Just been re-visiting some of the Communities of Practice literature, which is having something of an impact on ideas about teaching and learning in post-compulsory education. Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger (1991 ), and then Wenger (1998) suggest that ‘formal’ learning, isolated within the institution, separates knowledge from the whole set of processes in which it is normally embedded. Instead they analyse work-based activities (as in an apprenticeship) and argue that this way of learning is not – as it is often portrayed -merely a simple process of acquiring specifics through observation and imitation, to be set against, and inferior to formal instructional learning as verbal abstraction and reflection.
Rather it offers a form of learning through doing which is not just observing a task, but participating at the edges of a whole process – both absorbing and being absorbed by – the culture of practice. In this process understanding and practice are developed through simultaneous interaction. Thus learning becomes visualised as more like a journey through time, moving from the ‘legitimate periphery’ of a subject community to becoming a full ‘member’ of it.
This reminded me of the debate we had both within and outside the confines of the e-revolution book; how should students be ‘conceptualised’? Are they consumers, customers, clients, members or what? At the JISC conference earlier in the year I met David Donald from Glasgow Caledonian, who argued persuasively that students should be thought of as members of the academic community. He writes here in an article entitled Language Matters that:
“….even in a ‘commercialist’ ‘economistic’ narrative the notion of ‘customer’ is unfortunate. From this perspective are the students we graduate consumers, producers or products? If education is investment then students are a ‘producer good’. The customer (businesses and other organisations) has to be the final evaluator of the nature and quality of the goods. They are the demand side. The university or college is the supply side. It has to assure quality and ensure the relevance of the product for the market. The customer does not pay the producer directly — but immediate ‘employability’ is the goal. Relevant content and specific and general skills are the desirable characteristics.
The relationships we seek to induce are longer term and more profound than is captured by the notion of customer. Students are not passive recipients of services but co-creators in an active learning environment. The university is the learning environment and students (in a community with others) are constituent members of the institution.”