Discipline and practice: a sociology of the first year experience in higher education

This paper offers a re-examination of the concept of community of practice in relation to the first year experience by drawing upon the later philosophical work of Ludwig Wittgenstein. In doing so, I take up Wittgenstein’s maxim that our lives are focused on doing, not thinking. This may seem anathema to the world of higher education where thought is highly prized in our quest to ensure that students tread the path to being independent learners, capable of engaging their powers of analysis, synthesis and critical thinking. However, this is not an easy undertaking. With regard to the first-year experience, we have been dogged by the question of how to aid students in becoming self-regulatory learners. It is at this point that I apply Wittgenstein’s maxim about life as deeds and doings and come back to perhaps a more unfashionable term: training. In the paper I look at how training as part of a community of practice serves as a useful way of considering how we learn to undertake practices and, in some cases, transform them. As Wittgenstein would have it, we learn how to go on having learned the rules of the game. Nothing more is required. We learn practices principally by doing, by being part of the game, rather than through explicit instruction. In this way understanding is something that is a demonstrable practice. As we engage in practices, we must accept what the rules are, what actions count as correct procedures for engagement, and what counts as incorrect rule-following. Much of what is initially learned is therefore based on practical know-how, learned through training and emulation. After this initiation there may be scope for critical reflection about the practices in place. In this regard, the first year of higher education is therefore crucial in being trained in how to go on, how to start as you mean to go on through being part of a community of practice. I consider this in relation to my own discipline of sociology and how students can learn in some cases through trial and error or what is known as generative, or productive, failure.