Pedagogical Praxis: Using technology to build professional communities of practice

Shaffer, D. W. (2004). Pedagogical Praxis: Using technology to build professional communities of practice. Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) SigGROUP Bulletin, 24(3), 39-43. http://epistemicgames.org/cv/papers/shaffer_acm_2004.pdf

Abstract:

In this short paper, I describe pedagogical praxis as a fundamentally different approach to thinking about communities of practice in educational settings. Pedagogical praxis focuses on the development of useful and socially valued ways of thinking through personally and socially meaningful activity. That is, pedagogical praxis links learning and doing within the framework of communities of practice, but it does so by reframing two fundamental premises of much recent work. Fist, pedagogical praxis suggests that professional practices such as medicine, law, architecture, and journalism have distinct and coherent epistemic frames analogous to the ‘ways of thinking’ usually attributed to the traditional disciplines. These epistemic frames, rather than the traditional disciplines, are taken as the educational goal. Second, pedagogical praxis suggests that by engaging in epistemically faithful adaptations of the reproductive practices of professional communities, students can gain access to these ways of knowing’”and thus, to ways of thinking that are fundamentally grounded in the meaningful activities of a post-industrial society.