Communities of practice to understand civic education?

Phew, been away for a while, but the new semester has started, so back to it. Current focus is to complete the comprehensive exam and identify and start defining a research topic for the dissertation. More on that later, but for now I wanted to make some notes on the use of a framework that I am considering for the dissertation.

Wenger & Lave (1991) and Wenger (1998) describe situated learning that occurs in communities of practice. Researching communities of practice has become a staple of research on teacher learning - I have been using it to think about a research partnership between a school and a university-based research center. This owes some of its roots to Wenger's position in the field of organizational theory. Many companies have also used the idea of communities of practice to better understand the flow of information through their organization and restructure the organization to facilitate the flow of knowledge to the places it is needed. What I have not seen much of is the application of communities of practice to student learning. Perhaps there has been some if this in the fields of mathematics and computer/technology learning, but I certainly have not found it in the realm of civic education. (Though I did find this article which calls for it in service learning (Wolfson & Willinsky, 1998)). This direction was recommended to me by a colleague, and since our conversation, the idea has been growing on me. There seems to be a significant gap in research concerning the learning process in civic education, and I think this could be a framework that could help us think about experiences like service learning. What communities of practice are created through service learning experiences? Does service learning open the possibility for student to engage in "legitimate peripheral participation" with those in the space where they are serving? (Do students who are tutoring in a school have an opportunity to engage with teachers around educational issues? How does this impact their experience?) Communities of practice happen, and they help students make sense of their experiences - so what communities of practice do service learning students become a part of?

Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge [England]: Cambridge University Press.

Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity. Cambridge, [England]: Cambridge University Press.

Wolfson, L., & Willinsky, J. (1998). What Service-Learning Can Learn from Situated Learning. Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning, 5. Retrieved from http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/mjcsl/browse.html