Beyond Communities of Practice: Language Power and Social Context (Learning in Doing: Social, Cognitive and Computational Perspectives) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0521836433 ISBN 13: 9780521836432

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2005

Synopsis

The concept of "communities of practice" (Lave and Wenger 1991, Wenger 1998) has become influential in education, management, and social sciences in recent years. This volume emphasizes the significance of language, power, and social context in understanding how communities of practice work. Domains of empirical research reported include schools, police stations, adult basic education, higher education and multilingual settings. The relationship between communities of practice and literacy studies, critical language studies, the ethnography of communication, socio-cultural activity theory, and sociological theories of risk is also evaluated.

About this title

Book Description

This book consists of a set of studies exploring the concept of "communities of practice", which has been influential in social sciences, education, and management in recent years. Its main purpose is to emphasize the importance of areas such as language, power, and social context which are essential to understanding how communities of practice work. The concept has been a particularly influential one but has had little sustained critique, so a book of this kind is timely and necessary.

About the Author

David Barton is Professor of Language and Literacy in the Department of Linguistics at Lancaster University. He is Director of the Lancaster Literacy Research Centre. His main work has been concerned with carrying out detailed studies of literacy practices in different domains of life and with rethinking the nature of literacy in contemporary society.

About this edition

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0521836433
• ISBN 13: 9780521836432
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 258
• Editor: Barton David, Tusting Karin