Communities of practice and ways to learning: charting the progress of biology undergraduates

Abstract

This article discusses social learning outside of the overt curriculum. A thematic approach was used to analyse data from semi-structured interviews with 30 biological sciences students from a post-1992 university in the UK. The results indicate that: (1) students form communities of practice which function outside the formal curriculum, (2) there is a changing profile to community practice over three years of study as undergraduates revise their sense of academic identity, and (3) students' communities of practice seem to be influenced by external social networks which remain constant in their nature over three years of study. Findings are discussed in terms of Wenger's framework for the development of communities of practice, the role of distributed cognition in student social learning, and the importance of social capital within student social learning networks. Implications for the taught curriculum and how it is delivered are considered

Keywords:

• communities of practice
• distributed cognition
• social networks
• non-curricular learning
• patterns of participation

Acknowledgement

The authors would like to thank Mishele Barrigas for the transcriptions of interviews, the students involved in this study and the Centre for Bioscience for financial support.