Situated learning theory proposes that the location in which learning takes place is the community of practice. This can be thought of as a socially constructed
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group, activity system or network, in which humans act and react to each other and artefacts, such as tools, skills, knowledge, objects, shared objectives and practice. In this environment, common goals and values are shared, negotiated and changed over time (Wenger, 1998). The actors negotiate their learning pathways within in it, and position themselves within the existing hierarchical power structures, changing roles and identities as their careers evolve. As such, communities of practice can be any socially constructed situation including schools, work or even leisure activities such as sports clubs or amateur dramatic societies, and is a term that has been widely adopted for use in business management practice.
Lave and Wenger describe the community of practice as ‘…a set of relations among persons, activity and world, over time and in relation with other
tangential and overlapping communities of practice’ (1991: 98). Wenger (1998) further suggests that individuals simultaneously belong to multiple communities of practice, and may be located in overlapping areas of practice or a ‘nexus of multimembership’ (ibid., 1998: 158). Participation in linked communities of practice may follow any of the trajectories previously described in subsection 3.3.2, and this Wenger (1998) proposes, constitutes our identities.
Moreover, as these communities are continually produced and reproduced, they are not constant and so, can be regarded as dynamic structures that occur over time. By participating in socially situated activities, it is argued that the learner becomes a member of a community, and because membership is achieved and a relational process is initiated, learning takes place (Fuller, et al., 2005); a process described as ‘…increasing participation in communities of practice’ by ‘…the whole person acting in the world’ (Lave and Wenger, 1991:49).
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It is suggested that in this social learning process, a young person’s motivation to learn is activated and maintained by creating relationships with older, more experienced people and the subject matter (Fuller and Unwin, 1999). It is also believed that the apprentice is motivated to learn by an awareness that learning brings them the benefits of acquiring an adult identity at the same time as gaining an occupational status, and that this occurs when ‘…a relationship is established between what they learn, its application and the development of adult identities’ (Fuller and Unwin, 1998:160). In addition, learning is also
stimulated by the gap between their own knowledge and that of the expert. This concept builds on work on cultural-historical activity theory by the Russian theorists Vygotsky (1978; 1986) and Leontiev (1981), particularly Vygotsky’s ‘zone of proximal development’ which he described as:
…the distance between the actual developmental level as
determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance, or in collaboration with more capable peers (1978: 86).
Most significantly for this thesis, the situated learning concept, also lends itself to provide an explanation of how participants learn the range of social skills and knowledge that lie outside the narrow confines of occupation and the workplace and so, provides an understanding of maturation into the adult social world (Goodwin, 2007). Through becoming legitimate peripheral participants in a ‘nexus of multimembership’ (Wenger, 1998: 158), it is proposed in this thesis that apprentices learned the range of skills and knowledge required to achieve adulthood during the research timeframe. It can therefore, be considered to position apprenticeships and their role in the maturation process, firmly within wider societal, as well as occupational contexts.
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Because some social alignments are too diverse, too broad or too sparsely composed to be described as a single community of practice, Wenger (1998) proposes that they are better regarded as constellations of practice. This is true for ‘…large configurations (the global economy, speakers of a language, a city, a social movement) but also of some smaller ones (a factory, an office or a school)’ (ibid.:1998: 127). A constellation of practice is a means to understand how communities of practice may be grouped together for some purposes because they are interrelated, although dissimilar in structure.
As such, a constellation of practice is concerned with communities which share commonalities and boundaries which define two different types of diversity:
‘Diversity internal to practice and defined through mutual engagement’, and ‘Diversity caused by boundaries and stemming from the lack of mutual
engagement’ (Wenger 1998: 128-9, emphasis as in original). The members of
the first type share perspectives and identities through situation, but not necessarily a homogeneity of practice. To use one of Wenger’s (ibid. 1998) examples above as an illustration, this may be different departments of a factory as they share histories, consist of related enterprises, and serve a common cause. Therefore the community of practice consisting of workers spraying car bodies in a car production plant, belongs to the same constellation of practice as those communities working in the offices of the payroll department, or the car assembly line of the same company.
This concludes the presentation of situated learning theory as this thesis’ principal underpinning theory. However, as was noted in the introduction to this chapter, this theory is not without criticism. The next subsection addresses some of this analysis, and provides a defence of its use in this study.
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