Seductive texts: communities of practice ‘at work’

‘Communities of practice’ has widespread ‘currency’ in both the workplace learning literature and increasingly, in contemporary workplaces. Workplace learning researchers, workplace trainers and organisational consultants are using communities of practice as a way of talking about and theorising learning at work. It is this seemingly unproblematic ‘rise and rise’ of ‘communities of practice’ that is somewhat troubling and a theme which will be explored in this paper. Why is it that communities of practice are the contemporary focus of our gaze? As a researcher interested in the complexities of power and learning at work I ask ‘what work does communities of practice do in organisations?’ My introduction to, and interest in, ‘communities of practice’ has come about through my involvement as a research team member in an Australian Research Council funded project which is exploring ‘everyday’ learning at work. In the ‘Uncovering Learning’ project, ‘communities of practice’ (Wenger, 1998) has been used as one of various conceptual frames for exploring the extent and nature of everyday learning at work. The research site is TAFE NSW, in Australia, the NSW state government provider of vocational education and training. TAFE NSW is a large, public sector organisation that is undergoing change as a result of widespread education and training reforms. Our interest in this project is on TAFE as a workplace, although the significance of TAFE being in the ‘learning’ industry cannot be overlooked. ‘Communities of practice’ has appeal in this workplace at the moment. For example, the Professional Development Network, a staff development unit within TAFE, is using communities of practice. ‘Reframing the Future’, a staff development and change management program for VET practitioners, including TAFE employees, is also using a communities of practice framework (Mitchell, 2003). ‘Reframing the Future’ provides an example of the way ‘communities of practice’ is being used as a human resource development strategy in organisations. In this sense ‘communities of practice’ can be viewed as a contemporary organisational practice in TAFE. Using a postmodern perspective on researching learning at work we might ask which discourses are the most powerful, how they come to be powerful and how they frame practices (Edwards & Usher, 2000)? So why is it that ‘communities of practice’ has become such a powerful discourse in contemporary workplaces? Various commentators draw attention to the way the workplace is currently being discursively constructed as a legitimate site of learning (eg Garrick, 1998; Usher, 2000; Usher & Solomon, 1999). Communities of practice texts, both theoretical ones, such as Wenger’s work on communities of practice (1998), and organisational ones, such as the stories circulating at work about communities of practice, contribute to this construction. For example, Wenger’s notion of communities of practice draws on a theory of situated learning, where learning is understood as being located in social contexts, including everyday work (Lave & Wenger, 1991). These texts contribute to a normalising of learning at work and the contemporary shifts in power that are taking place within organisations and between universities and organisations. In terms of the latter, it is now understood that organisations have increasing control of the learning process and ‘what is learned’ (Usher, 2000). A postmodern approach to researching learning at work emphasises the way discourses construct certain objects as ‘knowable’ and ‘known’ and certain perspectives as ‘true’ (Edwards & Usher, 2000). Using this approach we can explore the way communities of practice texts position workers in normative ways thereby constituting particular forms of experience and subjectivities. I will use a text from the Reframing the Future program to briefly illustrate the representation of contemporary TAFE practitioners and explore the way a community of practice discourse constructs workplaces as legitimate sites of learning and the ‘worker-learner’ as a legitimate way of being at work. In this text ‘communities of practice’ are described as ‘groups of people bound together by common interests and a passion for a cause, and who continually interact’ (Mitchell, 2003, p. 5). The new worker is one who places an emphasis on relationships, for example, training providers need to be ‘more client-focused by establishing improved relationships with both enterprise clients and individual students’ (p 8). Workers are knowledge producers where: ‘The development of practice involves a balance between exploring ideas together and producing documents and tools’ (p 6). The communities in this text have great appeal. The members ‘communicate regularly and continuously in an atmosphere of trust, enabling collective enquiry about issues of importance to the members’ (p 6). The communities of practice are unproblematically aligned with a broader goal, which is the successful implementation of the new training system. For example ‘all the communities were required to focus on the implementation of the national training system. Legitimate foci for the communities included Training Package implementation, the requirements of the Australian Quality Framework (AQTF), the recognition of current competencies, industry-provider relationships and collaboration with other providers’ (p 13). In this text workers are presented as active and emotionally engaged knowledge-producers in the contemporary workplace and learning at work is presented as empowering and self-directed. And, as the management gurus remind us, it is exactly these active, entrepreneurial, knowledge-producing subjects that contemporary organisations need in our rapidly changing times (eg Drucker, 1988; Handy, 1995; Senge, 1990). The connection between the need for organisations to have active knowledge producers and the discursive production of these types of workers begins to draw attention to the relationship between learning at work and power. But as Usher & Solomon (1999) point out, the shaping of subjectivity is a tension-filled and complex process. Some of these tensions are illustrated in the following account from the head teacher of a teaching group in TAFE. In this interview ‘Jim’ was talking about the challenges and changes he and his workgroup had experienced in relation to doing their job in recent years. Not surprisingly, Jim often spoke about the new training packages and the impact they were having on the way this group of teachers were doing their work. Using Wenger’s criteria of shared repertoire, mutual engagement and joint enterprise, this group could be described as a community of practice (Leontios, Boud, Harman, & Rooney, 2003). However, the practice of this community is not focused around the successful implementation of the new training packages. Instead, the practices of this group could be described in terms of resistance. The morale around here has absolutely hit rock bottom- it could really hardly be lower and that’s of great importance to me – its very difficult to motivate people and after a while of patting them on the head and saying gee you really did a great job, that was great – it rings hollow – I can’t reward them any other way. The straw that’s broken the camel’s back around here was not constantly being attacked with the paperwork and the cuts, as the training packages –that’s what’s killed it. The one thing…you were able to motivate them in was their technical knowledge and their professionalism in which they are held in high esteem within the [profession]. So if something was new and important they would work it out themselves they would come to me and we would propose what new changes had to be made and how they would best work around them and that was never a real problem. When we had major curriculum reviews they would always turn around and release someone so everybody in this section has had release time [from teaching] to write curriculum…so there’s an incentive to turn around and put something back into it because it was an extra over the top, so they’ve all got pretty much a sense of ownership around here. They’ve all got their patches of expertise… … there is no way I can supply quality education because I don’t have a curriculum that’s been properly structured. I’m delivering training packages that are totally meaningless…Now my people look at it and say ‘this is total garbage, change it’ and I go to get it changed and they say ‘we’re not changing it’ and I come back and I say I’m sorry they can’t change it, therefore they look at me and they say they feel like they’re totally ineffective or they throw their hands up in the air and say ‘this is total crap’ and we’re stuck and we’ve got that crap and we’re trying to teach it now. Now we’re going into the second year of the new course without any new curriculum, so it’s a quality issue… This community of practice provide a contrast to the communities articulated in ‘Reframing the Future’. Instead of energetic, problem-solving implementers of the new training system we hear of a despondent, ‘burnt-out’, untrusting community. This community questions the national training framework and its promise of enhanced quality. This story suggests tensions around being re-positioned as worker-learners (Boud & Solomon, 2003). The teachers in this community had learnt how to teach this course, what worked and what didn’t work with the students, as well as how and when to update the curriculum. They had learnt how to successfully deliver this course to their students. But the learning and the expertise of this community were not taken onto account in the process of introducing the new training packages. The knowledge held by the teachers in regard to their relationships with industry and with their students was disregarded. The teachers in this workgroup see themselves as experts in an area of knowledge, not as ‘learners’ who need to develop new practices. The analysis of these stories brings to the fore the issue of ‘what counts as learning?’ In the Reframing the Future stories the practices that feature in the text are those that contribute to the successful implementation of the new training system. There is no talk of communities of practice that are resisting the implementation or presenting alternative agendas. This suggests that not all workplace practices are legitimate and that not all learning is legitimate. This privileging of some types of learning draws attention to the ‘disciplinary’ work of communities of practice. While communities of practice may open up space in the workplace for voices that might not normally be heard (Brown & Duguid, 1991), when it is used as a human resource development strategy it may have similar problems to other forms of organisational learning interventions. Garrick and Rhodes describe organisational learning as ‘ a dubiously legitimated and conceived project which focuses on control, the maintenance of orthodoxy and (although the rhetoric usually suggests otherwise) the suppression of difference' (Garrick & Rhodes, 1998, p. 177). When talking about communities of practice at work Gee et al. ask what space is left for reflection and critique if we are all immersed in ‘the core values and communities of practice of the business’(1996, p. 68)? This suggests the importance of creating space in a community of practice framework for dissention, challenge and contestation. One of the appeals for organisations in communities of practice texts is that learning at work is represented as both natural and neutral. One of the consequences of this is that power and ‘discipline’ no longer seem so visible. It is in this way that ‘communities of practice’ can be considered a particularly seductive discourse. This paper has foregrounded the relationship between power and learning at work by locating ‘communities of practice’ in a social, cultural and political context. It begins to draw attention to the politics of learning at work and being a learner at work with the understanding that learning at work is not neutral. For example, the practices in the workplace that are being developed are framed within organisational goals. In this sense communities of practice can be viewed as a technology that aligns the goals of individual workers with the broader goals of the organisation. As a communities of practice discourse becomes increasingly privileged, what are the implications for reflexive learning practices that incorporates an element of organisational critique? As educators we need to avoid a bounded version of learning and open-up space for learning other than that which is ‘re-defined in managerialist terms’ (Garrick & Rhodes, 1998, p. 181)

Stop-list slicing.

Traditional program slicing requires two parameters: a program location and a variable, or perhaps a set of variables, of interest. Stop-list slicing adds a third parameter to the slicing criterion: those variables that are not of interest. This third parameter is called the stoplist. When a variable in the stop-list is encountered, the data-flow dependence analysis of slicing is terminated for that variable. Stop-list slicing further focuses on the computation of interest, while ignoring computations known or determined to be uninteresting. This has the potential to reduce slice size when compared to traditional forms of slicing. In order to assess the size of the reduction obtained via stop-list slicing, the paper reports the results of three empirical evaluations: a large scale empirical study into the maximum slice size reduction that can be achieved when all program variables are on the stop-list; a study on a real program, to determine the reductions that could be obtained in a typical application; and qualitative case-based studies to illustrate stop-list slicing in the small. The large-scale study concerned a suite of 42 programs of approximately 800KLoc in total. Over 600K slices were computed. Using the maximal stoplist reduced the size of the computed slices by about one third on average. The typical program showed a slice size reduction of about one-quarter. The casebased studies indicate that the comprehension effects are worth further consideration

The Dual Feminisation of HIV/AIDS

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Globalizations on 2011, available online: http://wwww.tandfonline.com/10.1080/14747731.2010.49302

A multiple hill climbing approach to software module clustering

Automated software module clustering is important for maintenance of legacy systems written in a 'monolithic format' with inadequate module boundaries. Even where systems were originally designed with suitable module boundaries, structure tends to degrade as the system evolves, making re-modularization worthwhile. This paper focuses upon search-based approaches to the automated module clustering problem, where hitherto, the local search approach of hill climbing has been found to be most successful. In the paper we show that results from a set of multiple hill climbs can be combined to locate good 'building blocks' for subsequent searches. Building blocks are formed by identifying the common features in a selection of best hill climbs. This process reduces the search space, while simultaneously 'hard wiring' parts of the solution. The paper reports the results of an empirical study that show that the multiple hill climbing approach does indeed guide the search to higher peaks in subsequent executions. The paper also investigates the relationship between the improved results and the system size

Automated unique input output sequence generation for conformance testing of FSMs

This paper describes a method for automatically generating unique input output (UIO) sequences for FSM conformance testing. UIOs are used in conformance testing to verify the end state of a transition sequence. UIO sequence generation is represented as a search problem and genetic algorithms are used to search this space. Empirical evidence indicates that the proposed method yields considerably better (up to 62% better) results compared with random UIO sequence generation

Analysing assessment practice: how useful is the summative/formative divide as a tool?

A view of assessment as 'naturally' divided into the categories of formative and summative has become a taken-for-granted way of thinking about, talking about and organising assessment in universities, at least in the UK where the division is inscribed in national, institutional and departmental policy and guidance (eg. Quality Assurance Agency, http://www.qaa.ac.uk). In these documents summative and formative assessment tend to be understood as serving separate purposes with summative assessment understood as summing up the level of performance and formative assessment as feeding into future learning. We question the utility of the division in terms of better understanding assessment practices on the basis of an empirical study undertaken in a higher education institution in the UK. The aim of the Assessment Environments & Cultures project is to gain a better understanding of how academics assess and why they assess in the ways that they do. Interview and observational data have been collected from academics working in three subject areas: Design, Business and Applied Sciences. Initial analysis has focussed on the discourses in use and the subject positions taken up by academics when they talk about and undertake assessment. Analysis of our data suggests that, whilst academics used the categories of formative and summative to talk about their assessment practices, the distinction between assessment purposes may be 'messier' than the separate categories imply. Various examples from the project will be introduced to illustrate this point. This raises a number of questions in terms of researching assessment practices that will be raised for discussion at the roundtable. For example:Might it be useful to understand formative and summative assessment as occupying a shared and contested space rather than as distinct categories

Improved test quality using robust unique input/output circuit sequences (UIOCs)

In finite state machine (FSM) based testing, the problem of fault masking in the unique input/ output (UIO) sequence may degrade the test performance of the UIO based methods. This paper investigates this problem and proposes the use of a new type of unique input/output circuit (UIOC) sequence for state verification, which may help to overcome the drawbacks that exist in the UIO based techniques. When constructing a UIOC, overlap and internal state observation schema are used to increase the robustness of a test sequence. Test quality is compared by using the forward UIO method (F-method), the backward UIO method (B-method) and the UIOC method (C-method) separately. Robustness of the UIOCs constructed by the algorithm given in this paper is also compared with those constructed by the algorithm given previously. Experimental results suggest that the C-method outperforms the F- and the B-methods and the UIOCs constructed by the Algorithm given in this paper, are more robust than those constructed by other proposed algorithms

Boundary crossing: negotiating learning outcomes in industry based student projects.

In order to prepare upcoming Industrial Designers to be able to operate successfully in increasingly complex work settings, the Industrial Design program at the University of Western Sydney is teaming up with industry to provide final year students with industry-based projects. The introduction of Industry-Based Projects into the final year research projects have disrupted many set ways the traditional student projects have been run in the past. Industry-Based Projects have brought to light a number of important issues associated with the assessment process and views held by academics about desired student project outcomes and assessment that were left lying dormant in the past. This paper explores the challenges academics faced negotiating student outcomes and assessment while supervising Industry-Based Projects

Dissemination of innovative teaching and learning practice: the Global Studio.

This project aims to disseminate teaching and learning resources from an innovative programme called the Global Studio to the ADM-HEA community. The area of innovation developed in the Global Studio was to link student teams across the globe in ‘designer’ and ‘client’ roles in order to undertake a product development project. This built on and extended the learning philosophy of learning in and through doing provided in a more traditional design studio. Throughout the project students worked in geographically distributed work groups in order to provide them with experience in using skills that would enable them to work successfully in distributed design teams