Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Contributors
- Series Foreword
- Introduction
- 1 Literacy, reification and the dynamics of social interaction
- 2 Language and power in communities of practice
- 3 Mediating allegations of racism in a multiethnic London school: what speech communities and communities of practice can tell us about discourse and power
- 4 “I've picked some up from a colleague”: language, sharing and communities of practice in an institutional setting
- 5 The person in the doing: negotiating the experience of self
- 6 Communities of practice and learning communities: do bilingual co-workers learn in community?
- 7 Moving beyond communities of practice in adult basic education
- 8 ‘Communities of practice’ in higher education: useful heuristic or educational model?
- 9 Communities of practice, risk and Sellafield
- 10 Semiotic social spaces and affinity spaces: from The Age of Mythology to today's schools
- Author Index
- Subject Index
- LEARNING IN DOING
- References
8 - ‘Communities of practice’ in higher education: useful heuristic or educational model?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 November 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Contributors
- Series Foreword
- Introduction
- 1 Literacy, reification and the dynamics of social interaction
- 2 Language and power in communities of practice
- 3 Mediating allegations of racism in a multiethnic London school: what speech communities and communities of practice can tell us about discourse and power
- 4 “I've picked some up from a colleague”: language, sharing and communities of practice in an institutional setting
- 5 The person in the doing: negotiating the experience of self
- 6 Communities of practice and learning communities: do bilingual co-workers learn in community?
- 7 Moving beyond communities of practice in adult basic education
- 8 ‘Communities of practice’ in higher education: useful heuristic or educational model?
- 9 Communities of practice, risk and Sellafield
- 10 Semiotic social spaces and affinity spaces: from The Age of Mythology to today's schools
- Author Index
- Subject Index
- LEARNING IN DOING
- References
Summary
BACKGROUND
Global higher education is in a state of change. Its expansion at the end of the twentieth century has led to a burgeoning of new programmes, modules and courses. These include not just the development of interdisciplinary and new subject areas in mainstream academic departments but also those based less on traditional knowledge bases within academic disciplines and more upon vocational and professional bodies of knowledge and their practice-based concerns. At the same time, the concept of lifelong learning means that the learner is no longer regarded as the eighteen-year-old fresh from school, but now includes those entering and re-entering the university – conceived in its broadest terms – at many different points throughout the lifecourse. The university is no longer confined within its own buildings; courses are delivered in outreach colleges, in the workplace and on-line. With these profound changes have come new words associated with learning: ‘distributed’, ‘flexible’ and ‘blended’. In short, the university is no longer the traditional bastion of knowledge, defined by either its disciplinary boundaries or its physical campus, colleges and buildings. It is against this backdrop that researchers in the field of teaching and learning in higher education are drawing upon the concept of communities of practice in order to inform practitioners, both university lecturers and staff developers, about new ways of understanding their students' learning.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Beyond Communities of PracticeLanguage Power and Social Context, pp. 180 - 197Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2005
References
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