Etienne Wenger is a globally recognized thought leader in the field of communities of practice and their application to organizations. He was featured by Training Magazine in their "A new Breed of Visionaries" series. A pioneer of the "community of practice" research, he is author and co-author of seminal articles and books on the topic, including Situated Learning (Cambridge University Press, 1991), where the term was coined, Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity (Cambridge University Press, 1998), where he lays out a theory of learning based on the concept of communities of practice, and Cultivating Communities of Practice: a Guide to Managing Knowledge (Harvard Business School Press, 2002), addressed to practitioners in organizations. Etienne is also a founder of CPsquare, a cross-organizational, cross-sector community of practice on communities of practice. His work is influencing a growing number of organizations in the private and public sectors. Indeed, cultivating communities of practice is increasingly recognized as the most effective way for organizations to address the knowledge challenges they face. Etienne helps organizations apply these ideas through consulting, public speaking, and workshops, both online and face-to-face. His new research project, "Learning for a small planet," is a broad, cross-sectoral investigation of the nature of learning and learning institutions at the dawn of the new millennium.
Keynote: Learning in a landscape of practice: communities and boundaries
Many institutions of learning proceed from a similar set of assumptions: that a body of knowledge is a curriculum, that learning depends on teaching, that the classroom is the locus of learning, and that the rest of life is application. But in practice, a body of knowledge is really a constellation of communities of practice that contribute in various ways to the constitution of a field of inquiry. The boundaries between these communities can be quite problematic, and at the same time rich learning opportunities. What are the implications of this assumption for institutions of learning? How do we conceptualize the questions to be addressed? One approach is to view learning, not primarily as the acquisition of a curriculum but as the negotiation of an identity with respect to a landscape of practice—with a complex interplay of communities and boundaries. From this perspective, learning is a transformation of our identity. And teaching is not merely the transmission of a curriculum, but an invitation to a journey of the self.
Workshop: Communities of practice: a social discipline of learning
The complex challenges we face today urgently call for new models of how we can learn individually and collectively. We have quite rigorous models to consider the informational and cognitive aspects of learning, but we need to become more disciplined about considering its social dimensions. One model with the potential to do this is provided by communities of practice and the attendant learning theory. These communities are as ancient as human kind. Yet they represent a model of learning that is extraordinarily aligned with the new geographies of connectivity and identity emerging at the dawn of the 21st century. This workshop explores some dimensions of this social discipline of learning, as well as new approaches to learning challenges in business, government, education, and world development.