04/19/2022

Enabling Community Success

What social learning theory can teach us

Since medieval times, communities have banded together to enhance mutual strengths and slay their respective dragons. In the European Middle Ages, towns developed around trade routes and castles, and townspeople formed communes—or defense alliances—to protect their people, liberties and commodities.

Modern societies still depend on communities to support common missions, which today include networking and engaging in collective learning. In a professional sense, these groups are known as communities of practice, a term defined by cognitive anthropologists Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger-Trayner as “groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly.”

Etienne told us he and his colleague first coined the term while exploring the traditional master-apprentice relationship.

Please select this link to read the complete article from Associations Now.