Communities of practice in higher education: A challenge from the discipline of architecture

Uncritically applying a community of practice model has become rather prevalent in higher education settings (Lea, 2005). This paper attempts to return to the spirit of Lave and Wenger's earlier (1991) work and to use a community of practice perspective as a heuristic to analyse participation patterns in a final year design studio in the discipline of architecture. The data consisted of videotapes, transcriptions, and interviews with participants, and showed that students’ opportunities to rehearse expert roles relevant to the profession were somewhat limited. Instead of an extended community of participants engaged collaboratively in joint activities, patterns of interaction between the instructor and the students were typically hierarchical. Despite this, the students felt that their participation in this class was a legitimate part of their trajectories towards membership in the professional community of practice, underlining the complexity of higher education contexts. The paper suggests that the usefulness of the concept of community of practice to higher education lies primarily in treating classes as one of many overlapping more or less formal communities students may be involved in.

► Students’ opportunities in the design studio to rehearse expert roles were limited.
► Patterns of interaction between the instructor and the students were hierarchical.
► The relevance of the CoP concept to higher education is in theorizing its complexity.
► Students are being socialised into multiple overlapping communities of practice simultaneously.