| Long lives the project! The necessity of community building as a special task for European projects in the field of livelong learning | | Print | |
| Dr. Gertrud Wolf | 13.11.2006 | Science - Articles | ||||
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The activities of the European commission in the field of education and training are targeted at developing a common European concept of lifelong learning. According to the Lisbon strategies. this means to develop sustainable structures for a long-term cooperation in practice, administration and science of education and training. Therefore, the sense of European projects is not only to bring out new products, new methods or new examples for good practice, but also to create a European community of lifelong learning and the adequate structures of communication. Projects are the cells of this community. Therefore, it becomes an important task, that projects build a community which is able to remain after the projects end. But what is a community? How does it function? What are the policies of participation? In the following I will describe possibilities of community building based on the theory of practice. At the end, I will show the effects of community building on the sustainability of European proje
(Dr. Gertrud Wolf) About the theory of communities of practice Project practice is always situated in a social room. So it’s obvious, that the structures of this social room are necessary for understanding the function of social communication in the project. The simplest structures in the social room are represented by the relationships between people. But not every one has the same relationships to the others at the same time. Probably closer and looser, formal and informal, intimate and distant bindings exist. This also depends on the reasons, why people have relationships with each other. Some relationships are based on a common, central topic – if more than two people are interested in this topic, they build communities. We call them communities of practice. In other words: Communities of practice are built around a topic like a pearl around a grain of sand. These communities are represented by groups of people who share a concern, a set of problems, or a passion about a topic, and who deepen their knowledge and expertise in this area by interacting on an ongoing basis. This means, that a community of practice is a set of relations among people, activities, and their environment, over time and in relation with other tangential and overlapping communities of practice and we all belong to different communities at the same time (Lave/Wenger 1991). But this community is not only a group of friends. An important characteristic is that it has an identity defined by a shared domain of interest. Membership therefore implies a commitment to the domain, and therefore a shared competence that distinguishes members from other people. We have to keep in mind, that practice does not exist in the abstract and communities needs some more ore less well-defined topics. But such communities of practice are everywhere: “We all belong to a number of them – at work, at school, at home, in our hobbies. Some have a name, some don't. We are core members of some and we belong to others more peripherally. You may be a member of a band, or you may just come to rehearsals to hang around with the group. You may lead a group of consultants who specialize in telecommunication strategies, or you may just stay in touch to keep informed about developments in the field. Or you may have just joined a community and are still trying to find your place in it. Whatever form our participation takes, most of us are familiar with the experience of belonging to a community of practice” (Wenger 1998, p. 1). Of course, we can imagine the existence of other types of communities. Thus, to associate practice and community, we have to describe three dimensions of the relation by which practice is the source of coherence of a community: a. mutual engagement b. a joint enterprise c. a shared repertoire. If we said abstract practice does not exist, this means, it exists because people are engaged in actions whose meanings they negotiate with one another. According to this first characteristic of practice as a source of coherence of a community, membership in a community of practice is a matter of mutual engagement. The second characteristic is the negotiation of a joint enterprise, defined by the participants in the very process of pursuing it: “It is not just a stated goal, but creates among participants relations of mutual accountability that become an integral part of the practice” (Wenger 1998, p. 78). The third characteristic is the development of a shared repertoire. For success and sustainability a community of practice needs some mostly informal rules and routines. Over time, the joint pursuit of an enterprise creates some shared habits and usages. Hence the repertoire of a community of practice includes routines, words, tools, and ways of doing things, stories, gestures, symbols, genres, actions or concepts that the community has produced or adopted in the course of its existence, and which have become part of its practice (Wenger 1998, p. 82f.). Also in European projects the partnerships have a common joint enterprise, with the necessity of a mutual engagement of the partners. During the projects run-time the community often develops a special shared repertoire. Therefore European projects are very close to the theory of communities of practice. For the sustainability of projects it is interesting to look at what we can adopt from this theory. Two aspects seem very important for the survival of a project: The first question is how to motivate people to participate in the community and the second question is how to integrate newcomers into the community. According to these questions, we have to reflect how project structures can be organized so that they are open and transparent enough to give access for newcomers or participants who will reinforce their engagement. Participation The important difference between communities of practice and other communities are their social dimensions: Communities of practice base upon the human need for social communication. Hence there is a profound connection between identity and practice: “Developing a practice requires the formation of a community whose members can engage with one another and thus acknowledge each other as participants. As a consequence, practice entails the negotiation of ways of being a person in that context” (Wenger 1998, p. 149). This means our options to become a member of a community of practice have a significant impact on the development of our identity. According to this, our motivation to be a respected member of such a community is generally high. The more fully-developed our participation is, the more confident we are: “When we are with a community of practice of which we are a full member, we are in familiar territory. We can handle ourselves competently. We experience competence and we are recognized as competent. We know how to engage with others. We understand why they do what they do because we understand the enterprise to which participants are accountable. Moreover, we share the resources they use to communicate and go about their activities” (Wenger 1999, S. 152). The reason for enabling participation is not only because of social friendliness, but it also has an important function for the management of knowledge through the emergence of implicit knowledge. Polanyi (1966) describes, communications importance for opening room for the emergence of tacit knowledge. During symbolic encoding while speaking knowledge gets lost and it has to be reconstructed by the interpreter. This is more than a creative re-encoding; it’s an independent constructive achievement; furthermore, the emergence of tacit knowledge is the emergence of new knowledge. By sharing knowledge, new knowledge arises, so we can say communities of practice are a social room of learning. Therefore communities of practice are social models for lifelong learning. Communication is a key-topic in the discussions of knowledge management and learning organizations (Wilke, 2004). Particularly in regard to the social structures in European projects, we now understand the necessity of authentic participation. While building a project community, our vision must be focused on a social community of practice and not only a technical network to share information. I suppose that many partnerships in European projects are represented as network organizations not as communities of practice with a social shared knowledge. According to the theory of communities of practice the chance of participating is a direct condition for developing intrinsic motivation. Therefore our project activity needs a high level of transparency, clearness and openness to make access feasible for everybody. Newcomer and old-timers Members of a community of practice are involved in a set of relationships over a period of time. The interactions involved and the ability to undertake larger or more complex activities and projects through cooperation, bind people together and help to facilitate relationship and trust. A structure characteristic of these communities is set by the network of long-time participants and novices. Because communities of practice are composed of different people at the same time: senior members and newcomers. The ways in which newcomers become integrated into a community of practice show the potential of development. The function of ‘old-timers’ is to help newcomers to become full and respected members. By bringing new information and new perspectives into the community newcomers are more than time-killing greenhorns. They are essential for strength, dynamic and flexibility. The term “Legitimate Peripheral Participation” points out that there is no absolute centre in a community of practice. Newcomers should eventually move from peripheral participation to full participation. How well this occurs depends on social dynamics and power structures. In this way communities of practice can be seen as self-organizing systems, with special adaptable structures for an ever changing society. In this system knowledge plays a special role: According to Lave and Wenger the acquisition of knowledge is a social process in which people can participate in community learning at different levels depending on their level of authority or seniority in the group. Central to the notion of a community of practice as a means of acquiring knowledge is the process by which a newcomer moves from peripheral to full participation in the community as they learn from others. Communities of practice cannot exist as fixed, inflexible and closed companionships. They have to be open for new people and new ideas, otherwise they will not survive. The structures of the Grundtvig project “InfoNet Adult Education” show us a typical project network: In the centre there is a leader and some members with high activity, e. g. members of the steering group and the leaders of the working groups. At the very periphery there are members with a very low activity, we call them sleeping beauties, because they can awake and move forward to the centre. But between these to positions there isn’t a desert. There is a field of people with changing activities depending on their tasks; e. g. the quality manager, the valorisation expert, and the correspondents. Outside the periphery there is also no desert, maybe there are some people who would like to join in. At large, we could imagine the InfoNet structures as a very vital Italian plaza, with many interesting positions and more than one entrance. Fostering vitality is an important aspect for the sustainability of European projects. Community building as an aspect of projects sustainability Communities develop around things that matter to people. The fact that they are organizing around some particular area of knowledge and activity gives members a sense of joint enterprise and identity. Therefore a community of practice involves much more than the technical knowledge or skill associated with undertaking some task. For a community of practice to function it needs to generate and appropriate a shared repertoire of ideas, commitments and memories. It also needs to develop various resources such as tools, documents, routines, vocabulary and symbols that in some way carry the accumulated knowledge of the community. The motor for all these is efficient communication between the people. In other words, community building needs the retrieval of communication possibilities first, then the evolution of communication structures and routines based on authentic practice, and in the end the development of a communication culture, characterized by friendliness and openness. The general aims of European projects are to improve the quality and strengthen the European dimension of education and to increase cooperation and network-building between actors in all fields of education. Education and training are crucial to achieving the strategic goal set for Member States at the Lisbon European Council to make the European Union the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy (and society) in the world (EU 2003). The aim of the new European education programme is also to contribute through lifelong learning to the development of the community as an advanced knowledge society, with sustainable economic development, more and better jobs and greater social cohesion: “It aims to foster interaction, cooperation and mobility between education and training systems within the Community, so that they become a world quality reference” (EU 2004). Therefore, promoting networks of education and training institutions at various levels in the context of lifelong learning is one of the key issues in the strategy of the European Commission (EU 2001). If sustainability of personal networks in European projects is an explicit mandate, the development of adequate communication structures becomes a high priority. Communication has to at least have the same priority as project products. This will have an impact on the role of communication for evaluation and valorisation, but communication isn’t only a means to an end. We have seen that communication makes a sustainable impact if it creates a community of practice. Finally, we can say that the forming of a community of practice during its life circle is a valid criterion of the projects success. In the future, financial strategies, drafts for quality management, valorisation plans and evaluation policies have to take into account the necessity of communication and community building in European projects. Bibliography: European Commission (2002): Detailed work programme on the follow-up of the objectives of Education and training systems in Europe. Work programme of the Education Council in cooperation with the Commission (February 2002) Brussels. (http://europa.eu/eur-lex/pri/en/oj/dat/2002/c_142/c_14220020614en00010022.pdf European Commission (2003): Investing efficiently in education and training: an imperative for Europe Commission Communication (January 2003) Brussels (http://europa.eu/eur-lex/en/com/cnc/2002/com2002_0779en01.pdf) European Commission (2004): Proposal for a Decision of the European Parliament and of the Council establishing an integrated action programme in the field of lifelong learning (2007-2013). Brussels (http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/site/en/com/2004/com2004_0474en01.pdf) Lave, J. (20044): Situated Learning in Communities of Practice. In: Resnick, L.B./ Levine, J.M./ Teasley, S.D.: Perspectives on Socially Shared Cognition. Washington, DC Lave, J./Wenger, E. (1991): Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge Lesser, E. L. / J. Storck (2001): Communities of practice and organizational performance. In: IBM Systems Journal, Knowledge Management, Volume 40, Number 4, 2001. (http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/sj/404/lesser.htm). Wenger, E. (1991): Communities of Practice: Where Learning Takes Place. Cambridge University Press Wenger, E. (1998): Communities of Practice: Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity. Cambridge University Press Wenger, E. (1998): Communities of Practice: learning as a social system. In: The Systems Thinker, No. 5, 1998 (http://www.co-i-l.com/coil/knowledge-garden/cop/lss.shtml) Wenger, E. (2004): Communities of practice (http://www.ewenger.com/ewthemes.html) Wenger, E.; McDermott, R.; Snyder, W.M. (2003): Cultivating Communities of Practice. Boston Willke, H. (2004): Einführung in das systemische Wissensmanagement Heidelberg Polanyi, M. (1966): The tacit dimension. New York Author: Dr. Gertrud Wolf University Duisburg-Essen This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it |
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