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

ISBN 10: 0521544920 / ISBN 13: 9780521544924

Published by Cambridge University Press, 2005

In. Seller Inventory # ria9780521544924_new

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 the Authors: 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.

Karin Tusting is a Research Associate at the Literacy Research Centre at Lancaster University. She is currently working on the Adult Learners' Lives project, an ethnography study of the relationship between learning and other aspects of people's lives, working with adult literacy, numeracy, and ESOL learners.

Bibliographic Details

Title: Beyond Communities of Practice: Language ...
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Publication Date: 2005
Binding: Soft cover
Condition: New