Communities of Practice

In the Theories and Learning Cognition class I took last semester I learned about communities of practice. Communities of Practice (CoPs) are organized groups of people who have common interest. They collaborate regularly to share information and improve their skills. CoP members exhibit multiple levels of participation:

Peripheral - An outsider who never leads to full membership but is significant in contributing to the community. 

Inbound - Newcomers joining the community with the prospect of becoming full participants in its practice.

Insider - The formation of a full participant in the community. Practice continues through new events and demands creating occasions for renegotiation of identity. 

Boundary - Span boundaries and link CoPs, sustaining identities across practices.

Outbound - The member begins to lead out of the community.

One of the most recent communities of practice I have been involved in was a local running group. We all were pursuing our common interest of running. We engaged in joint activities and discussions to help each other become better at our practice and built collaborative relationships that tied us together as a social entity. Through our interactions we created a shared understanding of what bound us together. We were all committed to the domain and valued our collective competence to learn from each other. In pursuing our interest in our domain, we developed a shared repertoire of resources: experiences, stories, tools, ways of addressing recurring problems, and created a shared practice.

I began my journey in this running community of practice on a peripheral trajectory. I volunteered during races to hand out snacks and water, but I was not yet part of the group. I then joined a beginning running group and became inbound because I was becoming a participating member of the community. I attended events occasionally and joined Facebook groups to see what was going on in the community. Once I spent time with the group and became a regular attendee I became an insider. I attended many different running groups and races, and interacted with members of the community regularly. I began to make friends in the group and even ran with people outside of our scheduled running events. We often encountered people on a boundary trajectory during our meetings or events. We sometimes had massage therapists come to give us tips for stretches and ways to massage after a run. Other times, we had shoe experts come give us expert advice on picking the correct shoe for our running styles. These people were not fully participating members of the community, but participated by bringing a different set of services to our community. I eventually became outbound when I got surgery on my foot and no longer was able to participate in the running activities. I prepared to leave the community by participating less and less until I stopped going altogether. While a path through these five learning trajectories is not mandated, it was interesting to see how I progressed from one stage to the next as part of the community of practice. Once I  finish physical therapy after my most recent surgery, I hope to become an insider to this community of practice again one day.