Communities of Practice

A community of practice is a group of people who share a concern or passion for something they do and learn how to do it better through regular interaction. The term originates with Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger's Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation (1991), which reframed learning not as the acquisition of content by an isolated individual but as a trajectory of deepening participation in the practices of a social group. Wenger (1998) developed the concept into a full social theory of learning, and the construct now anchors a substantial literature on teacher development, workplace learning, and online professional networks.

Origins: situated learning and apprenticeship

Lave and Wenger built the framework from ethnographies of apprenticeship — Yucatec midwives, Vai and Gola tailors, US Navy quartermasters, butchers, and Alcoholics Anonymous members. The pattern across these settings was the same: newcomers learned by doing legitimate, lower-stakes work alongside more experienced practitioners, gradually taking on tasks of greater consequence and visibility. Knowledge was not transmitted from a teacher to a learner; it was distributed across the community, embedded in tools, language, and routines, and acquired through participation in those practices.

Legitimate peripheral participation

The book's central concept, legitimate peripheral participation (LPP), names this trajectory. Legitimate signals that the newcomer's role is genuine rather than rehearsal: the apprentice tailor really cuts cloth, the new teacher really teaches lessons. Peripheral signals that the work is initially low-stakes and limited in scope. Participation signals that learning happens through engagement in the community's practices, not in a separate training compartment. LPP describes both an entry route and a curricular structure: the community organises tasks so that newcomers can do meaningful work without yet bearing full responsibility, and so that their performance is visible to and shaped by old-timers.

Wenger's three defining characteristics

Wenger (1998) refined the construct by identifying three dimensions that distinguish a community of practice from other social formations. Mutual engagement is the regular interaction through which members establish norms and build relationships; without it, there is no community. Joint enterprise is the shared understanding of what binds the group together — a domain of concern that members continually renegotiate. Shared repertoire is the accumulated stock of routines, vocabulary, tools, stories, gestures, and concepts the community has developed and that members draw on to do their work. Together the three account for both the cohesion of the group and the substance of what is learned by participating in it.

Identity and trajectories

Wenger frames learning as identity work. Participation shapes who members are and who they are becoming, and members move along trajectories — peripheral, inbound, insider, boundary, outbound — that locate them relative to the community at any given moment. A new teacher on an inbound trajectory, a veteran on an insider trajectory, and a retiring teacher on an outbound trajectory all participate, but the meaning of their participation differs. The framework thus links cognition, social structure, and identity in a single account of how people become competent practitioners.

Use in language teacher education

The CoP framework reshaped how researchers theorise teacher learning. Tsui's (2003) Understanding Expertise in Teaching used the construct to track how four ESL teachers developed across their careers, showing that expertise emerges through sustained engagement with the practices and problems of a school community rather than from training input alone. Singh and Richards (2006) argued that teacher-education courses themselves function as CoPs, with their own discourses, artefacts, and trajectories from peripheral coursework to fuller participation in classroom teaching. Wenger-Trayner and Wenger-Trayner (2015) extended the model to landscapes of practice, accounting for how practitioners move across multiple, sometimes conflicting communities — a useful lens on teachers who participate simultaneously in a school, a department, an online forum, and a graduate cohort.

In ELT specifically the framework underwrites approaches to induction (pairing novices with experienced teachers as in mentoring), peer-led inquiry (lesson study and action research groups), and online teacher networks where dispersed practitioners build shared repertoire through forums, blogs, and Twitter chats. The language classroom itself has been theorised as a CoP, with target-language practices as the joint enterprise and learners on a peripheral-to-fuller-participation trajectory.

Critiques

The most sustained critique came from Barton and Tusting (eds, 2005), Beyond Communities of Practice: Language, Power, and Social Context, which argued that Wenger's framework underplays power, conflict, and the role of language itself. Communities of practice are not flat collegial circles; they have gatekeepers, exclusions, and asymmetries that the original framework treats as background. Tusting's chapter argued that a theory built on negotiation of meaning needs an explicit theory of language as social practice, drawn from critical discourse studies. Other commentators have flagged conceptual stretching: once any group with regular interaction is called a CoP, the construct loses its analytical bite and risks becoming a synonym for team or network. Wenger himself acknowledged the slippage and later distinguished CoPs from teams, networks, and other social configurations on the criteria of domain, community, and practice.

References

• Barton, D., & Tusting, K. (Eds.). (2005). Beyond Communities of Practice: Language, Power, and Social Context. Cambridge University Press. https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/beyond-communities-of-practice/EEC9FCC9FBCDDBF1FBA78DC55542203D
• Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge University Press. https://www.cambridge.org/highereducation/books/situated-learning/6915ABD21C8E4619F750A4D4ACA616CD
• Singh, G., & Richards, J. C. (2006). Teaching and learning in the language teacher education course room: A critical sociocultural perspective. RELC Journal, 37(2), 149–175.
• Tsui, A. B. M. (2003). Understanding Expertise in Teaching: Case Studies of Second Language Teachers. Cambridge University Press.
• Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity. Cambridge University Press.
• Wenger-Trayner, E., & Wenger-Trayner, B. (2015). Learning in Landscapes of Practice: Boundaries, Identity, and Knowledgeability in Practice-Based Learning. Routledge.