EdSight

Etienne Wenger is a Swiss-born educational theorist and organizational consultant whose development of the “communities of practice” concept has become one of the most widely adopted frameworks for understanding adult, professional, and situated learning across education, business, and public policy. Growing up in Switzerland, where the distant Alps fostered a sense of wonder and a desire to travel, Wenger began his career as a French teacher abroad before shifting into computer science in order to teach material that he believed would be more interesting to his students — a move that led eventually to a Ph.D. in artificial intelligence and to his first book, Artificial Intelligence and Tutoring Systems (1987). That early interest in how machines might be programmed to learn drew him into a broader question about how human learning actually happens, and in the late 1980s he joined the Institute for Research on Learning (IRL) in Palo Alto, California — a multidisciplinary research team of anthropologists, educators, and cognitive scientists who set out to define learning in settings where no formal teacher was present. At IRL he worked closely with Jean Lave, with whom he co-authored Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation (1991), the volume that introduced the community-of-practice construct to the social sciences. His solo monograph Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity (1998) became the canonical statement of the theory, and over the next two decades — increasingly in partnership with his wife and collaborator Beverly Wenger-Trayner — he extended the framework into social learning systems, landscapes of practice, and a value-creation model for evaluating social learning. Wenger's work has shaped K-12 and higher-education practice, organizational learning, and professional development in dozens of sectors worldwide.

Wenger's foundational contribution, developed with Jean Lave in Situated Learning (1991), was the claim that meaningful learning is inseparable from participation in ongoing social practice. Studying apprenticeships as the first replicable case, Lave and Wenger argued that “meaning is socially negotiated — learning, thinking, and knowledge are relations among people in activity in, with, and arising from the socially and culturally structured world.” Their pivotal concept, “legitimate peripheral participation,” describes how newcomers enter a community on its periphery and move toward fuller engagement as their identities and competences develop together. Legitimate peripheral participation, they wrote, is both “the development of knowledgeable skilled identities in practice” and “the reproduction and transformation of communities of practice” — a conceptual bridge between theories of situated activity and theories of social reproduction. In his solo follow-up Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity (1998), Wenger laid out four premises of an integrative social theory of learning: humans are social beings; knowledge is competence in valued enterprises; knowing is active engagement in the world; and meaning is what learning ultimately seeks to produce.

• Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge University Press.
• Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice: Learning, meaning, and identity. Cambridge University Press.
• Brown, J. S., Collins, A., & Duguid, P. (1989). Situated cognition and the culture of learning. Educational Researcher, 18(1), 32–42.
• Bandura, A. (1977). Self-efficacy: Toward a unifying theory of behavioral change. Psychological Review, 84(2), 191–215.

In Communities of Practice (1998) Wenger specified the three constituent features by which a group becomes a community of practice: mutual engagement, joint enterprise, and shared repertoire. Members learn by engaging with one another in a common enterprise — “joint not in that everybody believes the same thing or agrees with everything, but in that it is communally negotiated” — and in doing so develop a shared repertoire of routines, words, tools, ways of doing things, stories, gestures, symbols, genres, actions, and concepts that become part of the community's practice. Alongside these three features, Wenger insisted on a second, equally essential dimension: CoPs shape identity. “Practice entails the negotiation of ways of being a person … [and] the formation of a community of practice is also the negotiation of identities.” Four constitutive components of learning integrate practice and identity within the theory.

1. Meaning: learning as the experience of life and the world as meaningful.

2. Practice: learning as engagement in shared historical and social resources that sustain mutual engagement in action.

3. Community: learning as belonging, as configurations in which mutual engagement constitutes competence.

4. Identity: learning as becoming, as the trajectories by which we shape who we are and who we are becoming.

• Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice: Learning, meaning, and identity. Cambridge University Press.
• Farnsworth, V., Kleanthous, I., & Wenger-Trayner, E. (2016). Communities of practice as a social theory of learning: A conversation with Etienne Wenger. British Journal of Educational Studies, 64(2), 139–160.
• Li, L. C., Grimshaw, J. M., Nielsen, C., Judd, M., Coyte, P. C., & Graham, I. D. (2009). Evolution of Wenger's concept of community of practice. Implementation Science, 4(1), 11.

Wenger (1998) captured the internal architecture of learning in communities of practice through four complementary dualities — not dichotomies on a single spectrum, but independent axes whose interplay shapes how practice and identity emerge together. The first and most fundamental duality is between participation (“the social experience of living in the world in terms of membership in social communities and active involvement in social enterprises”) and reification (“the process of giving form to our experiences”), which together shape both what we do and how we make meaning of it. The remaining three dualities specify further tensions at the heart of CoP design and analysis.

1. Participation and reification: lived engagement and the objects, procedures, laws, or tools that give form to experience each shape practice and identity together.

2. Designed and emergent: practice and identity emerge in response to design rather than as its direct product — there is an “inherent uncertainty between design and its realization in practice.”

3. Global and local: CoPs must participate in designing their own learning locally while remaining subject to external, global influences.

4. Identification and negotiability: members share a common identity through association with a CoP while continually negotiating what that identity means in particular times and places.

• Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice: Learning, meaning, and identity. Cambridge University Press.
• Omidvar, O., & Kislov, R. (2014). The evolution of the communities of practice approach: Toward knowledgeability in a landscape of practice — An interview with Etienne Wenger-Trayner. Journal of Management Inquiry, 23(3), 266–275.

Extending CoP theory from individual communities to the learning capability of whole social systems, Wenger (2010) specified four capabilities through which a system negotiates and leverages its potential for collective learning. Citizenship describes how each participant's identity and sense of belonging shape their investment and involvement across learning spaces. Power describes how accountability is distributed — vertically, through traditional hierarchies, and horizontally, through democratized peer accountability — and Wenger cautioned against romanticizing horizontal accountability: “a self-governed community of practice is not heaven … it can reproduce all sorts of undesirable things, such as racism or corruption,” and vertical accountability can usefully structure and simplify local engagement. Partnership describes the dynamics of collaboration, anchored in the belief that each member can contribute and be valued. Governance describes the process by which a social system becomes a learning system, and Wenger distinguishes two complementary modes: stewarding governance, driven by “seeking agreement and alignment,” and emergent governance, which holds space for learning that “bubbles up from a distributed system of interactions involving local decisions.” Both modes, he argues, are needed for systemic learning capability.

1. Citizenship: individual identity, belonging, and investment across learning spaces.

2. Power: the distribution of accountability — vertical and horizontal — within the system.

3. Partnership: the dynamics of collaboration through which members mutually engage, focus on practice, and build trust.

4. Governance: the interplay of stewarding (alignment, standardization) and emergent (innovation, risk-taking) modes by which a system becomes a learning system.

• Wenger, E. (2010). Communities of practice and social learning systems: The career of a concept. In Social learning systems and communities of practice (pp. 179–198).
• Wenger-Trayner, E., Fenton-O'Creevy, M., Hutchinson, S., Kubiak, C., & Wenger-Trayner, B. (Eds.). (2014). Learning in landscapes of practice: Boundaries, identity, and knowledgeability in practice-based learning. Routledge.
• Wesley, P. W., & Buysse, V. (2001). Communities of practice: Expanding professional roles to promote reflection and shared inquiry. Topics in Early Childhood Special Education, 21(2), 114–123.

Wenger's most recent extension of the CoP framework, developed with Beverly Wenger-Trayner, reframes social learning around the question of value creation: “a perspective on social learning that reflects the aspiration to make a difference. Social learning creates value to the extent that it is recognized as improving the ability to make that difference.” Motivated by what the Wenger-Trayners describe as the urgent twenty-first-century need for a different kind of learning in the face of political, informational, and ethical upheaval, the value-creation framework specifies eight cycles through which social learning spaces generate individual and collective value, and frames aspiration and evaluation as integral features of social learning rather than external add-ons. The framework thereby repositions CoPs from a descriptive account of where learning happens to a normative model of how learning can be mobilized for societal change.

1. Immediate value: the value of activities and interactions as they occur in the social learning space.

2. Potential value: the knowledge, relationships, skills, and inspiration developed for later use.

3. Applied value: the adaptation and use of potential value in actual practice.

4. Realized value: the performance outcomes that follow from applying what was learned.

5. Enabling value: the structures, frameworks, and conditions that make future learning and change possible.

6. Strategic value: alignment of learning with long-term goals and directions.

7. Orienting value: the clarified sense of direction and purpose participants derive from engagement.

8. Transformative value: fundamental changes in practice, identity, or the social field itself.

• Wenger, E., Trayner, B., & de Laat, M. (2011). Promoting and assessing value creation in communities and networks: A conceptual framework. Ruud de Moor Centrum.
• Wenger, E., & Wenger-Trayner, B. (2020). Learning to make a difference: Value creation in social learning spaces. Cambridge University Press.
• Buch, A. (2021). Etienne and Beverly Wenger-Trayner (2020). In Learning to make a difference. Value creation in social learning spaces: Book review. Nordic Journal of Working Life Studies, 11(1), 129–132.
• Acai, A., Ahmad, A., Fenton, N., Graystone, L., Phillips, K., Smith, R., & Stockley, D. (2018). The 3M national teaching fellowship: A high impact community of practice in higher education. Teaching and Learning Inquiry, 6(2), 50–66.

• Wenger, E. (1987). Artificial intelligence and tutoring systems: Computational and cognitive approaches to the communication of knowledge. Morgan Kaufmann.
• Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge University Press.
• Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice: Learning, meaning, and identity. Cambridge University Press.
• Wenger, E. (2010). Communities of practice and social learning systems: The career of a concept. In C. Blackmore (Ed.), Social learning systems and communities of practice (pp. 179–198). Springer.
• Wenger, E., Trayner, B., & de Laat, M. (2011). Promoting and assessing value creation in communities and networks: A conceptual framework. Ruud de Moor Centrum.
• Wenger-Trayner, E., Fenton-O'Creevy, M., Hutchinson, S., Kubiak, C., & Wenger-Trayner, B. (Eds.). (2014). Learning in landscapes of practice: Boundaries, identity, and knowledgeability in practice-based learning. Routledge.
• Farnsworth, V., Kleanthous, I., & Wenger-Trayner, E. (2016). Communities of practice as a social theory of learning: A conversation with Etienne Wenger. British Journal of Educational Studies, 64(2), 139–160.
• Wenger, E., & Wenger-Trayner, B. (2020). Learning to make a difference: Value creation in social learning spaces. Cambridge University Press.
• Acai, A., Ahmad, A., Fenton, N., Graystone, L., Phillips, K., Smith, R., & Stockley, D. (2018). The 3M national teaching fellowship: A high impact community of practice in higher education. Teaching and Learning Inquiry, 6(2), 50–66.
• Bandura, A. (1971). Social learning theory. General Learning Corporation.
• Bandura, A. (1977). Self-efficacy: Toward a unifying theory of behavioral change. Psychological Review, 84(2), 191–215.
• Bransford, J., Brown, A., & Cocking, R. (Eds.). (2000). How people learn: Brain, mind, experience, and school (Expanded ed.). National Academy Press.
• Brown, J. S., Collins, A., & Duguid, P. (1989). Situated cognition and the culture of learning. Educational Researcher, 18(1), 32–42.
• Buch, A. (2021). Etienne and Beverly Wenger-Trayner (2020). Learning to make a difference: Book review. Nordic Journal of Working Life Studies, 11(1), 129–132.
• Contu, A. (2014). On boundaries and difference: Communities of practice and power relations in creative work. Management Learning, 45(3), 289–316.
• Gómez, R. L., & Suárez, A. M. (2021). Extending impact beyond the community: Protocol for a scoping review of evidence of the impact of communities of practice on teaching and learning in higher education. International Journal of Educational Research Open, 2, 100048.
• Li, L. C., Grimshaw, J. M., Nielsen, C., Judd, M., Coyte, P. C., & Graham, I. D. (2009). Evolution of Wenger's concept of community of practice. Implementation Science, 4(1), 11.
• Omidvar, O., & Kislov, R. (2014). The evolution of the communities of practice approach. Journal of Management Inquiry, 23(3), 266–275.
• Wesley, P. W., & Buysse, V. (2001). Communities of practice: Expanding professional roles to promote reflection and shared inquiry. Topics in Early Childhood Special Education, 21(2), 114–123.
• Yi, P. (2022). Teachers' communities of practice in response to the COVID-19 pandemic: Will innovation in teaching practices persist and prosper? Journal of Curriculum and Teaching, 11(5), 241.