Communities of Practice and Social Learning - A Conversation with Etienne and Beverly Wenger-Trayner

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

And it's that uncertainty that drives the learning. So it's almost like turning it on its head, you know, instead of the certainty of a knower driving the process, it's the uncertainty of the practitioner driving the desire to improve their ability to make a difference they care to make.

Hi everyone, welcome back to the podcast. Apologies for my lack of voice this week. As you can hear, many of us are pulling ourselves over the line at the end of the summer term in the Northern Hemisphere. But this week is a fantastic conversation that you won't want to miss with Etienne and Beverly Wenger-Trainer. Etienne and Beverly are internationally renowned social learning theorists and consultants. Their pioneering research and consulting is influential in diverse fields including learning theory, business, government, international development, healthcare, and education. They founded the Social Learning Lab to host events on theory, practice, and leadership, and their more recent writing updating the theory in Learning in Landscapes of Practice and in the first volume in their new book series, Learning to Make a Difference: Value Creation in Social Learning Spaces. I can also highly recommend their Communities of Practice guidebook as a really useful resource.

Well, great. Thank you, Étienne and Bev. Lovely to meet you, and thank you very much for joining the podcast. I have been really enjoying learning more and more about your works through Ray Ison, who's been a previous guest on the podcast, and I think it's, you know, it's incredibly important work in the sense of many people around the world exploring not necessarily a new phenomenon, but exploring what might be an important shift in education, formal education and schooling. But I think probably in our conversation we may stray into other areas of learning and development in all sorts of sectors, because I know you work in many sectors. So thank you very much firstly, great pleasure to be with you today and thanks for joining.

Thanks, Tim Logan. And also just to say that in fact, education is really a tiny part of our work. It's the tiniest. People often think if you're into learning, then you're into education. But yeah, we mostly work in other sectors other than education.

Great. And I think that's really important because I, one of the things I feel strongly about is that we need to be looking and learning everywhere in all sorts of different sectors outside of formal education. I do personally, I have a feeling about education as a, as a social phenomenon that is much broader than just formal schooling. I prefer to differentiate between those things because I think education is something very special about education generally, more broadly. And maybe if perhaps a good place to start is somewhat historically, is in relation to the concept of communities of practice, because that idea itself will be somewhat familiar to people working in schools around the world. So people listening, professional learning communities or communities of practice have been around in kind of professional development, professional learning conversations in education for quite a few decades. The question as to whether, how much impact they have had or how much hold they've taken in terms of really transforming experience of teachers in professional development is a different question, but it's definitely a phrase that they are familiar with. And obviously that's a phrase that you both, I think, but particularly you Etienne with your book in 1991, you know, coined the term communities of practice. So could you perhaps, yeah, just let's maybe start there and then we'll see where, where we go. But yeah, if you could just speak about how has that developed perhaps since the beginnings and maybe, yeah, just a bit of context.

Yeah, but to just clarify, the professional learning community is kind of like a pedagogical approach, right? Community of practice is a concept in a learning theory. It's not a pedagogical approach. Rather than saying what's the difference between a professional learning community and a community of practice, a better question is to what extent does a professional learning community act as the community of practice. Then it asks certain questions about the structure and the functioning of this professional learning community.

So perhaps could you say a little bit more then about what that means in terms of how it might embody the principles of a community of practice, or perhaps not sometimes?

Yes.

So I was hired, I was in AI actually originally. My first book was on tutoring systems, which was an application of AI to education. You know, what we called AI then is completely different from what we call AI today. It was like 35 years ago, 40 years ago. So anyway, but I was hired and, uh, that institute, its target audience was education. It was created following a Department of Education report in the US called A Nation at Risk. You don't need to read the report to guess what it was saying. And the idea was, why don't we rethink learning? Not education, but rethink learning, and then under a new vision of learning, reimagine the institutions that would foster learning. So that was the, the idea of this institute. And so they brought a bunch of researchers from different disciplines and working together to answer that question outside of a university so that there was some freedom to really explore across disciplinary boundaries, which was not yet fashionable at the time. And so I started to work with an anthropologist who had done a lot of work in Africa. About how young boys, mostly at the time, become tailors. So we thought, hmm, maybe apprenticeship could give us a clue to how to reframe the theory of learning because apprenticeship is as old as humankind. It precedes all these institutions. What can we learn from it? We were aware that the point was not to bring back apprenticeship in the 21st century, but to learn from it. What we could learn about learning theory. And so the first observation was that even though apprenticeship is often thought of as a relationship between a master and an apprentice, if you go and look in practice, the learning does not happen so much around the master because that's too big a figure to go ask a question. You ask another apprentice who is a little ahead of you, how do you do that? You know? And so we realized, wow, there is a community here and the learning is a trajectory into that community. And so the concept of community of practice was born to give a name to that community that acted as a kind of living curriculum for the young apprentice, starting at the periphery of the community, but legitimately so, you know, accepted as a non-yet members, but future possible member. And, and drawn in over time into full membership of that community. So that's how the term was coined, really as an observation and really not as a technique.

So yeah, one of my questions there would be, so as educators, for example, gather around a professional question, you know, an inquiry that they are interested in, whether it's how to engage, disengage learners more, or how to improve academic achievement, or, you know, whatever the professional inquiry question might be, I'm struggling slightly at the moment to see what's the difference between the articulation of a community of practice there and what I would see as a professional learning community where they gather around a kind of professional question.

Well, so the theory has evolved a lot. And we would say that it had gone through 4 different phases since that original observation. And so the next phase after that was to observe communities where there was no master. So you had the same phenomenon of learning from each other, but there was no master embodying the practice. And I guess for you, that's where this kind of professional learning community would come in, right? Because you are driven by practice. Practice becomes the curriculum. I don't know how to do that and you help me. So that was the second phase. And at that time, actually, before there were professional learning communities, there were committees of practice in all sorts of businesses, large companies that said, wow, that way of bringing people together to learn how to do something from each other.

Yeah.

It's more powerful than sitting people in our training center. And so it became a way to formalize something that had already happened in the company, that people talk to each other, but to formalize it as a, yeah, it's a legitimate use of your time to spend a couple of hours a month with your colleague in different business units to help each other practice well.

Yeah.

You know, I think that, I mean, there must be as many PLCs, different types doing different things, as there are different COPS doing different things. And I'm sure that there's a big overlap. But my understanding of PLCs is that they're mostly for improving student achievement and increasing collaboration among teachers. I don't know if I'm right in that. So a community of practice may or may not be about student achievement. And may or may not be about increasing collaboration. They're really about building what we call a regime of competence. What is good practice here? What does— not is a sort of general inquiry into what is best practice and are we living up to it, but it's more like trying things out and saying, is this what we consider among ourselves to be good practice or not?

Right.

And I think also a PLC, in a PLC, Isn't the leader usually a principal or a sort of educational leader?

I think, I mean, I think as you say, there are multiple different ways of kind of implementing that, some more probably hierarchical than others. Yeah.

Right. So the one, you know, if it had to be a principal or an educational leader, which many don't have to be, but if it had to be, that would also be, well, possibly less like a community of practice, but even then you couldn't really say it's not a community of practice. Practice. It's more like, are we working together to develop our practice and improve the regime of competence that we have?

And one of the things I think was maybe helpful here that I have heard you speak about is that it's driven by uncertainty. And I quite, I appreciated that, particularly given our current, you know, global situation with uncertainty as a very commonly used word now. And we're all feeling pretty uncertain about how things Well, I don't want to speak for everybody, but I am certainly feeling pretty uncertain about how things are going to evolve and transpire. So yeah, I think that was quite resonant for me.

Well, I mean, if you think of the traditional teaching model, right, you have someone who knows, and their certainty drives the development of a curriculum and a learning process until that certainty has been transmitted into those who don't know, right? So Certainty is the currency and the transmission of certainty is the essence of what happens. In a community of practice, certainty is not so much the problem because people, you know, they have the degrees or they've read all the books, you know. What's really the currency is how do I do this? You know, how can we achieve this? We are not quite there yet. You want to make a difference, but you don't quite know how to. And it's that uncertainty that drives the learning. So it's almost like turning it on its head, you know, instead of the certainty of the knower driving the process, it's the uncertainty of the practitioner driving the desire to improve their ability to make a difference they care to make. And actually, we're jumping to the fourth phase of the theory where we are going back now into the plumbing of what really happens in a community of practice.

No, I'd really appreciate that. I mean, well, I'd like to get onto that. It'd be great to talk about a bit more about your more recent book, but just to comment if I can on that idea of uncertainty, because I think one of the things we started straying into before we started recording was the idea of experimenting on children. You know, this fear of parents that we hold within an education system. And I, I'm quite interested in that because I think that idea of uncertainty it also sits next to an idea of fear. And there's something interesting there for me about how do we hold those things in a way that is positive and generative and safe, in inverted commas, for young people?

Well, I mean, part of what we are doing in that new book, Learning to Make a Difference, is to restore the concept of uncertainty, to save it from its pits, you know. And one of the, one of the versions we mentioned in that book is that we are gifted with the fact that we work with master practitioners a lot in our work, you know, people who are very good at what they're doing and they still want to improve, but they're very good. And a striking thing about experts is that what makes them expert is not their certainty. We think of expert as certainty. We think of knowledge as certainty, but these people are very good at functioning productively under conditions of uncertainty. That's what makes them master practitioners, you see. And I think there is a view of knowledge from the natural sciences, which is that more certainty, more knowledge. So if you can define the distance between the Earth and the Sun to the millimeter, wow, you see. So more certainty, more knowledge. That works in the natural science, but it doesn't work in the practical knowledge of everyday. In the practical knowledge of everyday, you never have certainty, you never have full information, You're always stumbling, you know, that's real expertise. If you're a master teacher, you're not just applying this piece of research and that piece of research and that piece of research. No, you are there in the classroom. You don't know what kids have experienced yesterday in their family. You don't know where they come from. I mean, you know something about that, but you don't know it. You don't know everything, but there is no certainty, but you probe and you, you live in a conversation with the new. With the unknown.

Yeah.

Right. And that's mastery.

Yeah. I'd love to ask you about what you said about regimes of competency, because I think that's, I, I'm hearing absolutely what you're saying, Étienne, about knowing and knowledge, but there's also this piece about regimes of competency and mastery that I think, you know, when you start talking about working with young learners who are novices, who get framed as novices in a lot of the research about education, and that, that justifies the more didactic teacher-led approach. Is there, yeah, what is there to be said about regimes of competency and mastery in relation to that?

I think the notion of regime of competence is important to recognize that there is learning over time, right? So uncertainty remains at the very edge, but there is also an accumulation of experiences and observations and research that you are accountable to. So this idea of a regime of competence is that A master practitioner will look at another practitioner and say, yes, I recognize the competence, not the certainty, you see? But I recognize the competence in that behavior. So really for us, the definition of a regime of competence is how do members recognize each other as members? And a regime of competence is graduated from very beginners to master practitioners. And the regime of competence is almost like a gradient. But the regime of competence is not certainty. The regime of competence is what's the behaviour that reflects the learning of this community?

Right.

The regime of competence isn't a regime of competence as in a profession. It's a regime of competence would be different, you know, among the students, which could be what kind of clothes do you wear? Where do you go during the break time? And for many students, actually for all students really, you're actually teaching them to be non-competent, right? Non-competent or not masters of mathematics. They're not necessarily going to be a mathematician, but they need to know enough maths to not be a mathematician, but still be able to function. Or, you know, they're learning literature, not because they're going to be an author, but they're learning to be not competent in multiple different—

That's a really interesting framing because, yeah, trying to tell a parent that we're going to teach your child to not be competent is a difficult sell, right?

Yeah, yeah, no, but to achieve productive non-competence is really more what school should be about than to teach kids to be minimally competent. You know, it's much more important for a kid, as Bev was saying, to understand the role of mathematics in society, to know how to do a long division. It's going to help them in their life so much better because the long division, you get your iPhone and yeah, but to understand, you know, the statistics that are in a newspaper article you read, to understand where they come from. What decisions did the statistician have to make? Where do they make choices? If you understand the practice, not as a practitioner, but as a non-practitioner. So non-competence may be too negative a term, but what we're saying is that we live in a complex world where we are mostly non-competent and we need to That's why we, in phase 3 of the theory, now we have, we are kind of like not going in the right order, but it's all right.

Yeah, that's fine.

In phase 3 of the theory, we added a concept which we call knowledgeability. So knowledgeability for us is an understanding of the social landscape that allows you to make sense of where you are. It's not facts, but it's more like understanding the difficulty of doing statistics. Enough so that you can kind of like appreciate statistics. You see what I mean? Do you know how to do a subtraction? We would call that minimal competence or like for a mathematician, it's like, it is competence, but it is like way down there. And so we give kids these way down there, little meaningless competence. And we don't give them the view that matters, that allows them to make sense of who they are. You see?

Yeah.

Yeah. So now we are going to a different— so there are really two directions for the theory. In education. One is how to build communities among teachers, the LCT and all that stuff. That's one application of the theory. That is not very common. There's another application of the theory, very uncommon, which is what does the theory say about what schooling should be?

Right, exactly. And, um, quite honestly, that second part is the question that drives me. I mean, absolutely. And that's why I was really keen to talk to you. And this is brilliant. I mean, it's really challenging. Me in terms of these juicy phrases like productive non-competence. And yeah, this is great. It, I just, just as an observation, it's really interesting, isn't it? That we define things as negatives. You know, uncertainty is the absence of certainty and non-competence is the absence of competence. But, but that's not, I, what I'm hearing is that's not exactly what you're talking about actually. And the thing that came to me as you were talking, Etienne, was the kind of the difference between doing science and then the philosophy of science. Like trying to kind of take a more of a bird's eye view of what science is and what science is trying to do. How does it situate with epistemology? How do we know things about the world? And how do we, you know, and then even what is reality and more philosophical questions like that. So you end up trying to take a more metacognitive or, you know, a meta view of some of the learning. I don't know. How does that, how does that sit?

We would not call this metacognitive because we are social learning theorists, not cognitive Sure. Yeah, that's what we call knowledgeability.

Okay.

That's why this concept to us is very important. Okay. Is that knowledgeability is productive non-competence. I understand enough about massage to have a sense of whether my masseur is a good masseur or not. You know, I'm, I'm not a masseur, but I can be a good client. I can be a discriminating client because I understand enough. You see what I mean? So you have an understanding. An understanding of the social landscape that allows you to say, okay, I can trust that, I cannot trust that.

Fascinating.

Almost a discernment is the word that came to me as you were talking. They're like, you know, enabling a discernment because you need to know a bit about something in order to kind of— judgment is too strong perhaps, but discerning difference. And as you say, being able to move through the world in an informed, discerning way. I don't know. Yeah. Interesting.

This is all the more important nowadays where the canons are destabilized. It used to be you just learn Shakespeare and you're fine, but now there's Ice Cube too. Or what's her name? Taylor Swift.

Yeah.

There's a course on Taylor Swift at Harvard. So the canons are being destabilized. There's misinformation everywhere. And if you don't have a good sense of how the social landscape functions, you're going to be completely a victim of anything. Are we equipping our kids to live in a world where 90% of what is produced is produced by AI? 70% is misinformation. You know, there are swindlers everywhere. Are we preparing the kids for a world like this? You know?

Interesting. Yeah. Bev, was there anything you were mulling on you wanted to add?

I mean, well, I think that in education, what happens if a kid does express their uncertainty or if anybody does, a teacher or the education establishment feels they're that they need to jump in with certainty. And then everything, it's like you can't say that you're uncertain without somebody jumping in to fill it up. And so learning to occupy, you never get the chance to occupy a space whereby everybody there is on the edge of their certainty. They don't quite know everything. And so creating those spaces where it's a sort of loose structure for uncertainty to exist. As soon as you get certainty as well, what you do is reduce, or there's a danger of reducing somebody's sense of agency. So, and agency matters. But in our theory, we say that agency matters. Learning with agency. Our learning is to make a difference. That means you care to make a difference. And caring to make a difference means that you must have some sense of agency. And so kids, one problem is that their agency gets snuffed out quite early on by people jumping in with their certainty.

Right.

Exactly.

And I mean, I really did want to ask you about that concept of agency, cuz that's really important for me. Maybe if we could go there in a moment. I just wanted to just what you said there about at the edge of the uncertainty. I think there are pedagogies of inquiry and I do a lot of my work with the International Baccalaureate and that's very heavily based on ideas of inquiry. And I know I'm, I'm very interested also in Charles Sanders Peirce's ideas of a community of inquiry. And I think, you know, so there's, there's this concept of inquiry which is also, I think, present in this conversation, which I just wanted to make the link with for people, because I think that's also a way of thinking about staying in the question, right? Staying at the edge of uncertainty that, you know, many educators are drawn to as a way of working with young people. So I just wanted to kind of bring that in.

Yeah, yeah.

And so all we would do as social learning theorists is say, listen, there's a landscape out there. So you are not doing inquiry in an empty space. You are doing inquiry in a space that is already colonized by communities that have a regime of competence. And so we would say to become aware of that and to interact with that in an inquiry mode, to us would be really, really essential.

Yeah, that's lovely because there's a real contextualizing. I mean, there's a situatedness, right? To use one of your words, I guess that, you know, enabling our young people to really understand how and where they are situated in context.

That's right.

It's something that I come back to all the time, and I spoke to Alicia Parrero on the podcast a while ago. I don't know if you know her work, Context Changes Everything. Fascinating work. But I, uh, yeah, just that idea of our ability to decontextualize even questions, right? Even staying in an inquiry, but somehow having these decontextualized bits of information that we can move around in a question. Or a set of questions or an inquiry is to divorce everything from the situatedness of knowing, right? I mean, that's, that I think, and again, it sounds philosophical when you say it, but that's just how we live. We live deeply embedded in context, right? And that's something I think we struggle with in education as well.

And that's why we are pushing this concept of knowledgeability as kind of like an orientation to the context that helps you navigate life, you know, and we think actually that school should be much more focused on knowledgeability because another problem with school from our theory's perspective is that they are focused on many competence. For me, I was a good student when I was in school, but I was never asked to be really good at anything. When I wrote my first book, I realized what it was to be good at something, you know, you are in front of that page and you go like, oh my God, this paragraph is not going to work. And you know, you break down. You know, I never had that experience in school. Maybe kids who do sports, maybe they have that experience of like, wow, to be really competent at something.

It does.

It does. Absolutely.

But schools don't do things. They don't do the two things that we think are important. They don't give a good sense of knowledgeability to the kids. And they don't teach competence because they only do these mini competence of like things that the master of these practices would think, oh, Yeah, that's good for kids or something like that, you know, calculating the trajectory of a cannonball, which is stupid. That's not physics, you know. Physics is to wonder, do electrons talk to each other across the cosmos when they form a pair? You know, that's it. That would have interested me when I was in my physics class.

Absolutely.

But instead, I had to calculate the trajectory of a cannonball, which, you know, who uses cannonball nowadays? You know, we use guided missiles. So So for us, we are pushing for an education of meaningfulness. Our theory says meaningfulness is essential to human flourishing. And as Bev was saying, an important element of meaningfulness is agency. Right.

So yeah, maybe we could go there because I'd love to spend a bit of time on that. And what do you mean by that concept? Because it's, again, it's another word that gets used a lot in education. I've had a recent podcast episode with Indra Adnan about agency specifically. And it's, it's a strange term. It's quite a cold term, I find, you know, in relation to young people. I wonder, how do you describe it? How would you describe it if you were talking to teachers or even the young people themselves?

That people found it, I mean, that students, they're able to make a difference or get closer to making a difference that they care about. And if you, you know, in order to do that, you have to have agency. So yes, getting closer to being able to make a difference. However small and however big, but that capacity to be able to do it, to make choices, to learn to do that is agency.

And so the way, or in the book, that we define agency philosophically is the ability to act on the world in ways that reflect your experience of meaningfulness. So agency is not just the ability to act on the world. AI can act on the world, right? But we would not give AI agency. Because the negotiation of meaning is also at the core of agency. So acting on somebody's behalf is not agency for us. It's acting on your own behalf.

Kids might find your explanation a bit hard, Étienne.

I know, I know. So I was giving my explanation for Tim, who said, oh yeah, but agency is a kind of vague concept.

I know, it's great to, I think it's really good to precisely define. But I agree with you, Bev. It's, you know, what does that mean in practice for young people? And I think, you know, we throw this term around and we want more agency for young people. I do it in my work and it's just, but I just think it's really important because I was wondering, as you were saying there, Etienne, for me it's more than an ability because there is a drive or an impulse or a movement that comes from somewhere else that is not just about a competence to act in the world or an ability to act in the world. Right?

Yeah. And I think it's because, you know, I like tying it to caring to make a difference because also just being able to articulate, creating a narrative about the difference you care to make is hard. You know, it's hard to articulate that difference. Or some people can do it, no problem. That's fine. They've got their objective or whatever. But for most people, especially if you're a kid also, you're not used to being able to make a difference, not unless you like really nag your mother.

—Or even being asked. You're not used to being asked, what is the difference you care to make?

So being able to articulate that is the beginning of agency, having a story that will be refined and changed over time, that you have the beginning of a narrative about a difference that you care to make. That's the beginning of agency, I think. And that's not even acting on the world. It's seeing yourself as somebody who could be agential.

Right. There's a self-perception there, but there's also, I don't know if, again, if you know Gert Biester's work, who's a Dutch educational philosopher, he talks a lot about the idea that even saying no is a really, well, it's actually a very strongly agentic act, right? I mean, yeah, for a child in a classroom to actually say, no, I don't want to do that. We don't value that moment in education because we set up the whole system to require yeses from all children about the thing that the teacher says, right? But the idea that— that's slightly overly generalizing, but—

No, no, but it's because in a lot of places, school has become about the transmission of a curriculum. Absolutely. If your view of learning is a transmission of a curriculum, agency does not matter. Yeah. Because the only thing that matters is can they pass the exam? Have they acquired the curriculum? And so in that view of learning, agency has no role. It's the curriculum that dominates. And what we're saying is that this is exactly the wrong thing because the curriculum is available. AI is going to make the curriculum immediately available to anybody at any time. So schools are living in the 19th century, you know, where they think, oh, we are the source of information for you. No, Google, AI, much better sources of information. That's no longer the prerogative of schools. The prerogative of school is identity, an experience of who you are in the world. That's what AI cannot give you. And that's what school should be about, you know, not the curriculum, but the becoming.

Yeah. You know? Can I offer us a slightly different framing of the question of what difference do you want to make in the world? Because again, Biesta's work, he often poses the question, what is the world asking of you? And that's, uh, that I think is a really interesting question as well, because absolutely, I hear everything you're saying about agency and the difference you want to make in the world. But I also think sometimes in the context of, let's say, neoliberal capitalism and a kind of a hyper-individualism, we sometimes get drawn into the frame that it's about what you want. What difference do you want to make in the world? And you being the individual. And I just wanted to bring that into the conversation. I'm not necessarily implying that that's what your, the broader context of your work, because obviously it's social learning, right? And I think maybe we could speak to that briefly, but I just, I wanted to bring that in because I think that's a really important aspect of the relationality between yourself and the world, responsiveness in your embeddedness with the world, but then also with other people around you.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you know, for us, there's no individual in social learning theory. Okay, there's a statement. There's no individual. There's no person, at least not as an island, you know. You become a person, but that person is your identity, and your identity is the relationship with what you identify with. Yeah. You know, so that's one thing. The other thing I wanted to say is that the difference you care to make, you know, what if the difference I care to make is I want to get kissed? I want to get what?

Kissed. Kissed. He wants a kiss, Pep.

Oh, but you know, for a boy who's 14, that may be the biggest difference, right? Yeah. You know, and so you have to set that aside to follow the structure of the school. You have to choose between being a successful student and caring about anything. And that's a terrible choice. It's a terrible choice. I know I'm not saying that we should get all the boys kissed. That's not my point. My point is that this idea that you have to choose between who you are And learning is a terrible thing that schools do to kids. And there are certain places where to be cool, you have to be anti-learning. It's really a choice between your identity as a cool person and the threat of being called a nerd. What kind of a choice is that? It's almost like the human being has disappeared. But we're human beings. Learning is a human experience. It's not the funneling of stuff. And so for us, agency is bringing the human person meaningful agency and identity. This is kind of the fundamental triangle of our theory.

Yeah, I think it's important to say it's like, because it almost sounds like we're basing everything around caring to make a difference. It's almost like agency, okay, here we go to student-centered learning. What does the student want? And then we satisfy what they want, you know, and that's not what we're saying. Education would then be perhaps offering up also challenges to that difference that you care to make, but engaging somehow with that. It may be that you care to do something and then you're taken on a trip somewhere where what you care to do doesn't matter, and so you're thinking, well, maybe that's not what I want. So it's constantly being challenged as well, yeah, and you've got to be constantly reassessing who you are, in terms of your identity because, oh, maybe I'm not the kind of person who likes that. So it's very important that school is setting up scenario whereby people are being challenged and being able to work out how they recover.

Yeah, and actually, actually, that's, that's one of our pedagogical principles. We are actually writing a chapter on for a book on that, okay, you know, is that no kids should graduate schools without having experienced a boundary. Crossing of a boundary. And by the crossing of a boundary, we mean exactly what Bev was saying, entering a world where your identity does not function and knowing what that is, knowing how you recover a sense of self. No school has that as part of the graduation requirement, you know? Yeah. But for us, it's like, especially in the world today, you know, in a globalizing world with a destabilization of the canons and everything, social cohesion is not going to come out of common ground. Social cohesion is going to come out of the ability to meet others in a deep way.

Yeah, I completely agree. I mean, that's what you said there, Étienne, about being a person, like that really resonates with me and being a person in a community of persons, right? This strange idea as an isolated individual, you know, is a fiction, right? I think I'm happy to see more and more people talking in that way. Obviously I have a Tim-ness about me, but, and that I carry with me, but at the same time, I am a person in a community of persons. And I think that for me is where there's something there around what you were saying, that cohesion between people in those situations. But that's not a language we are particularly familiar with, I think. But I think, I feel it strongly. We need more of that kind of conversation of what does that mean? It doesn't necessarily undermine my me-ness, because I think that's some of the conversations around identity have become incredibly problematic, right? Because you then talk as though identity is either a fixed essence or a completely fluid state or a bunch of smaller essences. And there's a really difficult conversation around that. We don't talk about identity.

We talk about identity work. Identity work is the work of being a person. So it's neither fluid nor fixed. But it's accountable to the things you identify with and to the thing you disidentify with. And so our theory is that the being a person requires more work today than in the past, because in the past, the community was doing more work for you. So you live in a little village in the north of England, right? The village is doing a lot of the identity work for you in the 14th century. You just do what the village said, then you are a good person. But kids today don't have that experience of a single community. Well, some of them, because they join an extremist group or something that offers them a simple identity. But for most kids, it's a lot of work to be a person because there's so many demands and so many possibilities. And so the problem again with the curriculum is that you subsume all that work. You say, oh no, you don't have to do that work, just learn this.

I mean, that's the hidden curriculum, right? It was articulated previously as the hidden curriculum, but we've all known it's there forever, but we just keep it hidden because it's convenient to keep it hidden. Sorry, Beth.

I was just going to say that it's helpful, I think, to think of identity hand in hand with accountability. And so it is, where do you feel accountable? So meanness may be accountable to me, whatever that is, but if you have your bunch of friends, right, you may feel accountable to them, so you've got to do the sort of things that they will think are good. But part of being at school should also be, in a way, playing with different senses of accountability. You're accountable to you, but you're also accountable to your fellow students in the classroom. You're accountable to your family. You're accountable to the parish where you live. You may be accountable to the country, accountable to the world, accountable to the planet. But you see, so your identity is slightly different depending on where your accountability is. So school can give you an experience of different senses of accountability so that you're able to play and manage those and do the work of identity better.

Yeah, that's, that's really helpful actually. That's really interesting. And yeah, I like that a lot. It makes me also think of people are using the word responsibility with a hyphen in between, you know, the ability to respond to the context you're in, the circle of belonging that you're in, that you're talking about there.

Is, yeah, fascinating. But also the level of scale, I think, in what you're saying is really important, not just the accountability, but the multiple levels of scale, which is something that schools are uniquely positioned to give, right? Because the family is going to tend to have a small-scale sense of accountability and your church is going to have a small sense, you know, but school, I think, is uniquely positioned to invite kids into seeing other spheres of belongingness and identity. Amazing.

I just wanted to give you an invitation at the end just to point people towards where they could find a bit more of your work, obviously your books, but because I think it's important from this kind of quite wide-ranging and somewhat philosophical conversations that then, you know, what are the moves that an educator could make if they're, if they're really intrigued and interested by this, and then they would like to kind of find out more or try something out?

Well, we share all our resources where we can on our website, the wengatrainer.com, wenga-trainer.com. You know, you can find a lot of stuff on there. We also do workshops at the Social Learning Lab here in Portugal, 4-day workshops, 3-day workshops, and many educators come to those. Those, I would say, are the two main places.

Perfect. And, and we are in in the context of a book where we would like to sort of summarize the theory and then give a sense of what it means for different spheres of human endeavor. And education is one of those. And there we will talk about sort of what is identity, meaningfulness, and agency, where the core concern— we're not going to tell people what to do because that's not our job, but we're going to give a sense of direction. This would be an avenue to explore. Like this idea of crossing boundaries. How do you set up the crossing of boundary? How do you evaluate whether the boundary— because you can, you know, tourism is not crossing the boundary. Tourism is visiting without crossing the boundary. So what we're talking about is something very different, not just traveling, but really engaging with otherness, you know, in a deep way. So this is a level at which we can talk down to how does a school do that? We are not qualified to.

No, but I, I think that's really important. But also, you know, educators are looking for what support and learning to bring in because they're seeing the insufficiency of the thing that they're doing with the young people. There's, there's so many cues, but they're not necessarily sure about where to look for alternative framings. And I think that's why your work is so powerful. So yeah, thank you so much for, for sharing about it today.

Okay. Thanks, Tim Logan.

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