Communities of Practice.

Community of practice is the social learning "achieved from a process of engagement" with colleagues. Wenger and Lowe state that a Community of Practice could happen anywhere whether it was 'at work, school, home or in our leisure interests.

The only community of practice I have been involved in for a long time other than school was The Brownies. The Brownies is an organisation where girls between the ages 7 and 10 could attend once a week and learn basic skills in outdoors, cookery and social skills. At first when i started I knew quite a few people from school but there were alot of faces I didn't know which made me scared as it felt like everyoen knew eachother and had these special relationships and I felt like an outsider.

However as I was knew people were always helping me out and teaching me how everything was done. One of the main aims of The Brownies was to comeplete tasks to get badges that you could put on your sash and so by helping each other out and as Wenger states "engaging" with each other it helped us to achieve our goals aswell as developing relatiosnships and social skills.

I feel I became as Wenger calls it a "core member"when I was 10 years old and i was made a Sixer where i had to lead my group and if other Brownies had a problem then they would come to me for advice. I was also incharge of keeping the group area clean and tidy and to make sure all the Brownies did the jobs they had too. This helped build relatiosnships and as alot of the badges were achieved through group work then members often helped out eachother to make sure people got the badges they aimed for. However the "core members" of The Brownies were the leaders who were in charge of all the children and organised all teh activities that happened. They had the power to give us the badges and were the people who decided if we had completed a task well enough. As it was not a school environment then it didn't feel like they had authority over us it just felt like they shared the same interests.