A community of practice is a group of people who share a concern or passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly. The term was introduced by Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger in Situated Learning [@lave_SituatedLearning_1991] and developed further in Wenger’s Communities of Practice [@wenger_CommunitiesOfPractice_1998].
A community of practice has three defining characteristics:
- Mutual engagement. Members participate together in shared activities. Learning is not individual acquisition of information but a social process of becoming a practitioner among practitioners.
- Joint enterprise. The community is organized around a shared domain of interest — a craft, a discipline, a set of problems. Members are accountable to this shared enterprise, though they may negotiate what it means in practice.
- Shared repertoire. Over time, the community develops resources — routines, tools, vocabulary, stories, concepts, methods — that members use to negotiate meaning and conduct their practice.
The concept challenges the assumption that learning is primarily individual and cognitive. In Lave and Wenger’s account, learning is a process of increasing participation in a community: the newcomer moves from legitimate peripheral participation — performing simple, low-risk tasks at the margins — toward fuller participation as competence develops. This is the structure of apprenticeship, but the concept applies beyond formal apprentice-master relationships to any sustained group practice.
Communities of practice are present across traditions. The Indigenous study circle, the quilting bee, the hackerspace, the freedom school reading group, the scientific research lab, and the craft guild are all communities of practice in this sense — groups where learning occurs through participation rather than instruction.
The concept has been widely adopted in organizational management and corporate training, often in ways that flatten its critical edge. Wenger’s original account emphasizes that communities of practice involve power, identity, and boundary-making — who is included and excluded, whose participation counts, and what kinds of knowledge are recognized. These dynamics are central to the concerns of critical pedagogy and Black radical pedagogies.
Related terms
- apprenticeship — the learning mode most clearly structured by legitimate peripheral participation
- mutual aid pedagogy — non-hierarchical learning within communities
- popular education — community-based education that often takes the form of communities of practice
- oral transmission — the communicative mode through which much community knowledge is shared