I just completed a course called Principles of Learning for my doctoral program at Brigham Young University. During the course, we were supposed to think about how we defined learning and instruction as we considered different perspectives from the many theories we would read. Then, at the end of the semester, we would write a learning and teaching philosophy statement. I enjoyed doing the project and wanted to share it:
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It was the winter semester at Utah State University. The writing center was warm and pleasant, and much more preferable to being out in the bitter cold and wind outside. I was getting comfortable in my second year as a master’s student and my second semester as a tutor at the writing center. Working at the writing center for at least one semester was required for any graduate student employed as a writing instructor for the university. It gave graduate instructors an opportunity to see student writing from a different perspective. I had enjoyed my experience working as a teacher and a tutor, and decided to continue doing both as I finished my master’s program.
It was that time of the semester when the English 2010 students began bringing in the first drafts of their research paper. I found tutoring these students to be challenging--one reason being that I hadn’t taught English 2010 yet, and I wasn’t completely familiar with the assignments and objectives. As I read a particular student’s paper on building a personal cell phone network, I suddenly realized what was missing from many of the English 2010 research papers I had previously reviewed--including this one.
“Who are you writing this to?” I asked the student.
“What do you mean?” he replied.
“I mean, who needs this information? Who do you intend to read this and use this?”
The student gave me a blank stare. The paper had no thesis, no sense of organization or direction. It was just a data dump of research he had found. The student had not realized an authentic purpose or context for sharing this information, and his writing proved it.
This experience stuck with me and changed the way I taught. I first focused on helping my students think through who the audience tended to be for the type of writing we were working on, why the audience would use that type of writing, what the writer intended to accomplish by writing, and what specific features of the genre helped accomplish the writer’s goals. It was a good thinking exercise, but it wasn’t transforming my student’s writing.
What they needed in addition to this was authentic writing experiences! I situated my assignments in context where my student’s writing could truly be used: the school newspaper, scholarly journals, or proposals to the university’s student body leadership. At times I encouraged my students to submit their work to actual audiences and publications, but no one ever followed through. And most importantly, student writing tended to be the same, no matter how my teaching strategies changed.
Time and again, as I reviewed with my students the purpose and audience of the different genres we used for our assignments, the answers followed this theme:
“Why would someone write this?” I would ask.
“Because a teacher made it an assignment,” one would answer.
“So we can get a grade,” another would say.
“Yes, I know that’s why you are really writing, but how would this be used in the real world?”
My problem was that no matter how much I simulated the real world, the world in which my students were really participating was the world of school. Lave and Wenger (1991) explained this well in Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Learning, as Lave and Wenger explain it, is a form of enculturation, wherein a learner becomes more capable of engaging in a community of practice. “Engaging in practice,” they wrote, “rather than being its object, may well be a condition for learning” (pp. 93). But wasn’t I trying to help my students engage in practice in learning how to write? While I tried to bring some authenticity to my classroom by encouraging students to imagine they were participating in real communities, I was never truly able to capture the whole, real thing. “When directive teaching in the form of prescriptions about proper practice generates one circumscribed form of participation (in school), preempting participation in ongoing practice as the legitimate source of learning opportunities, the goal of complying with the requirements specified by teaching engenders a practice different from that intended” (pp. 96-97). Not only was writing in my class a different practice from what I intended, but the products were different from what I intended as well. My students’ writing was truly writing for a school community, wherein the content of the writing did not really exist for authentic purposes other than to show that the writer was attempting to follow the teacher’s instructions.
If much of our reason for sending our children to school is to prepare them to engage successfully in the workplace, and if formal, traditional methods of schooling seem unable to consistently and effectively replicate these communities, then what should we do with schooling? Are we wasting our time? I can see how participation in a theater production company at school would be getting close to being an authentic community of practice that is not just replicating a school community. But what about introduction to biology, or college algebra? Much of what is authentic to the workplace has been stripped away from these courses to get at abstract concepts and processes.
I try to imagine what would happen if public schooling as we know it was disbanded. What would our children do? What would parents do, especially if any parent of the child had a full-time job? Disbanding school is just an unthinkable option with the way we currently live. I imagine too, though, if children would have as high of a literacy rate if we did not have the current schooling system. Sure, that literacy rate is not phenomenal--but it is better than what the world was like two hundred years ago. Successfully participating in a school community of practice requires an ability to read textbooks, assignment descriptions, and what the teacher has put up on the whiteboard. Students are involved in it for more than a lesson, or a course--but essentially their whole time participating in this community. It is a skill we value, and it is a skill that many of our students come out of school being able to do. What students learn about reading in school lays a foundation for developing additional reading skills in other communities they may join.
If learning is a process of participating more successfully, fully, meaningfully in a community of practice, then what can we realistically do with the traditional approach to schooling? An important step is to recognize that the school is its own unique community. While I attempted to get students to pretend that they were participating in a community other than school, because I couldn’t authentically replicate those communities, and because students weren’t authentically choosing to join those communities, we were never getting to the real thing. The writing was just for school. However, writing in a school community of practice can be an authentic, meaningful task for the school community. It is a useful way of demonstrating what someone understands, a chance to communicate ideas to someone else. Pretending that our classrooms are something else is just ignoring the reality of the situation. We need to explore the potential value that authentic participation in a school community could have for individuals and society and capitalize on that.
Second, when we recognize what a school community of practice can do and be, we need to focus on how to help students participate more fully, successfully, and meaningfully. I marvel at how often as a teacher I expected my students to know how to be a student and participate successfully in my class. Yet, simply having those expectations did not help my students learn to participate in ways that met those expectations. I found that I needed to spend time teaching how to read a textbook, how to plan and schedule things, or how to participate in a discussion in class or online. So many students are frustrated and jaded because they are largely left to their own devices to figure out how to participate successfully in the school community of practice. We can do better by apprenticing this participation more explicitly and effectively.
Finally, we need to make the school community a community worth participating in. Most students find participation in school to be utter drudgery. If students don’t really want to participate, then how will they truly learn? If we are going to improve traditional schooling, we need to focus on activities and projects that are more meaningful and relevant to our students. One such activity going on in schools in Utah County is a project where students make their own platform games. The project teaches computer literacy, math skills, and collaboration skills. Those skills are foundational to other types of practices students might join in later in life. Most importantly, students find the project fun, relevant, and engaging. If the authentic tasks of a school community of practice were worth participating in for our students, I believe learning would improve.
I do not claim that the items I addressed here will fix all our problems with traditional schooling. I personally feel that I can better explore ways to apply the three principles I mentioned. However, Lave and Wenger have introduced a powerful perspective on schooling that I believe can make an important difference. It will be to our benefit for educators and researchers to explore further how to apply this perspective to our approaches of educating our students.
Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. New York: Cambridge University Press.
