Practicing in and learning from community placements

In 2004, the authors began a qualitative study into the value of community placements as sites of sociocultural and sociolinguistic learning among English as an Additional Language (EAL) learners studying a Bachelor of Arts degree. Students undertook community placements of ten hours, and wrote reflective journals detailing their observations of and participation in social, cultural and linguistic interactions. This paper reports on the key findings of the project over the past three years. It also applies the notion of 'community of practice' (Lave and Wenger, 1991) to community placement within a framework that accommodates constructivist, sociocultural, poststructuralist and new literacy understandings of situated learning. This report discusses participant commentaries in terms of the ten most recurrent themes emerging from open-coded analyses of the data. The findings suggest that community placement has the capacity to provide significant experiences for students, and to impact on participants' evolving identities as bi- or multiculturals. Community placements also provide opportunities for acquiring procedural, pragmatic and linguistic knowledge. The paper concludes that community placements can serve as communities of practice for the majority of language and cultural learners.