ABSTRACT
Etienne Wenger first worked as a teacher before obtaining a Ph.D. in artificial intelligence. He then joined the Institute for Research on Learning in Palo Alto, California, where he developed his concept of communities of practice. In the course of his career, he has provided conceptual frameworks for two different fields. His first book on artificial intelligence in education shaped the domain known as ‘intelligent tutoring systems’. Later, in the 1990s, he focused his efforts on ‘situated learning’ and ‘communities of practice’. He was the co-author, with Jean Lave, of Situated learning (Lave & Wenger, 1991), where the term ‘community of practice’ was coined. Building on these original ideas, he wrote Communities of practice: Learning, meaning, and identity (1998) and Cultivating communities of practice: A guide to managing knowledge (co-authored with Richard McDermott and William Snyder, 2002). Since 1997, Wenger has been an independent researcher, consultant, author and speaker. He is currently an Honorary Professor at the School of Humanities, University of Aalborg, Denmark.
Etienne Wenger places learning in the context of our lived world experiences. Learning is therefore assumed to be a fundamentally social phenomenon, reflecting our own deeply social nature as human beings capable of knowing (Wenger, 1998). Developed from Lave’s (1988) initial thinking, Lave and Wenger (1991) and Wenger (1998) argued against a cognitivist approach to learning that separates cognition from the cultural context and activity (Rovegno, 2006). Instead, they support a focus on relations between sociocultural structure and social practice, and the indivisibility of body, cognition, feeling, activity and the sociocultural world (Lave, 1988; Wenger, 1998; Rovegno, 2006). In collaboration with Jean Lave (Lave & Wenger, 1991, 1996) and others (Wenger et al., 2002), Wenger engaged in a conceptual shift from the traditional view of ‘the individual as learner to learning as participation, and from the concept of cognitive process to the moreencompassing view of social practice’ (Lave & Wenger, 1991: 43). The primary focus of Wenger’s theory, then, is on learning as social participation, not just in
