In a landmark collaboration, five co-authors develop a theme of ordinary disruptions ("the everyday") as a source of provocative learning moments that can liberate both student writers and writing center staff. At the same time, the authors parlay Etienne Wenger’s concept of "community of practice" into an ethos of a dynamic, learner-centered pedagogy that is especially well-suited to the peculiar teaching situation of the writing center. They push themselves and their field toward deeper, more significant research, more self-conscious teaching.

Today's marketplace is fueled by knowledge. Yet organizing systematically to leverage knowledge remains a challenge. Leading companies have discovered that technology is not enough, and that cultivating communities of practice is the keystone of an effective knowledge strategy. Communities of practice come together around common interests and expertise- whether they consist of first-line managers or customer service representatives, neurosurgeons or software programmers, city managers or home-improvement amateurs. They create, share, and apply knowledge within and across the boundaries of teams, business units, and even entire companies-providing a concrete path toward creating a true knowledge organization. In Cultivating Communities of Practice, Etienne Wenger, Richard McDermott, and William M. Snyder argue that while communities form naturally, organizations need to become more proactive and systematic about developing and integrating them into their strategy. This book provides practical models and methods for stewarding these communities to reach their full potential-without squelching the inner drive that makes them so valuable. Through in-depth cases from firms such as DaimlerChrysler, McKinsey & Company, Shell, and the World Bank, the authors demonstrate how communities of practice can be leveraged to drive overall company strategy, generate new business opportunities, tie personal development to corporate goals, transfer best practices, and recruit and retain top talent. They define the unique features of these communities and outline principles for nurturing their essential elements. They provide guidelines to support communities of practice through their major stages of development, address the potential downsides of communities, and discuss the specific challenges of distributed communities. And they show how to recognize the value created by communities of practice and how to build a corporate knowledge strategy around them. Essential reading for any leader in today's knowledge economy, this is the definitive guide to developing communities of practice for the benefit-and long-term success-of organizations and the individuals who work in them. Etienne Wenger is a renowned expert and consultant on knowledge management and communities of practice in San Juan, California. Richard McDermott is a leading expert of organization and community development in Boulder, Colorado. William M. Snyder is a founding partner of Social Capital Group, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Connecting with other people, finding a sense of belonging and the need for support are natural human desires. Employees who don't feel supported at work don't stay around for long - or if they do, they quickly become unmotivated and unhappy. At a time when organisational structures are flattening and workforces are increasingly fluid, supporting and connecting people is more important than ever. This is where organisational communities of practice come in. Communities of practice have many valuable benefits. They include accelerating professional development; breaking down organisational silos; enabling knowledge sharing and management; building better practice; helping to hire and retain staff; and making people happier. In this book, Emily Webber shares her learning from personal experiences of building successful communities of practice within organisations. And along the way, she gives practical guidance on creating your own.

The role of writing in building community is an important topic. This book moves us through that process by describing the journey into the fold of a particular writing community. While it may be helpful to describe community membership as a typical journey, it is nonetheless important to interrogate this journey of belonging through examining the specific nature of one such community. Given that both the nature of collaborative writing and community practices are situated, the journey itself is also situated practice. The writing community described in this text is Inkshed, an academic collaborative that has existed over twenty-five years at the publication of this text. What is Inkshed? It is the nickname of the Canadian Association for the Study of Language and Learning (CASLL), an organization that has the purpose of exploring relationships among research, theory, and practice in language acquisition and language use, particularly in the Canadian context. Inkshed has a website, LISTSERV, publication group, and annual meetings. The membership is a mixture of mainly Canadian academics and professional writers from across the provinces and territories. Regional members organize a yearly conference. For these conferences, members are provided with a guiding theme that creates a common thread for member presentations. Following and often during presentations at each one of these conferences, a special type of sharing takes place: members write responses to each of the presentations; they literally shed ink on the presentations and then place these response writings on conference tables for others to read and engage in further writing, responses to the responses. Writings in response to the speakers are then gathered together by a team of conference organizers, edited and distributed so that all members, including the presenters, can read the written responses of their community throughout the duration of the conference. As the technology has become available, some responses have been posted online. This writing-in-community response was a forerunner of the current social networks, which became an inevitable consequence of writing collectives online such as Wikis, Twitter, online letters to the editor, fan fiction, or Facebook. Inkshedders have always described this conference as a working conference and described the collaborative nature of their responses in writing as a far deeper experience than merely listening to a speaker and/or asking questions at the end of a session. The audience is purposefully engaged. The investment of self is personal. In this text, Miriam Horne has addressed the nature of this deeper experience. She notes that it is a risk-taking venture and that the feeling of membership goes beyond paying fees to belong. Inkshedders must pay their dues in other ways toward full membership. Legitimate peripheral participation (LPP), as introduced by Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger, is only the beginning. Horne's book provides insight into knowledge about membership and invites us to think about our own and other communities of membership such as school classrooms, Web 2.0, churches, and clubs. We see that peripheral participation is an important and tenuous aspect of membership and that success in this outside margin is important to the nature of how one sees oneself later, on the inside of membership. Horne's interrogation of what it means to become an Inkshedder allows us to interrogate the meaning of membership through collaborative writing, and determine what it really means to become part of a community. The book describes a personal journey into academic writing in community and is a good read for anyone who aspires to that destination.

In this edited collection, the authors pick up the communities of practice (CoP) approach of sharing practice in their reflection on the experience of taking their CoP vision from a dream to reality. Their stories articulate the vision, the passion and the challenge of working within and/or changing existing institutional culture and practice. The book discusses strategies that worked and considers the lessons learnt to inspire future dreamers and schemers. The multiple perspectives provided in the case studies will assist higher education leaders, as well as academic and professional staff, in establishing or assessing CoPs. The book offers insights into implementation strategies, practical guidelines and ideas on how CoP theoretical underpinnings can be tailored to the higher education context.

Languages change and they keep changing as a result of communicative interactions and practices in the context of communities of language users. The articles in this volume showcase a range of such communities and their practices as loci of language change in the history of English. The notion of communities of practice takes its starting point in the work of Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger and refers to groups of people defined both through their membership in a community and through their shared practices. Three types of communities are particularly highlighted: networks of letter writers; groups of scribes and printers; and other groups of professionals, in particular administrators and scientists. In these diverse contexts in England, Scotland, the United States and South Africa, language change is not seen as an abstract process but as a response to the communicative needs and practices of groups of people engaged in interaction.

Communities of Practice in Language Research provides an up-to-date and critical introduction to the community of practice framework and how this can be applied to language research. Critiquing and offering alternative suggestions for the ways in which researchers frame research participants as members of communities of practice, with the goal of inspiring use of the Community of Practice (CofP) model in new areas of research, this book: engages in extended critical analysis of past research as well as questioning recent applications and suggesting limitations incorporates instructive examples from multiple fields, including Sociolinguistics, Linguistic Anthropology, Critical Discourse Studies, Language Teaching & Learning, Literacy Studies, and a trailblazing section on Language & Digital Media brings up-to-date the key questions and concerns around the Communities of Practice model, debunking myths and re-emphasising ongoing challenges. Communities of Practice in Language Research is essential reading for undergraduate and postgraduate students studying research methods or undertaking research projects in those areas.