level at least). Some students may attend staff-student committees and report that they ‘feel like Holgate students’ and look forward to attending their graduation ceremonies, while others do not identify with the institution in any meaningful way and barely acknowledge the receipt of their certificate other than to make a copy for their employer so that their status as ‘qualified’ can be noted in their human resources file. In these and other ways, students are able to negotiate some aspects of their participation, and the nature and consequence of this negotiation in turn contribute to how they construct – and have constructed around them – their identity as students. The relative diversity of student identities is mirrored in the diverse identities that are negotiated by the teachers, both in the colleges and at Holgate, and that are likewise mediated by a range of factors. For some, working in teacher training is just one aspect of a larger portfolio of teaching or management responsibilities, while for others teacher training is their main or only role within the

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college. Some combine their teacher-training role with wider college-based roles as ‘teaching champions’, ‘mentors’ or ‘advanced practitioners’. Sometimes such roles neatly align to the developmental ethos of the teacher-training curriculum. At other times, however, these roles occupy discourses of inspection, quality assurance and managerialism, leading to difficulties for those teachers who have to negotiate these different identities: a negotiation that for some will pose no difficulty (either because they can straightforwardly and without risk reject the managerialist discourse or because they actively embrace it), while for others being required to reconcile such contrasting roles proves burdensome or difficult, leading to unwilling or strategic compliance at best. Other teacher-trainers embrace the affordances offered to them through being attached to universitylevel provision within their colleges, perhaps using their role as a lever to negotiate (more or less successfully) for professional development opportunities, or as a stepping-stone to a university post either at Holgate or elsewhere. Some embark on research degrees, imagining a future trajectory outside the college, and others are asked to do some teacher-training because the college is shortstaffed and the senior management team need to make maximally efficient use of their human resources. However, none of these very different staff trajectories, as well as the students that I have outlined above, are so diverse that they cannot be accommodated within the community of practice due to the permissive nature of the structuring resources – the learning architecture – that have been established.

A community of practice for teacher training Any university or college consists of a constellation of communities of practice, all connected in various ways depending on the nature of those communities, the kinds of practice being done, the people and things that move within and between them, and so forth. One of the constellations of communities of practice at Holgate University is centred around the practice of teacher training, and consists at least of a community of pedagogic practice, a community of research practice (many, though not all, of the people who teach on the programme are also active researchers) and a community of administrative practice (the admissions assistants, finance officer, and so forth). This university community is at the centre of a wider constellation of teacher-training communities of practice that are distributed across the network of colleges, which have elected to offer the Holgate curriculum. At each college, the teacher-training

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community of practice is nested within the other communities in the college, but nonetheless possesses clearly identified boundaries constructed in various ways according to context:  through space (the provision of specific seminar rooms); through routinized practice (the provision of a regular timetable and of identifiable routines such as lesson observations); through people (specified members of staff who teach on the programme); through objects (posters on walls, books on shelves, course files and Holgate-branded memory sticks); and through discourse (people talking and reading about the programme or writing about it in quality reports). That is to say, within any one of the colleges, a teacher-training community of practice is discernable. Some elements of the practice of the community are directly and straightforwardly observable, while others have to be indirectly observed or deduced, perhaps through reading documents or talking with people. But the community of practice can be identified and explored: it is present within the college as a possible object for inquiry and analysis. Any one of the communities that make up the Holgate constellation rests on the learning architecture that has been established at Holgate and then distributed, using a network of texts, procedures, websites, meetings and people, across the colleges. This architecture does not specify all the artefacts that might be drawn on by teacher-trainers, nor does it list precisely how each student should satisfy the assessment requirements of the programme. It does not require a particular layout for the classrooms that are to be used, or provide a comprehensive list of all the books or journal articles that all students must read. Instead, the learning architecture consists of a series of structuring resources that can be adapted or modified in accordance with local need (that is, at a college level, responding to the geography, the student population, the buildings, the available staff, or any other institutional or cultural specificity), but only insofar as the practice of teacher training as reified within the Holgate curriculum is not damaged, threatened or otherwise altered in unacceptable ways (that is, ways that impair the practice of the community). None of the many teacher-training communities of practice that can be seen, discerned or talked about at any of the colleges where the Holgate programme is offered are identical. But they are all similar enough, sufficiently aligned to the Holgate learning architecture, to maintain coherence in practice. This alignment is not to be taken for granted, however. The massive work involved in coordinating practice across the network as a whole is never complete or stable; rather, it is always in need of being refreshed, check up on and worked at so that it can be established. This constant process of ordering (it is never ‘ordered’) involves a range of people, systems and

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tools. Internal moderators read work completed by students at colleges different to theirs. College-based course managers travel to regular meetings at Holgate in order to take part in curriculum evaluation discussions or training in admissions procedures. Students read their handbooks and module guides, and then ask for further guidance from their teachers before negotiating how best to complete their portfolios. College libraries ensure that the minimum threshold of recommended textbooks has been ordered. College quality managers enrol the teacher-training programme within their systems. And the teachers themselves act as brokers for the programme, encouraging admissions from new applicants, and representing the work of the programme for external inspectors. All these communities of practice emerge and change over time (they have not simply been installed or generated overnight) through the construction of the learning architecture that has been established by Holgate and adopted  – with appropriate local additions and amendments – by the colleges. As the staff and students at one of the colleges come together to take part in the teachertraining programme, a community of practice develops around them, designed initially by the learning architecture, but then shifting slightly as the requirements and habits of the local negotiate with the opportunities and demands of the global in settling the shared repertoire and patterns of mutual engagement of the community. The joint enterprise of the community remains strongly framed: the teacher-training programme can only be seen to provide robust and recognizable qualifications for professionals if the assessment of the course is both valid and reliable and the course is sufficiently closely mapped onto the relevant professional standards. But how the enterprise is accomplished can vary: teaching styles vary across the colleges; students and teachers at one college prefer some textbooks or web-based resources (that is, some reifications) above others. Some students and teachers participate differentially to others, and these patterns or trajectories of participation may change over time as the identities of both students and teachers change as a consequence of their participation – their learning. Other changes are effected from outside the constellation: government changes to funding or to the status attached to professional standards, for example, might require changes in the learning architecture as some reifications become obsolete and new ones need to be generated. The senior management team of the college might decide to withdraw from the Holgate programme and seek endorsement from a different awarding body  – or even to withdraw from offering a teacher-training programme at all. All the communities within the Holgate constellation are subject to change, and make change happen as a consequence of both indigenous and external practices. But

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the communities of practice sustain themselves, and are sustained by others, so long as the coherence of the practice – the work of the teacher-training curriculum – is maintained.

Some interim conclusions Taken as a whole, the Holgate teacher-training provision can be characterized as a constellation of communities of practice, moderately to strongly framed around a series of reified artefacts and processes and actions by people that have been gathered together in the form of a learning architecture. This learning architecture is a socio-material assemblage of places, discourses, things, texts and people, constantly being ordered and reordered across institutional, geographical and temporal boundaries through networks of practice, activity, speech and writing: voices, movement, paperwork, meetings and messages all come together across this network to make the communities of practice happen. Numerous different things are learned within each of these communities, but – more importantly – a number of more or less similar things are learned as well and these things pertain to training teachers for the FE, or PCET, sector. It is not possible to predict or audit the learning that might happen from one year – from one iteration of one of the communities of practice – to the next. It is possible to explore each of these communities of practice on their own terms, however. And it is also possible to specify with a degree of certainty how a learning architecture to encourage such communities of practice might be specified. But the practice of learning within a community is too contingent, too unpredictable, too messy to be measured in a more specific way than this.

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Learning Architectures in Medical Education

Introduction This is the second of two chapters in which I  draw on prior ethnographic research in order to construct an empirical account of learning and teaching within a specific HE context, based on the learning architectures framework that I established in Chapter 6, in order to make sense of the practices of both students and staff (in the context of this chapter, this is not restricted to academic or teaching staff ) as members of different communities of practice. These have been generated through the structuring resources of the learning architectures that have been established, relatively recently, by the university that is at the centre of the research. The data that this chapter rests on is derived from a threeyear ethnography of medical education in North America, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The fieldwork for the project was conducted from 2012 to 2015. The broad aims of the project were to explore issues at one university in Canada surrounding the implementation, from September 2010, of a new medical education curriculum distributed across two campuses spanning two provinces, 400 kilometres apart. This new distributed medical education (DME) curriculum was designed explicitly to rest on ICTs. The need to establish comparability of provision in terms of both educational experiences and assessment methods across the two sites is driven by an external professional framework established by the accrediting organizations, the Liaison Committee on Medical Education (LCME) for North America, as well as the Committee on Accreditation of Canadian Medical Schools:  wider North American accreditation allows graduates to access opportunities for postgraduate training and residency across all of North America. The key findings of the research project have been published elsewhere; however, the holistic analysis that I engage in here using learning architectures is entirely my own and should not be interpreted as in any way seeking to counter or to challenge these prior findings (MacLeod et al., 2015, 2017; Tummons et al., 2015, 2016, 2017).

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Setting the scene The use of audio and visual technologies to allow people to access universitylevel programmes at a distance from the institution is a well-established curriculum and pedagogical model within HE. The first university correspondence courses were offered to distance learning students in the middle of the nineteenth century, and distance learning provision has continued to adapt in order to take advantage of new technologies that have proliferated at a remarkable speed. Correspondence courses gave way to programmes of study supported by recordings as well as by texts. The use of telephone-based tutorials and teaching materials on audio cassette tapes was in turn rendered obsolete by dial-up internet connections and CD-ROMs, and these in turn have been replaced by live streaming, videoconferencing and virtual learning environments, all of which allow for models of HE provision that, simply put, do not require the students and the academic staff to always be in the same physical place at the same time. Indeed, a review of research literature relating to distance learning in HE more broadly, as well as medical education specifically, allows us to identify four commonly agreed-on components of any distance-learning programme. First, it is institutionally based; second, it is characterized by separation (geographic and/ or temporal) of teacher and student; third, it uses either synchronous or asynchronous telecommunications; and fourth, it rests on the sharing of resources. As an example of distance learning provision, the DME curriculum therefore relies heavily on the adoption and integration of both technologies (videoconferencing, web conferencing and content-sharing platforms) and people to support the development and use of these technologies (Caladine et al., 2000; Greenhow et  al., 2009). As a solution to curricular provision in so-called HE cold spots, in rural or otherwise isolated areas, the affordances of ICTs are obvious, and it is within a broader context of the need to establish as well as sustain both initial and ongoing medical education in North America and specifically in Canada (where this research was undertaken), in more remote areas, that the provision of this DME curriculum has to be understood. In 2010, the already-established medical education programme at Main Campus was redesigned and extended to include a new site  – Satellite  – situated 400 kilometres away in a neighbouring province. Main Campus is (perhaps unsurprisingly, bearing in mind the nomenclature used here) larger and busier than Satellite Campus. The size of the student cohort for the medical programme at Main Campus is almost three times that at Satellite. Approximately eighty students enrol at Main each year, whereas the typical student cohort at Satellite

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numbers thirty. The new curriculum was designed to rest on ICTs from the ground up, the application of technology (digital video, digital learning platforms, e-learning devices and such like) functioning as a means to enact synchronously the DME curriculum across the two campuses, with the establishment of a videoconferencing system at the centre of this technological framework. Through this framework, the two campuses are linked so that for the undergraduate students, during their first two years of study (that is to say, before they take up their clerkships at the beginning of their third year of study in, for example, emergency medicine, paediatrics or psychiatry), the curriculum is shared, distributed across the ICT infrastructure. That is to say, students at both campuses follow the same curriculum and ‘attend’ the same lectures and other plenary activities, linked via the videoconferencing system. Two groups of students ‘share’ not only the same lecture space, but also the same lecturer, who addresses one group in person and the other via the videoconferencing system, although other elements of the course, such as small-group sessions or laboratory-based sessions, are delivered separately. It is at Main Campus that the bulk of ‘real-world’ whole-group teaching takes place, with students at Satellite participating via the videoconferencing system; it is relatively uncommon, although not unknown, for the lecturer to be physically present at Satellite and be transmitted to Main. Finally, it is important to highlight the fact that the construction of parity of curricular provision across both the campuses rests on two key drivers. First, there is the historical perspective, derived from the longer tradition of distance learning within HE and a consequent imperative to maintain the quality of the provision, irrespective of the geographical location at which the provision is sited. Second, there is the policy perspective, and specifically the accreditation requirement for comparability of provision within any medical education programme:  ‘The curriculum of a medical education program [sic.] must include comparable educational experiences and equivalent methods of assessment across all instructional sites within a given discipline’ (LCME, 2013: 8, emphasis added).

A learning architecture for medical education The Main/Satellite medical education programme rests on a network of people, places, routines, objects and technologies that is as complex as the Holgate assemblage described in the preceding chapter (one element of my argument is that any university programme is accomplished in ways that are always complex and contingent). The complexity of the Main/Satellite DME curriculum is

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constituted within a learning architecture that, like any other, contains a number of distinctive elements, leading to the establishment of new communities of practice. Many components of the Main/Satellite learning architecture for medical education are entirely typical of university provision more generally: notice boards, academic and administrative staff, laboratories, lecture rooms, libraries and so forth. Some components of this architecture are, however, distinctive by virtue of being products of the specific context of the DME curriculum as a whole. That is to say, it is due to the requirements of the DME provision that some aspects of the learning architecture emerge as being story worthy: the plenary lecture theatres and seminar rooms, the audio-visual (AV) staff and the teaching staff. At both the Main and Satellite campuses large lecture theatres, smaller seminar rooms and even student lounges have been equipped with videoconferencing systems. Irrespective of size, all these teaching spaces are equipped with an array of monitors, cameras and microphones that allow not only for the display of media-rich teaching materials (in common with other, similar programmes, the DME curriculum is delivered on a largely paperless basis), but also for staff and students at one campus to see and to hear their counterparts at the other, during lectures, seminars, laboratory sessions and panel meetings. The plenary lecture theatre at Main is considerably larger than the Satellite counterpart (the Main lecture theatre seats 130 students – it is four times the size of the counterpart room at Satellite), but the core technical features – the multiple screens, the microphones and buttons, the cameras – are the same at both sites. Stateof-the-art camera and microphone systems in all the teaching rooms allow for synchronous teaching by one member of faculty staff across both sites, for question-and-answer sessions that students at both sites can take part in, and for the recording and archiving of lecture and seminar materials for future use. Lecturers either wear microphones or are recorded by microphones installed at the front of the room, and are tracked by cameras. Press-button systems allow students to activate the microphones in front of them (in any teaching room, there is a microphone and a button to activate the microphone system shared between every two seats) so that their counterparts at the other campus can hear their questions and comments. And when a student pushes their button to ask a question, the cameras in the room focus not only on the student group as a whole and transmit their image to large screens at both sites, but also on the individual student who has asked the question. At the same time, the lecturer receives a notification that a question has been asked on one of her screens at the front of the room. Other screens display images of the lecture hall at the other

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site, and the lecture slides. A light fixture indicates whether the question is being asked – the button has been pressed – by a student at the local site (a red light comes on) or the other site (indicated by a green light). The infrastructure is very similar across the two sites. Moreover, it is physically linked: a network of custom cables, 400 kilometres in length, joins Main and Satellite together. The videoconferencing and ICT infrastructure is under the care of a specialist group of AV staff, a specialist team that works out of control booths (there is one at each site) from where they orchestrate the technologies that are in use during lectures, seminars and other meetings, in an environment akin to a control booth in a professional television studio: indeed, many of these AV professionals have backgrounds in the entertainment industry as sound and vision engineers, rather than as learning technologists in HE. Their position within the DME curriculum is central to the accomplishment of that curriculum, so much so that to describe them as ‘support’ or ‘ancillary’ staff is to fail to acknowledge their importance: rather, they are pedagogical partners (MacLeod et al., 2016). The centrality of their role can be seen in the work that they do in helping to complete the everyday academic work of the curriculum. It is the AV staff who ensure that PowerPoint slides are correctly formatted for use at both Main and Satellite; who coordinate the microphones, cameras and recording equipment for videoconferencing; who help members of teaching staff if they are unfamiliar with the technology of the lecture room; and who archive lecture notes and recordings for later use by the students. They not only manage the processes that help the curriculum to be delivered seamlessly across the two sites, but also play a central role in drawing up the institutional policies that underpin these processes. Simply put, the AV staff hold a central position within the community of pedagogic practice, notwithstanding the fact that they are neither medics nor teachers. By contrast, the position of the teaching staff is defined in terms of a nexus of multimembership, as they are not only situated within, and constructing their identity from, membership of the pedagogic community of practice, but also from membership of what might be termed ‘communities of clinical or professional practice’. It is not uncommon for undergraduate medical education lecturers to be asked to do only a very small amount of university teaching during the academic year, invariably slotted in around their wider clinical or other professional commitments. Thus, their identities as university lecturers are often partial, subsumed by more profound identities as clinicians or surgeons. At the same time, their capacity to work as university lecturers is entirely reliant on their ongoing membership of clinical/professional communities of practice.

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This is very much the case for the teaching staff at Main and Satellite, some of whom only deliver one or two lectures during the course of the year, scheduled around their wider duties across a constellation of communities of practice that encompasses the hospitals, clinics and surgeries where the academics work, and where the students will, after their first two years of study, begin their clerkships.

Reification and participation The campuses at both Main and Satellite are rich in reifications that capture different aspects of the practice of the medical education community at the university, as well as reflecting the wider constellation of medical and clinical communities of practice that constitute the students’ destinations. Some of these reifications are central to the pedagogical work of the community. An example of a reification designed to inform the practice of the teaching staff (but that has a clear consequent effect on the practice of the students) is the Tutor Handbook for Case-Based Learning, written for the lecturers as a guide to good workshop and classroom practice. One of the reifications designed primarily for the students (but that will in turn have an effect on the practice of the teaching and clinical staff ) is the Electives Manual for Students, which provides outlines and instructions for students when choosing the elective components for their first two years of study  – typically including options such as dentistry, laboratory medicine, health law or bioethics, assessed through one of a number of project options, again negotiated by the student, which might include a clinical study, a case report or a research poster. The overlaps in practice generated by these reifications, and the processes that they reify, are echoed in the material overlaps in the artefacts themselves, both of which contain many common elements such as copies of the feedback templates used by teaching staff, the evaluation forms used by students, and the aims and objectives of the curriculum. Through negotiating their choices of electives, students are therefore able to exercise a degree of choice in how they participate not only in the pedagogic community through the creation of their own reifications as a consequence of participating in the assessment process, but also, eventually, in their professional and clinical communities. Running in the background are a multitude of other texts that reify different aspects of participation, ranging from the serious (course books such as A Primer on Musculoskeletal Examination) to the light-hearted (a homemade poster showing an image of Hippocrates, captioned ‘First Do No harm – Wash Your Hands’). Timetables are pinned to noticeboards in the common rooms

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as well as in the lecture halls, alongside laminated copies of the university’s Mission, Vision and Values statement. Desk space is taken up with computers and stationery (university-branded pens and pencils). Well-stocked bookshelves are commonplace. Other traces of the practice of the community are scattered around: assessment guides, feedback templates and case study materials. At the same time, other texts exist only virtually, as PDFs or as web pages: the Faculty of Medicine Professionalism Policy; copies of PowerPoint presentations (‘Decision Making with Patients with Developmental Disabilities’); and the university’s Strategic and Tactical Plan. Artefacts such as these, which reify more complex and wider-ranging policies, actions, attitudes and behaviours, impact on the daily practice of the teachers, the students, and the AV staff in more or less direct ways, but their effects are nonetheless always able to be traced, as are the networks across which they are linked together. From any single point of entry (Latour, 2005), we can map different aspects of the learning architecture. Take the example of the clickers that are used in lectures, to provide lecturers with opportunities to quiz the students, and for the students at both sites to take part on an equal basis: the lecturer poses a question, written on a PowerPoint slide, and the students use their clickers to select which of four given statements provides the most appropriate response. From a small aspect of student participation such as this, afforded through a particular assemblage of reifications (clickers, students, PowerPoint slides, cameras, microphones, AV staff, lecturers, buildings, textbooks), we can not only map the work of the DME curriculum across both campuses, but also trace a variety of activities that cut across other, different communities of practice. The content of the lecture rests in part on the wider knowledge and experience of the lecturer, who embodies as well as discursively represents aspects of practice from elsewhere – from other communities of professional and clinical practice. The lecture also rests on other reifications – book chapters or journal papers perhaps – that students have already read (or will have to in the future), all elements of which will in turn be folded into new texts that are created by the students for their assessments. Or we can travel in a different direction, and consider why the PowerPoint slide on which the lecturer has posed their question, is formatted in the particular way that it is. Lecturers at both Main and Satellite, irrespective of how many lectures they give during the course of the academic year, are all required to submit their presentations to the AV staff two weeks before the date of the lecture, so that the latter can be sure that the presentation and any embedded materials are completely compatible with all the ICTs at both sites. This is a

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non-negotiable element of the curriculum, reified in institutional policy and quality processes (MacLeod et  al., 2017; Tummons et  al., 2017), and that in turn is one small element of a wider network of policies, procedures, artefacts and actors that are all enrolled within the curriculum more broadly, and within the work of establishing and maintaining comparability of provision more specifically as mandated by the accrediting organizations, and that in turn will be reported to both organizations as part of the university’s quality process, in a document (‘Accreditation Briefing Book’) that will report on the design of the curriculum as a whole, in reference to the relevant accreditation standards. Here again can be discerned a hierarchy of textual artefacts, one relying on the next in each moment of reification, and the use of which enfolds different members of the community in different forms of participation, sometimes within the community of pedagogic practice, sometimes across a constellation of communities that includes administrative and governmental as well as medical and professional aspects.

Designed and emergent A consideration of the delicate balance between the design of a learning architecture and the kinds of practices that might emerge within the community of practice is of particular significance when exploring medical education, due to the nature of the profession that the community is preparing students to enter. In the light of those arguments that posit learning as always being at only a threshold level at the point of entry to the profession in question, therefore both assuming and necessitating ongoing professional learning when in service (Eraut, 1994), the scale or scope of the threshold level of performance required on the part of the students who are on an outward-bound trajectory away from the DME community of pedagogic practice is of considerable, as well as selfevident, importance. Simply put, the mistakes that might be made by people leaving the Holgate teacher-training community of pedagogic practice are almost certainly of less significance to society than those that might be made by people leaving this DME community. Consequently, we can perceive the power relations that inform the learning architecture at work at Main and Satellite as being more strongly framed, with more serious levers in terms of inspection and sanction, than those at work in Holgate. The DME learning architecture is therefore, by necessity, more strongly designed and with less scope for emergent practice than is the case at Holgate. Nonetheless, opportunities for emergent

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practice can still be found, and some aspects of what is learned within the DME community remain emergent. Not all of what people learn – as a consequence of their participation – needs to be aligned to the practice of the community, of course; so long as learning is sufficiently aligned to the joint enterprise of the DME curriculum, the community of practice can be sustained. Drawing on this more generous understanding allows for incidental and unintended episodes of learning to be made sense of, not least as necessary corollaries of participation. Thus, as well as conceptualizing the learning of the medical students through exploring the ways in which they take part in question-and-answer sessions as learning that is aligned to the joint enterprise of the community, we can conceptualize the ‘off-task’ behaviour of the students in terms of learning as well. To illustrate: question-and-answer sessions within a typical plenary lecture (that is, when the lecturer is physically present at Main and is being broadcast to Satellite) are mediated by the lecture room technology in particular ways. When a student (at either site) wants to ask a question, she presses the button at her desk and the lecturer receives a notification that a question is waiting, together with an indication as to whether the question is local or remote. When it is time for her question, her microphone becomes live and a camera focuses on her (all coordinated by the AV staff from their control booth). Asking a question or requesting a clarification is an example of participation that is emergent: the nature of the questions asked cannot be predicted, nor will they be the same year-on-year. But so is the way in which the students learn to manipulate the affordances of the ICT-mediated environment: ducking out of the way if they do not want to be shown on screen; reminding the lecturer that having questions or comments informally called out means that the students at Satellite cannot hear. These kinds of practice constitute elements of mutual engagement within the community of practice, as do taking notes, asking questions or writing up clinical diaries. The performative identity that the students take up during their time within the community is not defined solely in terms of the DME curriculum that shapes their choices of electives, of clerkship or of assessment, but in terms of being a student, which includes learning how to use library and laboratory resources as well as how to use the clickers or the buttons in the lecture room. Nor is learning restricted to the students: any participant in the community of pedagogic practice is by definition also learning, as an epistemological consequence of their participation. For the lecturers, irrespective of how much actual teaching they do, participation involves more than drawing on their clinical and professional knowledge, expertise and experience in constructing a lecture or

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assessing a research poster. It also involves learning how to access, complete and then submit the end-unit assessment forms, how to convene the online discussion forums or when to submit PowerPoint presentations for formatting by the AV staff. And for the lecturers as well as the students, the affordances as well as limitations of the technology-rich lecture rooms need to be learned, sometimes through a formal induction led by a member of the AV team, sometimes through trial and error and sometimes through being told by one of the students if something is going wrong. It is not uncommon for lecturers to move around the room while speaking (indeed, many academic practice courses suggest that staying fixed behind a lectern does not constitute ‘good academic practice’), but such movement poses particular problems for a lecture that is being relayed to a distant location. For the lecturers at Main, using physical movement to illustrate a point is troublesome because the camera might not pick up the gesture. Alongside learning how to run question-and-answer sessions with the button system or how to complete evaluation forms, there is a lot for the lecturers to learn about being lecturers as an element of their participation within the community of pedagogic practice. The balance between the designed and the emergent that is instantiated within the DME community favours the designed. The nature of the community’s joint enterprise is such that if the design were too loosely framed, then the coherence of the community would collapse: a medical education curriculum does not afford significant scope for negotiating understanding or for generous interpretation. But instances of the emergent are still present. Indeed, the emergent is always present; it is simply the case that it has to be looked for. In this community, the emergent can be seen in the spaces occupied by members – students and staff  – as they learn how to take on their roles within the community, negotiating the processes, ICT systems, rooms and texts that have been designed. And this process of negotiation involves, as it always does, opportunities for improvised practice, unanticipated routines or off-task behaviours to emerge.

Local and global All the work done at Main and Satellite is nested within a wider landscape of practice, a landscape that encompasses not only the clinical and the professional (as it relates to medicine), but also the wider university sector, the politics and ethics of healthcare, and the concerns and perspectives of all of those who might

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be enrolled within one or more communities within the landscape, such as parents, service users, clinicians and instructors. The global landscape of clinical practice is brought into the local context of the Main/Satellite DME community across networks of texts and objects as well as of people who bring traces of practice from other communities of practice with them, acting as brokers between the clinics or surgeries where they do most of their work, and the university lecture rooms where they talk with the students, not only as participants within the pedagogic community, but also as representatives of the wider landscape, drawing on rich networks of experience, practice and knowledge that serve as authentic structuring resources for learning. The movement to and fro of people matches the flow of virtual as well as physical resources across a constellation of communities that pertain to medical practice as well as medical education. However, any consideration of the local and the global within this DME community is rendered troublesome as soon as we take the time to consider the impact of the distance between Main and Satellite – a distance that is constructed not only geographically, but also discursively (‘distance’ is unavoidable in a university curriculum that is being offered at two sites) and institutionally (the two campuses are each situated within different provinces in Canada). Notwithstanding the significant resources that have been spent in establishing comparability across the two campuses, the separateness or otherness of one in relation to the other can be seen as emerging in all kinds of ways. Sometimes this might be a curriculum issue: even though time and effort have been invested in creating a body of online resources that students at both Main and Satellite can use equally, the fact that lecturers tend to speak to students at Satellite from the lecture hall at Main rather than the other way around in some way militates against the comparability that the technology is trying to accomplish. The technical facility for both groups of students to use their buttons and microphones to ask questions or to all use clickers when answering a question helps to establish a kind of comparability, in some way bridging the 400-kilometre gap between the two sites. But at the end of a lecture, the students at Main can wait around after class and speak to the lecturer in person, an opportunity for follow-up learning that is markedly absent at Satellite, where the screens go blank once the lecture has come to an end. And the physical distance not only impacts on students’ abilities to ask questions or to network with staff after class, but also reinforces how the lecturers talk to their students. This might be as simple as an exhortation from the lecturer at Main for comment from the students at Satellite (an entirely well-intentioned attempt to include the Satellite students that, ironically, also reminds everyone of the distance being travelled). Or it might be something

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more complicated, such as recognition of the different provincial laws that apply across the two campuses in relation to a difficult topic such as assisted suicide. There is, undoubtedly, a hierarchy in place that establishes and maintains Main Campus as in some ways superior to Satellite, and not simply in terms of the relative sizes of the student cohorts. Most of the lecturers speak from the lecture room at Main, not at Satellite; indeed, when a lecturer is physically present at Satellite and is being watched on screen at Main, it causes something of a buzz. It is at Main Campus that students predominantly have the opportunity to speak to staff outside formal class time, at Main Campus that students get to ask questions face-to-face, and at Main Campus that students get to attend buffet receptions where they can mingle with peers as well as staff. The point that I wish to raise here is not to express surprise that such a hierarchical relationship exists, mindful of the history of the institution as a whole and the relative newness of Satellite. Rather, it is that the technological infrastructure that has been established in order ostensibly to bridge some of the gaps, not only hierarchical but pedagogical as well, between Main and Satellite, in fact perpetuates them, reminding all the participants – the students as well as the lecturers – that there is a physical as well as symbolic distance between the two campuses. Consequently, our consideration of the local and the global has to be understood within the context of this DME provision. The specific learning architecture that has been established across Main and Satellite simultaneously bridges as well as perpetuates the distance between the two. For students at both Main and Satellite, the local is discursively constructed in terms of the institution, described in the official university literature as ‘two campuses, one class’. They are both, in some ways, the local, while the global is reified within the tools, people, artefacts, resources and legislation that all impact on their indigenous practice. But in other ways, each campus is local in relation to the other, which becomes the global. Although they both share a learning architecture, a curriculum infrastructure that has been explicitly designed to be installed and enacted across both sites, each campus constitutes a distinct community of pedagogic practice. There is a significant degree of overlap between these two communities:  frequent boundary crossing facilitated by the ICT network; a sharing of pedagogical resources and strategies; a shared curriculum, reified in handbooks, assessments; and a common response to the requirements for comparability of provision laid out by the accrediting bodies. The students at Main and Satellite listen to the same lectures, complete the same assignments, choose from the same list of electives and eventually receive their qualifications from the same

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university. But they are not all members of the same community of practice. There are distinct communities at Main and Satellite, and each reifies elements of the global – the outside – to the other.

Identification and negotiability An inquiry into the extent to which members of the DME community identify with the practice of the community is complicated by the presence of multiple trajectories for participation within it. For the students, the time spent within the DME community, at whichever campus they attend, is always timebound: after two years, they take up their clerkships, which also lasts for two years, and these are offered at a number of different institutions. By design, the students only spend a fixed period of time within the DME community of practice, and this is a necessary precursor to entry into other communities of practice that pertain to their clerkships. In contrast to the Holgate students discussed in the preceding chapter, however, the DME students attend on a full-time basis, and as such we might imagine that the extent to which they identify with the joint enterprise of the community (to prepare the students for their clerkships through providing them with a thorough and wide-ranging background body of knowledge, experience and attitudes) is more uniform than for members of the Holgate community of practice, some of whom actively resent and even resist adopting the identity of ‘student’. This is not to say that the students at Main or Satellite eschew those aspects of student behaviour that fall outside the strictly academic: like any other group of students, they use their smartphones to send each other messages, or use their laptops to check through their social media accounts during lectures. But the identities formed or adopted at Main are in some ways different to those adopted at Satellite, and this can be understood as being a consequence of the fact that Main and Satellite are two different communities of practice, and therefore it follows that trajectories of identity formation will be different across the two sites, even though everyone follows the same strongly framed curriculum. These differences can be directly observed in the different ways that the students at Main and Satellite work within and respond to the learning architecture and specifically the ICT-mediated lectures. And while there are opportunities for negotiation, the extent to which the students can or cannot do things differently is constrained by the requirements for professional accreditation and the demands of alignment to the same curriculum, as well as the affordances of the wider constellation of communities as they imagine their

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future trajectories in terms of specialism, mode of assessment or other elective elements of the programme. While the nature of the students’ identification is multifaceted, the ways in which the academic staff identify with the DME community are more complicated, rendered so by the nexus of multimembership that characterizes their position. A member of staff who only delivers a small number of lectures each year is vital to the joint enterprise of the community, but only occupies a relatively peripheral trajectory within it. A preceptor who mentors a student during an elective is similarly only peripherally enrolled within the DME community, occupying instead a more central role, and therefore a more profound identity, as a practising physician. For these members of academic staff, therefore, the extent of their engagement within the DME curriculum is a matter for negotiation. Their trajectories are quite distinct from those of full-time members of faculty, some of whom are employed as educators and for whom identity is constructed in terms of pedagogic work. And these trajectories in turn are different from those followed by medical researchers for whom multimembership is constructed in terms of membership of communities of research practice as well as of pedagogic practice. While many of the academic staff follow only peripheral or relatively shortterm trajectories within the DME community, the AV staff occupy more central positions, constituting an always-present aspect of the learning architecture of the DME curriculum. Their importance in maintaining the ICT infrastructure on which the DME curriculum rests is self-evident. What is more noteworthy is the extent to which they identify aspects of their participation in terms of pedagogy. From the mediating or gatekeeping roles that they play in facilitating the teaching work done by lecturers (whether helping them to use the ICT infrastructure or reformatting their PowerPoint files) to the ways in which they deploy the camera and microphone systems to facilitate student question-andanswer sessions, the work done by the AV staff within the DME community of practice is unambiguously part of the community’s repertoire, and the engagement of the AV staff is as necessary to the practice of the community as that of the lecturers and the students. And because identity is constituted, in part, through practice, it is perhaps unsurprising to learn that the AV staff construct their own understanding of their identities in terms of pedagogical work as well as technical work. This is not a straightforward process, however; rather, it involves processes of negotiation with academic staff, reflecting more traditional hierarchies within universities. Academic staff frequently commend the ICT infrastructure but rarely the AV staff, whose practice is invariably quite literally

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out of sight (they work in a control booth that is separate from the lecture halls, although at the lectern there is an intercom switch should the lecturer need to ask for help). For the AV staff, the extent to which they should or should not have a role in shaping pedagogy within the curriculum is a matter for concern, whether relating to the rules concerning early submission of PowerPoints, or to how the lecture rooms should be physically organized. Through these negotiations, the extent to which the identities of different members of the community of practice are mutually constituted becomes apparent. The paradigmatic identities of ‘students’ and ‘lecturers’ are more firmly established, drawing as they do on wider histories of university education, on cultural models and tropes. For the AV staff, negotiation of identity is contingent on the more immediate history of the community of practice that, by virtue of having emerged form a learning architecture that has only recently been established, is itself relatively new and contains some relatively novel elements as a consequence of the requirements of the DEM curriculum. The AV staff, unlike the students and the lecturers, do not have a rich cross-community history of participation and identification to draw on when negotiating their identities.

A community of practice for medical education At each of the campuses, Main and Satellite, a community of practice for medical education has emerged, shaped by a learning architecture that is shared between the two and that was explicitly designed to not only encompass both sites, but also bind both sites together, to establish a shared programme of study. In many ways, these communities of practice, even though they are new – because they have emerged from a learning architecture that has only recently been constructed – nonetheless draw on the histories, cultures, practices and repertoires of many other longer-standing communities. Some of these have been sited within the constellation of communities that make up the university as a whole, while others have been, or still are, sited within constellations of communities of clinical or professional practice. Through the boundary crossings, acts of brokerage and processes of sharing that are characteristic of such constellations, the communities of medical education practice at Main and Satellite are able to plug into wider histories and geographies of practice, teeming with networks of people, discourses, tools, routines and ways of knowing that help to shape the local communities at both campuses while simultaneously accommodating, and being accommodated by, indigenous practices. These indigenous practices can

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be seen as being derived from the specificities and localities of the learning architecture that has been designed specifically to provide a curriculum that will be delivered only at these two campuses, mediated by a bespoke ICT infrastructure. But this DME curriculum, while being situated within a rather specific social and cultural as well as institutional context, has not been constructed solely in response to local concerns. The dominant discourse of comparability of provision established by the accrediting organizations provides the political impetus for the DME curriculum, as it has been accomplished across the two sites. The learning architecture for the DME curriculum has been built in response to dominant discourses of comparability of provision in addition to dominant discourses of quality of provision, as reified within the standards of the two accrediting organizations, while also drawing on wider histories and practices of similar iterations of medical education provision, which in turn draw on the world of work (that is, of the medical profession, of hospitals, laboratories, family surgeries and so forth) that the course is seeking to prepare students for. The two communities of practice that the learning architecture has provoked into being, one at Main and the other at Satellite, overlap considerably, and draw on a shared repertoire that is largely common, although differently used and experienced, across both sites. They both draw on many of the same reifications, and they both offer many similar opportunities for participation and negotiation. They share many aspects of the same instructional discourses, and they both engage in brokerage with similar other communities. What is of interest in this DME curriculum is the extent to which the practices of the two communities at Main and Satellite need to be kept in alignment with each other, and the network of things as well as people that has been established by the learning architecture in order to accomplish this alignment. And yet, notwithstanding the sophistication of the ICT infrastructure, the corpus of curriculum texts and handbooks, the external political drivers and the discourses of comparability of provision, the two communities of practice at Main and Satellite are distinct, and as a consequence of this, what is practiced at both – and, by extension, what is learned at both – will always be different. The central issue here, therefore, is not the whether or not the provision at Main is different to that at Satellite, but whether the differences are such that the joint enterprise of accomplishing the DME curriculum breaks down. The communities of medical education practice that have emerged at Main and Satellite share a learning architecture, sustained by tools, routines and people. This learning architecture, linking Main with Satellite, is complex, expensive and in some ways overwhelming; it is also successful, engaging and in some ways

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emancipatory. It rests on a custom-built length of fibre-optic cable, 400 kilometres in length (including back-up systems), on AV systems that are more commonly found in the entertainment industry in order to provide audio and video of high quality, on skilled AV technicians who have worked in the entertainment industry as well as in universities, on skilled and committed clinicians who are willing to adapt their part-time teaching practices to the requirements of the technology, and on students who are willing to shift their understanding of what it means to be a student and who come to work alongside and talk with peers who are at a considerable distance, but who  – thanks to the aforementioned technology – sound and look as if they might simply be in the room next door. Even the furniture that is used in the video-enabled rooms across the two sites is the same, so as to evoke a sense of unity across the two sites. Notwithstanding the shared people, tools, artefacts and room fittings, however, the DME curriculum does not provide for an identical experience between Main and Satellite, although it provides for a comparable one. But it is a comparability that rests on a complex assemblage of not just technology, but people and practices as well, an assemblage that needs to be carefully accounted for if any attempt to evaluate this provision is to be made. The joint enterprise of the two communities can be seen in the enactment of the DME curriculum, in the broader goal of preparing the students for careers as clinicians. The shared repertoire of the communities rests in the assemblage of tools and of people, as well as in the shared ways of talking and working that are enacted across the two sites, shared through the ICT infrastructure. And access to this shared repertoire in turn affords the mutual engagement that any community of practice needs if the practice is to be sustained.

Some interim conclusions The medical education provision at Main and Satellite can be characterized as two distinct communities of practice, strongly framed around an assemblage of reified artefacts and processes and actions by people, which have been gathered together as a learning architecture. This learning architecture is made up of physical spaces, discourses, artefacts, texts and people, many elements of which are shared or brokered across the two sites through networks of practice, activity, speech and writing: voices, movement, paperwork, meetings and messages all come together across this network to make the two communities of practice happen. The students and staff at each of the sites are enrolled within the same

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DME curriculum, but they are not all members of the same community of practice; the distinctive characteristics, requirements and affordances of each campus serve to mediate the ways in which the learning architecture is employed as well as deployed at each site, engendering closely overlapping but nonetheless distinct communities of practice at each. The practices of the students and the staff at each campus are different in more or less profound ways: the experience of a videoconference lecture across the two campuses quite clearly leads to a qualitatively different experience of practice for the students at the two sites, but this is not a difference in practice that in any way threatens the overall coherence of the DME curriculum. Being a student at Satellite feels different to being a student at Main – because it is. But the design for learning that is enveloped within the learning architecture that encompasses both sites is sufficiently robust to allow for two different communities of practice, each with their own idiosyncrasies, habits and routines, to develop. They are not in any way identical communities of practice: no communities of practice are. But they are similar enough to allow for their practices to be understood as being sufficient, authentic and robust.

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Two Conclusions

How do things stand with communities of practice theories? There are two particular critiques in relation to communities of practice that I would like to finish with, neatly summed up by Tight (2015): first, diversity in the uses to which the theory has been put (which I have described elsewhere as ‘conceptual slippage’ (Tummons, 2014a: 121)); and second, a managerialist shift in use of the theory (outlined in detail by Barton and Tusting (2005), and as evidenced in Wenger (2000) and Wenger et al. (2002)). In a way, Tight suggests that these might not really be all that troublesome:  the diversity of use indicates that the theory is adaptable and widely applicable and this could be an advantage – unless, that is, the real problem is not diversity in communities of practice theory (described by Ryan (2015) in terms of ‘versions’ of communities of practice) but fuzziness. Similarly, the managerialist shift in tone between Wenger’s earlier and later works is again perhaps not unexpected, and certainly need not imply an intellectual compromise. But it does in turn contribute to the diversity/fuzziness/slippage that I (and others) have identified. These issues may also be a contributing factor in relation to the poor application of the theory that I have outlined above. Nor is ‘communities of practice’ the only such victim: ‘legitimate peripheral participation’ (Lang and Canning, 2010), ‘habitus’ (Reay, 2004) and ‘grounded theory’ (Thomas and James, 2006) are examples of three other frameworks that are similarly perfunctorily or glibly used. Over the course of this book, I have tried to get across two key points. First, I think that some degree of pluralism in how we might use communities of practice theory is not necessarily a bad thing, so long as we are mindful of the necessity of providing a robust and scholarly justification for our approach. I think that if someone wants to put out there a communities of practice framework augmented by Bourdieusian sociology, then that is a good thing, so long as they have read a lot of Pierre Bourdieu, Lave and Wenger, Wenger, and other things as well. Second, if someone wants to use empirical research to push at an aspect of

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Wenger’s approach, then that is fine too so long as the warrant that they attach to their empirical findings is justified. I think that the field of HE research is sufficiently broad, and generous, to allow communities of practice to be used as both a heuristic and an educational model, so long as a theoretically and empirically robust case is made for the approach that is taken. At the start of this book, I proposed that there were two strands to the argument I  have presented. The first related to the need for a more coherent and critical use of Wenger’s communities of practice theory, in order to answer those critiques of education research that position theory use as inconsistent, tautological or lacking cumulative application. The second related to the benefits that a communities of practice perspective necessarily drawing on learning architecture would offer to current discourses around learning, teaching and assessment in HE, which continue to be dominated by individual cognition models of learning and quality assurance discourses that assume that learning is predictable, auditable and prone to ‘scientific’ evaluation. I now offer conclusions relating to each of these in turn.

First conclusion: We need to talk about learning A lot of journal articles and books rest on a very narrow reading and understanding of Wenger’s (1998) communities of practice framework. The term ‘community of practice’ is used indiscriminately, often with little recourse to any detailed or critical exposition of the theory, as evidenced by the examples of communities of practice research that were discussed throughout this book. Much of this literature fails to take account of the fact that communities of practice theory is a theory of learning where learning is understood as being a social practice. As such, any claims within such literature to have anything serious to say about learning, teaching and assessment are highly problematic. The term ‘community of practice’ is used indiscriminately by researchers who then do not go on to define or describe where these communities are, what their practices are, how their repertoires are constituted and so on. And while other examples drawn from extant literature makes better use of Wenger’s work, this is also, often, partial. Although other accounts have addressed formal educational contexts that would assume some kind of pedagogic discourse to be present, such accounts have not satisfactorily theorized the position of such a discourse of instruction within communities of practice (Harris and Shelswell, 2005; James, 2007; Malcolm and Zukas, 2007; McArdle and Ackland, 2007).

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The first point that I wish to make here is to foreground the necessity of using Wenger’s communities of practice theory in a more coherent manner. I am not arguing that specific components from Wenger’s work should not be drawn on in isolation in order to explore or unpack particular issues of themes. Wenger’s concept of the double edge of reification provides an excellent example of a discrete component of his work that has wider applicability across other theoretical perspectives that share the same assumptions about learning that communities of practice theory occupies (1998: 62ff.). In its exposition of the inability of artefacts to contain a single fixed meaning but instead to be prone to multiple interpretations mediated by the biography and experience of the user, it is in clear alignment to a number of other theoretical perspectives. Social practice accounts of literacy also stress the different meanings that people bring to the texts that they use in literacy events, in which the meanings taken from texts are mediated by the social practices that enfold them (Barton, 2001; Lillis, 2001). This in turn is closely aligned to the ways in which actor-network theory posits the use of texts as actors that can carry meaning and intent in a more or less physically durable form (Law, 1994), where reading a text is understood as a conversation in which the reader plays two parts, first activating the text by reading it and then responding to it or acting on it, although probably not quite in the way intended by the author. Any one of these three concepts is perfectly capable of being compared or contrasted with another as part of a rigorous theoretical debate about the meanings ascribed to a text by the person who is reading it. However, the broader concept of the community of practice is not so straightforwardly discrete. The three concepts referred to in the previous paragraph all contain what might be termed a straightforward and easily understood central thesis: that different people will take different meanings, for different reasons, from the same text. Our everyday experiences of trips to the cinema or joining book clubs lead to the same phenomenon: that a few of us might watch the same film or read the same book, and take different meanings from them. But if we are going to describe something as a community of practice, then we cannot simply stop there. We need to describe the mutual engagement of the community, we need to describe the joint enterprise of the community and we need to unpack the shared repertoire of the community. Only by doing all this are we able to state satisfactorily what the practice of the community actually is, and therefore what kinds of things its members are learning. All these are theoretical necessities, not optional extras. In essence, therefore, when we talk or write about communities of practice, we are talking about learning. And, therefore, when we talk or write about communities of practice, we need to be prepared to talk about all these other elements as well.

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Second conclusion: Communities of practice, pedagogy and learning architecture Having established that communities of practice theory both requires and deserves comprehensive as well as critical treatment, the use of learning architecture allows us to solve the problem of how to position pedagogy as a discourse of instruction within a community of practice. Once teaching is established as part of the architecture, the presence within a community of practice of pedagogy no longer contradicts the broader point that learning is improvised and emergent. Or, to put it another way, it is only through using Wenger’s learning architecture framework that it becomes possible for us to use communities of practice theory to describe formal educational provision such as HE. However, the argument that I have presented here is not solely concerned with establishing robust theoretical foundations for educational research. Communities of practice theory, as a subset of the sociocultural turn that is increasingly foregrounded in pedagogic research in HE, also provides us with ways of investigating a number of issues of wider pedagogical and political importance. The specific issues that I wish to raise here are concerned with audit, inspection and the dominant discourses of quality assurance that shape so many aspects of professional practice in HE (Dill, 1999; Shore and Wright, 2000). The expansion of HE during the last three decades has been characterized by the growth of performativity cultures that have interposed themselves into many aspects of academics’ lives:  audit and inspection; documentism; the steady increase in the bureaucratic and management duties of the academic; and planning and documenting regimes for both teaching (specifically, the growth of outcomes-based models of teaching in HE based on behaviourist theories of learning (Illeris, 2007)) and research. Technologies such as these – and it is the dominant outcomes-based approach to learning (and by extension, to teaching and assessment as well) that are of greatest importance and relevance here – rest on notions of managerial accountability that in turn rely on the idea that what people learn, and the way that other people teach it, can be straightforwardly measured and evaluated. But there is a fundamental problem with this account. Communities of practice theory tells us that learning is emergent, fluid, and difficult to predict or to control. Learning architectures theory allows us to understand that the structures created within formal educational institutions will undoubtedly support or provoke or sustain learning, but that what kind of learning it will be, when

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exactly it will happen or exactly which elements of the architecture will be most efficacious in creating a context for learning, are more problematic and difficult to quantify. Put simply, even with the most rigorous and comprehensive architectures – planning, curriculum, resources, staffing, procedures, meetings and so forth – it is at a fundamental level impossible to state exactly what will be learned, how it will be learned and when. So what are the implications of this for learning and teaching in HE? I am not arguing for the complete dismantling of the management and bureaucratic structures that envelop pedagogic practices within UK HE. However, I am arguing that their purview needs to be revised. Helping to ensure that appropriate architectures are established and sustained is a complex task, and it needs to be managed carefully and systematically within and across institutions. The presence of appropriate teaching accommodation, sufficient library and online resources, and appropriately expert and qualified teaching staff are all facets of a learning architecture that can and must be accounted for. But the learning that happens within, around and through these architectures is nebulous, slippery at best. Learning, and its relationship to the activity that we refer to as teaching, cannot be measured and audited in the same way as can the provision of up-todate equipment, legible and understandable course documentation, or sufficient copies of core books. This argument has consequences for audit and quality assurance systems that are both simple and profound. They are simple because I am not suggesting that the actual processes currently to be found in the UK HE sector need to be altered or revised in terms of the actual activities that are carried out (such as inspection, programme appraisal, external examination and the like). They are profound because I am suggesting that the focus of such quality assurance processes needs to be altered, to concentrate on those things that can be audited or measured, such as the tangible aspects of a learning architecture, and away from those intangible things, such as learning, that cannot be so audited due to their richness, their unpredictability and their complexity.

Coda: A Conceptual Toolkit for Thinking about Learning, Assessment and Teaching in Higher Education

Communities of practice are perhaps not quite as cutting-edge as they might once have been, and it is certainly the case that other theoretical frameworks are, at the time of writing, being more widely applied to studies of higher education practice. Nonetheless, my standpoint is that communities of practice theory continues to have something useful to say about how we work in universities, how we assess our students, and how we come together and cohere as groups of researchers and/or teachers. But for this to be the case, a small number of necessary conditions need to be considered, some pertaining specifically to communities of practice theory, some more generally applicable to theory-use in higher education research. I propose four such conditions and outline them briefly here. Any account of a community of practice in higher education that speaks, in a reflexive rather than reductively prescriptive manner, to these four conditions can – I suggest – be taken seriously. The four necessary conditions for accounts of communities of practice in higher education are: 1. 2. 3. 4.

A sufficient conceptual grasp. An appropriate empirical foundation. A consideration of what is being learned. An aligned assumptive framework.

The first condition is that communities of practice theory require a sufficient conceptual grasp (although the same must be said for any other theoretical framework to be applied to a research problem). By this, I mean to stress the necessity of demonstrating a critical and robust understanding of the theory. I am not advocating theoretical orthodoxy – quite the opposite in fact, as the

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argument that I have (I hope) presented in this book clearly demonstrates – but I am advocating (requiring might be a better word) depth of scholarship, and a use of communities of practice theory that rests on a robust and lively engagement with the literature. This need not require the adoption of every tenet of the ideas of Lave and Wenger (1991) and Wenger (1998), but simply to describe a group of students and staff as being members of a community of practice without a consideration of (at least some of) the paradigmatic elements of identity, boundary, trajectory or participation (to name just four) would seem to me to be inadequate, an example of theory talk (Thomas, 2007) that risks reducing the notion of ‘community of practice’ to an empty signifier, used so loosely that almost anything might be seen as being a community of practice, and thereby diminishing the theoretical insights that the framework, if critically applied, might afford the writer. Relatedly, the second condition is that an appropriate empirical foundation is employed (also applicable to other theoretical approaches). By this, I mean to stress the ethnographic and anthropological foundations of communities of practice theory, which are often lost sight of in accounts of learning and teaching in higher education. I don’t think that it is necessary – let alone desirable or even appropriate – for everyone to conduct months of extensive ethnographic fieldwork before writing about communities of practice in higher education, but some degree of thick description is needed, not least if the community of practice is going to be described in such a way that we can be sure that what is being described is a community of practice, and not a differently-constituted agglomeration of social, cultural and physical entities that would be better explored through recourse to a different theoretical framework. Thus, we need to consider the three key constituent elements of any community of practice (Wenger, 1998): mutual engagement, joint enterprise, and shared repertoire. If time and space is not spent accounting for all three of these then, I suggest, we can legitimately question the robustness of the account that we are reading, as well as the appropriateness of the framework for the inquiry in question. These descriptions need not derive from our own empirical research: thoughtful and reflective accounts of practice supported by recourse to a sufficient body of literature would also be entirely satisfactory. But a rich sense of place, of people, and of practice will always be needed. The third condition serves to remind us of the formation of communities of practice theory within the work of Lave and Wenger (1991), in turn situated within a richer, post-Vygotskian social turn, and requires a consideration of what is being learned. A community of practice, at the most basic level, is

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a social configuration of people, tools, artefacts, and so forth, all concerned with a particular form or body of practice, which in turn necessarily involves learning through legitimate peripheral participation (LPP) as proposed by Lave and Wenger and derived from the informal and apprenticeship models of learning that Jean Lave in particular has extensively written about (Lave 1988, 1996, 2011). Learning is always, necessarily, linked to practice within the community. As well as mediating practice, it mediates how people talk within the community, the nature and direction of their trajectories through the community, the making and use of the tools of the community, and so forth. It may well be the case that our inquiry is not focused on learning per se; rather, we may choose to focus on the tools and artefacts of the community, on the ways in which the boundaries of the community are formed, crossed over, and reinforced, or on the differing ways in which newcomers and old-timers employ the discourses of the community. But all of these community elements in some way pertain to learning, and a sense of what is being learned and why will need to be considered, mindful of the affordances of the LPP model for a generous understanding of learning as social practice. Finally, it is important to locate our use of communities of practice theory within an aligned assumptive framework. The argument that I have put forward in this book is not an appeal for essentialism, but nor is it an invitation to ad-hoc or supposedly eclectic approaches. Rather, the use of other frameworks (I have focused on actor-network theory, expansive learning within activity systems, literacy studies and threshold concepts) is to be commended, not least in order to resolve those difficulties or deficiencies that might emerge through a critical use of communities of practice theory (the pedagogy problem discussed in Chapter 3 serves as a pertinent example). The creative use of theory need not preclude testing the elasticity of that theory or augmenting it through importing expressions, concepts or vocabulary from elsewhere. But any and all such additional ingredients need to share both the epistemological and the ontological standpoints of communities of practice. An account of a community of practice might seek to explore the extent to which expansive learning, rather than legitimate peripheral participation, might allow the author to pursue an empirically and/or theoretically robust inquiry. Perhaps, in order to explicate power relations within a community, another author might draw on Foucauldian ideas of governance of the self alongside Wenger’s ideas of identity (in a manner akin to Fox, 2000). But all such augmentations need to be reasoned and explained, not simply slotted alongside each other. A rationale, based on a sympathetic epistemology and/or ontology, always needs to be provided.

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With these four conditions in place, we arrive at the final problematic that I want to consider within this book (there are plenty of others, but they will have to wait). Having established what a robust and trustworthy account of a community of practice (and, by extension, a constellation of communities) in higher education might look like, we can now address the related problem of how communities of practice actually come to be in the first place. We might choose to do this through an exploration of the history of the community (Wenger, 1998), but a more common approach in both current as well as recent literature is to discuss how a community of practice, or a constellation of communities, might be established, not least as it is sometimes assumed – entirely erroneously – that a community of practice will serve straightforwardly to remedy some perceived deficiencies with extant conditions of learning, teaching, or assessment. If a community of practice is ‘introduced’ or ‘constructed’, then an older, tacitly less effective or harmonious figuration will be pushed aside. However, mechanistic approaches such as these (which invariably draw either on a superficial reading of Wenger’s (1998) work or on his later, more ‘managerial’ approach (Wenger et al., 2002)) fail to acknowledge the emergent nature of learning and of practice that characterizes the social turn more widely as well as communities of practice more specifically. It is simply not possible to design and build a community of practice in order to affect a particular kind of change in practice in comparison to what has gone on before, say, or in order to introduce and evaluate an entirely new practice. Practice is always emergent, situated and contingent: it is not predicable, auditable or measurable. We cannot establish and then evaluate a community of practice, but we can establish and then evaluate a learning architecture (although any evaluation of such an architecture cannot rely on simple measures reified within checklists or questionnaires and must instead rest on a more reflective process – I shall return to this below). It is, therefore, in the model of the learning architecture that we find a toolkit that can be used in the design and introduction of revised or innovative new pedagogical structures in higher education, a toolkit that consists of four elements (Wenger, 1998). The four elements of a learning architecture are: 1. 2. 3. 4.

Reification and participation. Designed and emergent. Local and global. Identification and negotiability.

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I have discussed the learning architectures framework in Chapter 6, and in the two chapters that followed I provided accounts of two distinct learning architectures derived from prior ethnographic research into teacher-training and medical education. I do not, therefore, intend to explicate the framework any further here. Instead, I wish to consider how it might be applied. Thus, if a new unit or module is being planned, or a new series of pedagogical activities is being introduced to an existing programme of study, then any descriptive or evaluative account of these as planned can be framed within the four-part learning architectures model provided by Wenger and which remains (inexplicably, to my mind – the learning architectures model and the communities of practice model are co-dependent) relatively under-used by educationalists, researchers, teachers and academic developers in higher education. It is when the learning architecture is activated, when life is breathed into it by the arrival of the people for whom the architecture has been designed and built, that the community of practice will emerge and then begin to grow and change (growth and change being characteristic of all communities). The description of the learning architecture – it might be a new curriculum, a new module or unit, or even a qualification scheme for an entirely new field of study – will need to be rich and detailed, echoing once again the anthropological/ethnographic roots of communities of practice. The evaluation of the architecture will allow our account to move beyond description and consider the following questions, derived from the framework, that speak to the theoretical underpinnings of communities of practice: 1. What resources and opportunities have been designed, imported, built, or planned for, to allow students/teachers to participate in the curriculum? What are the places and spaces available to them? How can students/ teachers actively take part in the curriculum, making meaning within it and making permanent their participation through writing, talking or other forms of making? 2. How has the curriculum been designed, mindful of the fact that different people, once enrolled within the curriculum, will always respond differently to different books or journal papers, to different modes of assessment (as students writing essays, and as teachers marking them), and to different ways of talking and being, anticipating the ways in which the practice of the emergent community might change over time?

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3. What is the nature of the constellation of communities that this learning architecture is being constructed within? How have the relationships between extant communities of practice and the community of practice that is anticipated (but never perfectly predicted) to emerge from this new learning architecture, been considered? How will people and tools, objects and processes, move in and out of this new community? 4. What will it feel like to be a member of this new community? What elements of the learning architecture have been put in place to anticipate the ways in which putative members of the community will display their membership? How will established members of the community respond to new members, and vice versa? Are the habits and practices of the community merely to be followed or can they be negotiated? What are the statuses of, first, communities of practice and, second, learning architectures, as tools for thinking about learning, assessment and teaching in higher education, therefore? In order to answer this question and to provide a final series of indicative guidelines, I suggest that, as researchers and writers in higher education, we start by thinking about the following if we are to generate worthwhile and robust accounts: 1. Communities of practice are everywhere, but always need to be carefully accounted for in terms of practice, learning, membership, boundaries, discourses, artefacts, and so forth. 2. Communities of practice cannot be built or dropped in to a pre-existing cultural setting, nor can their practices be predicted: they are always emergent and mediated. 3. Learning architectures can be designed and installed from scratch, although they may well contain traces of the histories of other, older communities – for example, if the architecture draws on the resources or routines of a pre-existing community. 4. Communities of practice and learning architectures can be explored and explicated through recourse to other theoretical perspectives, so long as the additional perspectives are sufficiently compatible with the overarching communities of practice framework. 5. Introducing change, instituting reform or leading innovation are not synonymous with introducing new communities of practice; rather, these will constitute more-or-less indigenous processes of change within an existing community or constellation.

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6. Communities of practice are everywhere, but focussing on them is worthwhile only if it is necessary to answer the questions established by the inquiry that is being undertaken. 7. Communities of practice are not always beneficial, positive or constructive; they can be destructive, stifling, and harmful. It is self-evidently the case that not every inquiry into teaching, assessment and learning in higher education will require reference to learning architectures and communities of practice (indeed, my current research rests on an entirely different way of thinking about higher education practice), but I do maintain that if people are going to do so, then it needs to be done carefully, reflexively, even painstakingly, with a commitment to the critical use of theory, and an eye for the kinds of rich ethnographic details that first led Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger to articulate what remains a powerful and critical lens for inquiry.

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Index activity system 83–4 and legitimate peripheral participation 88 activity theory critique of 89–90 as critique of communities of practice 87 principles of 84–5 actor-network theory 54–6 defining 55–6 epistemology of 62 versions of 58–9 apprenticeship 9–10, 23, 25, 37–8, 40, 50 artefact 6, 14, 49 access to 68 in activity theory 89 in actor-networks 59–60 communicative ability of 67 mediating 83 and reification 54, 103 transparency of 67 assessment 47 and academic literacies 66, 69 within communities of practice 42–7 criteria 47–8 PISA 58 reliability 50 audit culture 67, 78, 105 authenticity of assessment 49–51 of practice 28, 98 boundaries 12–13, 21, 50 boundary objects 12, 46, 101 brokers 12, 21, 60, 67, 113, 137 community of practice constellations of 13, 28, 60, 100 definition 4–7 examples 4

in medical education 147–9 in research 26–9 in teacher training 123–6 versions of 31–3 curriculum 96, 98, 137 as design 118 in legitimate peripheral participation 10–11 rejection of 36 designed and emergent 98–100, 116–18, 134–6 discourse 80, 100 and communities of practice 15, 19 dominant 24, 66, 78, 82, 105 instructional 36, 93, 106, 147 and lifelong learning 57 managerialist 123 economy of meaning 102–3 ethnography 23, 55, 67, 85, 93, 127 expansive learning 83, 84–5, 91 and epistemic actions 85 further education colleges 110 genre 63 hierarchy of texts 63 history of activity systems 84 of communities of practice 14, 19, 80, 104, 141 of engagement 6 identification and negotiability 102–3, 121–3, 139–41 identification work 103 identity 101–2, 139–40 in academic writing 81 in actor-network theory 55

178 in communities of practice 13, 60–1, 122 performative 135 in threshold concepts 74, 81 joint enterprise 5, 6, 100 knowledge 11, 45, 54 within communities of practice 28, 41, 80 disciplinary 21–3 evaluation of 50 transfer of, 32–3 troublesome, 74–5 learning distance 128 informal 36, 38, 93 transfer of 11 learning architecture definition 94–6 and medical education 129–32 and teacher training 111–14 legitimate peripheral participation 8–10, 37–40 and critique of individualist cognition 42 liminality 76, 78, 91 and affect 81 anthropological roots of 82 as peripheral participation 80 literacy academic 64, 66, 78 artefact 49, 68, 118 dominant 64, 68 essayist 64 vernacular 64, 68 literacy studies 62–4 local and global 100–1, 118–21, 136–9 matters of concern 58, 101 medical education 128–9 and activity theory 86 multimembership 13, 21 nexus of 25, 131, 140 mutual engagement 5, 6 negotiation 102–3, 136

Index organizational learning 90 paradigmatic trajectory 49 participation 9 affordances for 104, 114 authenticity of 10 politics of 15, 41–2 trajectories of 21–2, 83, 99 work 103 pedagogical partners 131 pedagogy 41, 106, 140, 148 within communities of practice 106 pedagogical cost 98 pedagogy problem 11, 22, 36–7 rejection of 10 performativity 105, 148 critique of 26 peripherality power 52, 67 inequalities of 61 professional framework 101, 127 professional learning 86, 113, 121, 134 professional standards 111, 125 professionalism 77–8, 133 quality assurance 50, 63, 105, 148 reification 6, 14 double edge of 46, 68 and participation 96–8, 114, 132–4 politics of 15, 42 research work 9, 26–9, 71, 78, 120 shared repertoire 5, 6 shifts of emphasis 59 structuring resources 96, 99, 101, 109, 123–4 students 18–19, 22 and assessment 47–8 histories of 99, 102 within learning architectures 94–7 meaning-making 66 medical 88, 135 as newcomers 24 as peripheral participants 24, 79 symmetry, principle of 56, 60

Index teaching Excellence Framework 105 theoretical intersection 81 theoretical rigour 25, 71, 91 theory 7–8 use of 27, 45, 54, 145–6 theory work 61, 70 threshold concepts 74–6 and communities of practice 81–3 disorientation within 81 identification of 81–2

university as activity systems 86–7 as a constellation of communities of practice 31, 61, 123, 141 vocational education 39, 50, 110 work, modes of 103 workplace learning 88 zone of proximal development 80

179