Communities of Practice: Education and Mind in the Knoweldge Age- Part II

More thoughts on the ideas presented by Bereiter:

Many are familiar with the idea of a Community of Practice (we educators all face a similar problem in trying to help middle schoolers learn what they need to learn and we all participate in generating our collective understanding of how to do that at NELMS conferences for example). Bereiter takes the idea a step further with CoP in education as he recognizes the special circumstances of education:

1. Educators work in unique social circumstances that affect our practice (and unlike other CoP we have no control over these social circumstances).
2. As we seek to become technology-rich CoP the tools that we have available will affect what we can (or cannot) do.
3. Educational CoP have unusually deep and embedded divisions of labor and norms regulating behavior (many of which are informal).

Through Bereiter's nuanced lens of CoP, we can more clearly see the challenges of reinventing schooling for the 21st century.