Teacher Learning in a Community of Practice: A Case Study of ...

who did or did not want to become fully-fledged members. These teachers were offered
various forms ofcasual, but legitimate access to the practice without subjecting them to
the demands offull membership. It was able to provide opportunities for learning both
for outsiders and for the TEMS community. Wenger refers to this as 'multiple levels of
involvement' and notes that in a community ofpractice, mutual engagement can become
'progressively looser' at the periphery, with layers ranging from 'core membership to
extreme peripherality' (Wenger 1998: 118). The TEMS community was able to offer
multiple and diverse opportunities for learning where different participants contributed
and benefited differently, depending on their relations to the endeavour and the
community.
7.3 AN ANALYSIS OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE TEMS COMMUNITY
USING WENGER ET AL'S FIVE STAGES OF COMMUNITY
DEVELOPMENT ASA FRAME
Some communities ofpractice could exist over many years while others could be short­
lived but "intense enough to generate indigenous practice and transform the identities of
those involved" (Wenger 1998:86). Such communities arise in the face ofcrises where
people come together to deal with a situation. The TEMS community could be viewed as
such a community that had formed in response to a crisis that new EMS teachers were
facing, namely, having limited subject content knowledge and pedagogic content
knowledge to teach the EMS learning area.
Communities ofpractice continually evolve. Wenger et al suggest five stages of
community development: potential; coalescing; maturing; stewardship and
transformation (Wenger et al 2002, see Chapter Two). They caution that while it is
possible to discern different stages, progression from one stage to the next entails an
evolutionary transition and not a distinct or sudden shift. While some communities go
through one stage quite quickly, others may spend much time in the same stage or may
even skip a stage. This phenomenon was evident in the development ofthe TEMS
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