Collectively learning to talk about personal concerns in a peer-led youth program: A field study of a community of practice

Youth peer-support is an increasingly established approach to youth work. Drawing on Wenger's theory of a 'community of practice', this study explored social learning processes in an Australian community-based and peer-led youth program for young people from disadvantaged backgrounds. Social learning was conceptualised as arising from processes of 'negotiated meaning', which Wenger described as a duality of 'participation' and 'reification'. The study was designed as a qualitative field study drawing on participant observation data from weekend workshops and 16 semi-structured interviews with young program participants. Results indicate that the program was highly conventionalised with repeated practices reifying the meaning negotiated by the participants. However, it was also open for participatory negotiation of meaning through which participants learned to recognise and share their own and others' vulnerabilities, which created a strong sense of belonging to a community of equals. The study's conception of social learning offers a novel explanation of how the youth program created and sustained alternative transformative spaces. This was done through simple, repetitive and highly conventionalised practices, brokered by peers, that allowed participants to recognise and address their own and others' vulnerabilities in new ways.