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Today, more people want to know how to make a meaningful difference to what they care about. But for that, traditional approaches to learning often fall short. In this book, we offer a theoretical and practical way forward. We introduce the concept of social learning spaces for developing both new capabilities and a sense of agency. We provide a rich framework for focusing on the value of social learning spaces: how to generate this value, monitor it, and learn iteratively through the process. The book is a useful extension and refinement of 'communities of practice' for those familiar with the theory. For those who are not, the chapters will lay out a new way to approach learning. This volume is written to serve the needs of readers across fields, including researchers, educators, and leaders in business, government, healthcare, and international development.

This chapter explores the challenges of fostering learning across traditional academic and non-academic boundaries when conducting participatory research in community-university partnerships. The authors were all active collaborators in the Imagine – Social programme. They focus on the role of research retreats in including a diversity of partners in this long-term research project. After introducing the key terms of ‘community of practice’ and ‘retreats’, the chapter describes the types of boundaries that were addressed and the challenges that were faced in crossing them. Next the authors present their approach to crossing these boundaries by cultivating a community of practice through these retreats. The stages of development of a community of practice (Wenger et al, 2002) are then set out and are reframed to focus on boundary issues drawing on the successive retreats as illustrations. Finally, the chapter closes by identifying the key enablers that supported the development of such a boundary-crossing community.

This chapter explains that the 'body of knowledge' of a profession is best understood as a 'landscape of practice' consisting of a complex system of communities of practice and the boundaries between them. Various practices have differential abilities to influence the landscape through the legitimacy of their discourse, or their control over resources. Regulators produce national policies and verify compliance with auditing practices. Developing the metaphor of a landscape of practice, first introduced in Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning and Identity, provides a broad social perspective on professional learning, and learning more generally. Learning in a community of practice is a claim to competence: it entails a process of alignment and realignment between competence and personal experience, which can go both ways. Learning as a social process always involves these issues of power. On our learning journey, engagement gives us direct experience of regimes of competence, whether our engagement is a visit or a lifetime commitment.

If the body of knowledge of a profession is a living landscape of practice, then our personal experience of learning can be thought of as a journey through this landscape. Within Learning in Landscapes of Practice, this metaphor is further developed in order to start an important conversation about the nature of practice knowledge, identity and the experience of practitioners and their learning. In doing so, this book is a pioneering and timely exploration of the future of professional development and higher education. The book combines a strong theoretical perspective grounded in social learning theories with stories from a broad range of contributors who occupy different locations in their own landscapes of practice. These narratives locate the book within different contemporary concerns such as social media, multi-agency, multi-disciplinary and multi-national partnerships, and the integration of academic study and workplace practice. Both scholarly, in the sense that it builds on prior research to extend and locate the concept of landscapes of practice, and practical because of the way in which it draws on multiple voices from different landscapes. Learning in Landscapes of Practice will be of particular relevance to people concerned with the design of professional or vocational learning. It will also be a valuable resource for students engaged in higher education courses with work-based elements.

This chapter focuses on our reflections on practice-based learning. These reflections are likely to have resonance with broader questions about higher education, concerning lifelong learning, employability, assessment, and the role of the university. These questions are generating a lot of thinking and innovation directed at the future of higher education. The chapter provides a framework that suggests a view of students on a learning trajectory through a landscape of practice. These learning travellers have to find their way into and around specific practices, build an image of where these practices are located in the landscape, engage with multiple places in the landscape at once and develop an identity. In designing a course on online learning for faculty members from around the world, we spent time listening to their concerns. Whilst online learning is strategically important by the leaders of the majority of universities, many of their faculty continues to have deep concerns about the implications for their work.