Communities of practice in higher education: A challenge from the discipline of architecture

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Abstract

Uncritically applying a community of practice model has become rather prevalent in higher education settings (Lea, 2005). This paper attempts to return to the spirit of Lave and Wenger's earlier (1991) work and to use a community of practice perspective as a heuristic to analyse participation patterns in a final year design studio in the discipline of architecture. The data consisted of videotapes, transcriptions, and interviews with participants, and showed that students’ opportunities to rehearse expert roles relevant to the profession were somewhat limited. Instead of an extended community of participants engaged collaboratively in joint activities, patterns of interaction between the instructor and the students were typically hierarchical. Despite this, the students felt that their participation in this class was a legitimate part of their trajectories towards membership in the professional community of practice, underlining the complexity of higher education contexts. The paper suggests that the usefulness of the concept of community of practice to higher education lies primarily in treating classes as one of many overlapping more or less formal communities students may be involved in.

Highlights

► Students’ opportunities in the design studio to rehearse expert roles were limited. ► Patterns of interaction between the instructor and the students were hierarchical. ► The relevance of the CoP concept to higher education is in theorizing its complexity. ► Students are being socialised into multiple overlapping communities of practice simultaneously.

Introduction

In higher education, the notion of ‘community’ and the associated concepts of ‘novice’, ‘expert’ and ‘apprenticeship’ have been used for several decades by educators modelling the process of learning and socialisation. John Swales’ (1990) ‘discourse communities’ is one such approach. Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger's (1991) ‘communities of practice’ is another approach, one that is considered by researchers working in a language socialisation paradigm as one of the more robust models of community (Garrett & Baquedano-Lopez, 2002). However, whereas Swales used the idea of ‘discourse communities’ specifically to refer to how both entire disciplines and individual academic classes function in the university, Lave and Wenger (1991) were not much interested in learning in formal educational institutions. Their interest lay outside schools and universities—in using the metaphors of apprenticeship and community to explicate how learning occurs informally when groups of people of varying expertise are mutually involved in a joint project. For Lave and Wenger (1991), success or failure in learning were characterised in terms of this mutual engagement, and thus what was of utmost importance to them were the conditions that enabled joint participation. In the epigraph above, we see the studio instructor highlighting the role of shared language (“common words gizmos…shorthand names”) as a key resource for joint participation; a resource that according to him, distinguishes studio practices in the academy from those in workplace settings.

Despite Lave and Wenger's (1991) original intentions, the community of practice perspective has been embraced enthusiastically by educators in the last few decades. Some researchers have viewed it in the spirit of the earlier work of Lave and Wenger (1991). Such research has used it as a heuristic to consider, for example, how the physical organisation of classroom practices may selectively shape students’ opportunities for participation (Toohey, 1998) or whether students’ different ways of participating are provided with adequate legitimacy in specific classroom communities (Morita, 2004). Other educators have adopted communities of practice as a model, possibly influenced by Wenger's later publications (e.g. Wenger, 1998, Wenger et al., 2002). In these, the fostering of communities of practice is promoted as a means to implement successful learning, primarily in the corporate world, but as the authors suggest, also in educational institutions. As Lea (2005) observes, it is the second of these uptakes, that of using communities of practice as a model and at times in a rather uncritical manner, that has become increasingly prevalent in higher education.

The present study takes up the question of the relevance of a community of practice perspective in higher education contexts, focusing on the discipline of architecture, and more specifically on the practical design studio component of the course. The design studio is considered to be the core of the architecture degree, the main site of socialisation of students (Stevens, 1995), and the nexus between the academy and the profession. An important question in this context is how students can best be prepared for workplace settings through their participation in the design studio. Recent empirical research in design-related disciplines has concluded that studio-based practices do effectively replicate workplace practices, and that the learning that takes place in studio classrooms can best be explained by a community of practice framework (Drew, 2004, Logan, 2006, Shreeve, 2007, Shreeve et al., 2010).

The aim of the present study was twofold. On a practical level, it sought to examine design studio practices in which a group of final year architecture students and their instructor participated, and to consider the extent to which co-participation constituted effective preparation for becoming an architect. The data for the article consist of observations and recordings of two studio sessions, mid-way through a 12-week semester. The analysis focuses on how classroom practices were socially and linguistically organised (Capps & Ochs, 1995), and on identifying roles and responsibilities assumed by the instructor and students (Lave and Wenger, 1991). The data suggest that the routine practices enacted in these studio sessions did not necessarily provide students with a wide range of opportunities to rehearse expert roles relevant to full participation in the profession. On a more theoretical level, the study sought to explore whether Lave and Wenger's (1991) concept of communities of practice provides analytical purchase on the teaching and learning practices of academic classrooms. The paper concludes that the concept has relevance, although less in terms of treating single classes as discrete communities, as is implied by scholars who promote communities of practice as a model. Instead its relevance lies more in theorizing the complexity of higher education settings as multiple, overlapping, more or less formal communities (of practice) that students and instructors are simultaneously involved in.

Lave and Wenger's (1991) account of communities of practice is based on apprenticeship styles of learning,1 whereby novices or newcomers acquire the skills and knowledge valued in a particular community through interaction with more experienced members. Central to such an account are the ideas that learning is located in the processes of co-participation (or in other words, is social), and that it occurs in the authentic practices2 of particular communities (that is, it is situated) (Hanks, 1991). The present study draws from both community of practice and language socialisation frameworks, to emphasise that the process of socialisation through ‘apprenticeship’ involves more than learning skills and knowledge; that it also involves the appropriation of a particular sociocultural world view, and that shared understandings are likely to operate on a tacit level rather than be consciously taught or learnt (Capps and Ochs, 1995, Duff, 2007). Thus the process of gaining competence and membership in a community is one linked to changing identity—involving newcomers gradually taking on both more responsibility and more expert roles (referred to by Lave and Wenger as “identities of mastery”). Lave and Wenger (1991) coined the term legitimate peripheral participation (LPP) to describe this process. What is important about this concept is that newcomers need to have access to a variety of community resources for participation to be ‘legitimate’ and to lead to full membership. With access, come opportunities to try out a range of roles and responsibilities associated with expertise in a community (Lave and Wenger, 1991, Wenger, 1998).

The idea that learning and socialisation take place through particular types of situated participation (Lave & Wenger, 1991) foregrounds certain challenges for professionally oriented courses in the university. If we treat the classroom as a community of practice in itself, we are faced with the issue of what constitutes full participation and expertise. Kanes and Lerman (2008) address this issue with respect to primary school maths education by noting that most students attending and participating in maths classes are unlikely to aspire to being a mathematician or a maths teacher. Does this mean, they ask, that full participation involves aspiring to a “school mathematical identity”, or what Watson and Winbourne (2008, p. 5) call “a fluent member of the class”; an aspiration which might have more to do with managing the learning situation – dealing with the teacher's questions or keeping out of trouble – than actually learning the skills involved in doing maths. Lave and Wenger (1991) in their caution about the relevance of communities of practice to institutional education note that learning how to “do” school effectively may indeed be a major component of what schools teach. In a tertiary context, full participation in classes thus may be less about gaining expertise in academic or professional practices and more about assessment and gate-keeping, as Lea (2005) points out.

If on the other hand, we conceive of the profession as the mature community of practice (e.g. Drew, 2004), then we are faced with the issue of whether engagement in academic practices can provide adequate LPP for the workplace. In disciplines with direct links to the professions, such as architecture, medicine, law and engineering, pedagogic genres are often modelled on and take their credibility from ‘equivalent’ professional genres. But is this enough?3 Situated learning theory problematises the question of transfer of learning from one context to another (Sfard, 1998). Within a community of practice framework, as Hanks (1991) notes, the focus shifts to ways of participating. “If both learning and the subject learned are embodied in participation frameworks, then the portability of learned skills must rely on the commensurability of certain forms of participation” (Hanks, 1991, pp. 19–20). A pedagogical implication of this is that we need to question the kinds of interactions that occur in routine classroom practices, and the roles typically occupied in these and their statuses, as well as considering to what extent these are aligned with those of workplace practices.

In design-related disciplines, a number of empirical studies have recently been conducted exploring the teaching and learning styles of the studio component of courses (Drew, 2004, Logan, 2006, Shreeve et al., 2010). These studies have much in common. Their main source of data is interviews with instructors, supplemented in several of the studies by classroom observations and interviews with professionals working locally. The researchers highlight the distinctiveness of studio pedagogy, which they argue is very different from more traditional academic practices such as lectures and tutorials. The studies also conclude that it is these distinctive studio pedagogies that help students in their transition to the relevant profession; a process the authors conceive of in community of practice terms (see also Shreeve, 2007). Logan, for example, concludes that the educational and professional settings in her study were closely enough aligned to characterise them as “overlapping circles of activity within a wider graphic design ‘community of practice”’ (2006, p. 342).

Both Logan (2006) and Shreeve et al. (2010) foreground the physical setting and the centrality of material artifacts in mediating teaching and learning practices in the studio. Logan reports that in the graphic design studio she observed, students shared tables and were actively engaged in ‘doing’ design, with instructors acting as “expert coaches”, “cruising” the studio and informally responding to individual requests (2006, p. 334). Shreeve et al. (2010) similarly found that in the four art and design fields they investigated, the distinctive use of space in the studio for “shared, prolonged, communal activity” (p. 133) was considered by tutors to be fundamental to students’ engagement in design practices and learning how to ‘do’ design (practices conceived of as LPP). Shreeve et al. (2010) also identified the epistemological role of material artifacts (cf. Hanks, 1991), observing that studio practices focused on a dialogue with materials, a process of discovery that has unknown consequences. These two aspects of the design studio—the physical setting and the critical role of material artifacts, together with the development of shared discourse and a common metaphorical language (Logan, 2006) were viewed as the fundamental links between academic and workplace settings.

The current study focuses on the discipline of architecture, where the studio classroom is also considered to be the main point of contact between the discipline and the profession. This idea is manifest in the objectives of the graduate design studios in the university in which this research was conducted, which are couched in terms of professional architectural practice. These include for example, ‘an understanding of professional roles and responsibilities’, ‘the ability to communicate a design in a clear and professional manner’, and ‘the development of skills commensurate with those required by the architecture profession’. The links between the studio and the profession are strengthened by studio instructors being largely drawn from professional practice (rather than academics in the School of Architecture), and by the commonly held perception that classroom and assessment genres mirror professional genres, specifically the critique or review that occurs in design meetings between teams of architects, or in meetings between architects and their clients (studio instructor, interview, 14/12/2008). One of the main scholars in architectural education, Donald Schön (1987), has written extensively about studio practices in the discipline of architecture with the purpose of promoting practicum pedagogies in the academy. Like the researchers writing about other design-related disciplines cited above, Schön recognised that the physical setting of the studio and students’ “immersion” in studio practices was an essential component of “learning a practice” (p. 37).

The overarching aim of the current study was to explore students’ socialisation into the profession of architecture through the design studio. In order to get a sense of expert professional practices, recent ethnographic studies of architectural firms were consulted. The following short description is based on studies conducted in Australia (Maher & Mewburn, 2007), North America (Murphy, 2005), Canada (Dias et al., 1999, Medway and Clark, 2003), and Holland (Yaneva, 2005). These studies concur in their characterisation of the process of architectural workplace design as one, which occurs through the mediation of design tools and is fundamentally collaborative, with teams of people from a wide range of backgrounds working together on a per project basis. Murphy (2005) for example reports that whilst the firm he observed was large, employees sat in “project-based clusters” (p. 119). Medway and Clark (2003) and Dias et al. (1999) talk of the complex division of labour on various projects, and the range of roles that individual architects assume in relation to for example, more senior and junior colleagues, clients, public authorities, other professionals, contractors, and subcontractors. From these descriptions of architectural professional practice, we can infer that the expertise required for full participation includes crucially the ability to work collaboratively on identifying and resolving design problems. This, in turn, is seen to involve the ability to verbalise one's design intentions and spatial conditions (Dias et al., 1999, p. 102), to defend one's ideas in the face of critique, and to reflect upon and critique one's own and others’ design ideas and decisions.

Previous research into design-related disciplines, based largely on interview data, has suggested that studio practices can be understood within a community of practice framework as providing the attenuated conditions of LPP. The current study sought to further explore this issue by investigating participation patterns in classroom interactions using video-recordings and transcriptions as the primary source of data. The following questions formed the basis of the analysis.

  • (1)

    What are the central practices observable in the design studio sessions?

  • (2)

    How are these practices enacted—through what kinds of interactions?

  • (3)

    What are the expert roles and responsibilities evident in these practices, and who typically occupies these roles?

Section snippets

Context and participants

The design studio observed for this study was part of a large well-established architecture school in an Australian university. The instructor was a senior academic who had been at the university for more than fifteen years, with prior experience as an architect in a range of workplaces. The 15 students were in the fourth and final year of their degree, with some already having completed work experience of approximately six months with architectural firms the previous year. The School of

The studio practices

A preliminary analysis of the data revealed that the studio sessions were primarily organised around the repetition of one specific pedagogical event, which the participants referred to as ‘crits’ or ‘desk crits’.5 These crit events appeared to be enacted in generic ways; that is, the forms of participation in the crits followed certain patterns. The following

Discussion

A community of practice-based framework is based on the notion of learning through doing, with more experienced oldtimers creating opportunities for newcomers to rehearse relevant expertise by “actually engaging in the process” (Hanks, 1991, p. 14). There is little doubt that students in this study were profoundly engaged in the process of design. However, this study argues that the way the main pedagogical genre – the crit – was enacted in these studio sessions constrained students’

Conclusion

This study set out by focusing on a single class as a discrete community. A community of practice framework is useful at this level in conceptualising learning, knowledge, competence and participation as being negotiated primarily at a local level. A corollary of this is the idea that students are likely to have to navigate a diverse range of academic practices as they progress through their academic degrees. At a local level, this study of the practices of one design studio in a School of

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