Quakers as a Community of Practice

When I was studying educational research, there was a particular model, generally applied to informal education, that I became particularly taken with. From the first, I though that it may be applicable to liberal Quakers. Communities of Practice are a theoretical model developed by Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger, hereafter referred to as Lave & Wenger. It is a model of what is called situated learning, wherein learning is not considered the transfer of knowledge and skills from those who already possess them to those who do not, but rather the development of knowledge and skills within a social situation.

A community of practice is, unsurprisingly given the name, defined by commonality of practice. Where a community of practice has many units, such as local branches, one characteristic that determines that it is truly a single community of practice is that someone who normally participates in a single branch could participate in any branch without special notice or preparation, and that practice would be sufficiently similar between the two that the visitor can fully participate. It is this compatibility and centrality of practice that differentiates a community of practice from a community of interest, which the community is bound primarily by a common interest of some sort. In addition, most knowledge is tacit, gained from some sort of experience, rather than delivered in a didactic manner or reified in documentation.