Being Sensitive to Power Increases Collaboration and Learning

In this blog, I aim to thread together the contents of my previous blogs on collaborative learning and sensitivity to power using Wenger’s theory. In this way, my goal is to find the practical in Wenger’s theory as well as to extend the discussion on the limitations of his work.

As was exemplified in the movie Crash, we use our personal force and power to influence people within our communities of practice as well as to objectify people outside of our communities of practice. Thus, power has a dual nature: it can be both productive and destructive. As a destructive force, power can create barriers leading to exclusion and discrimination. As a productive force, power can lead to significant and transformational learning. For example, the conflicts around power on the edge of the boundaries of communities of practice are where we begin to question our learned assumptions, challenge our perceived notions of fairness and examine how that impacts our practice and how we make sense of the world. I believe that these “crashes” of boundaries can be transformational without being so destructive if we employ more collaborative approaches to learning and interacting with one another.

Wenger agrees that communities of practice can be counterproductive by reinforcing unequal power relations. He states, “Communities of practice should not be romanticized: they can reproduce counterproductive patterns, injustices, prejudices, racism, sexism, and abuses of all kinds. In fact, I would argue that they are the very locus of such reproduction” (p.132). After a statement like this, I though Wenger would go on to devote more space and time to the influence of personal and systemic power. But this is where Wenger falls short. He fails to explicitly acknowledge the systemic nature of power in communities of practice, instead he chooses to focus on the ways power impacts our belonging and identity. He states, “I will treat issues of power not so much in terms of political institutions or economic systems which are the traditional focus of theories of power, but in terms of negotiation of meaning and the formation of identities- that is, the property of social communities” (p.189).

While I will continue to critique his lack of systemic power analysis, I was surprised to find how much I could relate to his discussion of modes of belonging. In particular, I found his theoretical triad of engagement, imagination, and alignment quite useful to help unpack the way social power plays itself out in learning and meaning making. Indeed Wenger agrees that when power is more equally shared, so is participation and ownership of knowledge. He states, “[B]ecause meanings are socially negotiated, shared ownership can widen participation in their production and thus increase ownership for all participants (p.200).

Wenger defines engagement as “the work of forming communities of practice and the ability to take part in meaningful activities and interactions toward the negotiation of meaning” (184). Imagination, he says, is the “ability to take a step back and look at our engagement through the eye of an outsider” (p.185), which I understand as the ability to empathize and suspend judgement. And, the work of alignment “requires the ability to coordinate perspectives and actions in order to direct energies to a common purpose” (p.186). Alignment work focuses on the need for collaboration, in order to take our individual experiences and create a discourse around them. Wenger suggests that this triad of elements need to be combined, as they rely on one another so that a community of practice becomes a learning community.

Wenger’s framework of engagement, imagination, and alignment helps me to identify and more clearly communicate why the collaborative approaches I use in my facilitation work are so important. In order to engage people and support learning, we need to create space for relationship building and authentic sharing. I use group agreements and think-pair-share (described in my last blog) to help create this democratic space. The work of imagination is the only way we can begin to understand what it might be like to walk in someone else’s shoes. I usually incorporate elements of one-to-one story sharing in my facilitation to achieve this, to allow participants to expose themselves to one another to increase understanding and empathy. The work of alignment and finding common ground can only happen when people feel their voices have been heard and valued. Then, people can step outside of their individual identities and communities of practice, and begin to straddle the boundaries of their multimemberships and multiidentities.

Beyond just creating modes of belonging, I believe Wenger’s three-fold process and framework of sharing, understanding, and finding common ground is central to building the capacity of people to see the connections and the distinctions between personal and systemic power. If I could add a fourth constituent to Wenger’s framework, I would add critical reflection, based on the work of Freire, Brookfield and many others. Critical reflection adds the necessity and builds the capacity for communities of practice to examine their identities and belonging in relation to political, institutional, and systemic forces of power. This would extend Wenger’s theory beyond personal learning to transformational social change.

Studying Wenger has reinforced for me the need to be explicit about power in all of the learning contexts that I engage in. I try to bring my own understanding of personal and systemic power to all the work that I do. However, I often fail to be more explicit about why I think discussions of power are so important, and how the practices that I employ are built on creating democratic space for engagement, imagination, alignment, and critical reflection in the pursuit of meaning making that challenges the status quo.