Introduction

Learning has traditionally been associated with formal education and work environments. However, there is increased research interest in how learning takes place in informal cultures because they provide opportunities to understand identity formation, social interaction and independent learning in sustainable ways and in its implications on designing learning environments (Aittola, 2000). The first part of this paper looks at a 19-year-old social softball community and discusses the strengths and limitations of using Anderson’s Adaptive Character of Thought –Rational (Act-R) and Lave’s Situated Learning Theory to understand learning in a sustained way in this community. It then proposes some improvements for this learning community and suggests principles which may be applicable to other learning communities.

Background

The case study involves a sustained, recreational softball community which has played the game every Saturday afternoon at the National University of Singapore (NUS) sports field for about 19 years. Calling themselves the Saturday Afternoon Recreational Softball team (SARS), the group attracts between 15 to 28 softball players from different age groups, nationalities, occupations and genders to play ‘pick-up’ games weekly. Table 1 shows the profile of the members of the community. It was initially formed for United States (U.S.) exchange students from NUS and the U.S. Education Information Center by a history professor, Daniel Crosswell, in 1993 who has since relocated back to the U.S. By 1995, more local players joined as peripheral ‘neophytes’ (Crosswell, 2012) and the movement grew to become more cosmopolitan with even interested bystanders invited to play. Before long, these social softball sessions became a weekly affair and became integrated with the social activities and identities of those who formed the community.

Table 1Description of MembersSocial connections to SARS

Age Range

Gender Country of birth No. of active participants (at least once every two months)

Occupations

NUS teaching staff & family members

35 – 55 years

Male USA, Australia, Britain , Canada

4 Professors in higher education

Ex-NUS students 26 – 42 years

Male and female

Singapore, Malaysia.

7 Teachers, grad students, research assistants,

Current NUS students

18-25 years

Male and female

Singapore, Malaysia, Korea, China.

7 Students

Ex-Montfort boys and friends

24 – 32 years

Male and female

Singapore 4 Students, HR, banking, sales, business, F&B, nursing, etc

New York University Tisch School of the Arts Asia & others

30 – 52 years

Male and female

USA, Puerto Rico, Canada, Singapore

4 Musician, IT, photographer, banking, teacher

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The main source of data collection was derived from one of the researcher’s involvement in the group since 1994. To triangulate the information, email correspondence was carried out with Crosswell and informal interviews with SARs members Other sources of data information came from their blog and social media which tracked the origins, development and weekly scores, photos and comments from the group.

Act-R Theory

Anderson (1990) proposed that knowledge is initially stored in declarative form as facts, images and sounds and is interpreted by using general procedures towards more automatic processes which become procedural. According to Act-R theory, knowledge compilation comprised of three distinguishable stages of expertise for skill learning (Anderson 1990).

a. The cognitive stage takes place when learners commit to memory a set of facts relevant to the skill which increasingly become proceduralised through practice. This stage is prone to errors because declarative knowledge about the task process may be incomplete or incorrect. It involves conscious manipulation of declarative representations of the method for performing a task and as a result, tends to be slow and halting in nature, and often takes verbalized forms.

b. An associative stage where declarative knowledge is used together with heuristics and a means-to-end analysis to perform tasks. After continuous repetition, proceduralisation takes place and uses the repetition of contexts to the action, creating procedural knowledge which takes the form of ‘if-then’ production rules and chunk matching. This removes unnecessary and useless search paths related to active declarative knowledge.

c. The autonomous stage occurs where the tuning of production rules and the composition process is aimed at reflecting the process by optimization of the task and require few attentional resources (Anderson, 1993; Anderson, 2007)

Because Act-R theory looks at cognition as an information process which is derived from the interactions of a visual module, a problem state module, a control and goal module, a declarative module and a manual module that programs manual response (Anderson, 2007), it was felt that such lenses could be used to analyse how beginners learn basic fundamental skills for batting a ball, catching a groundball or fly ball, processes which involve proceduralisation and automacity associated with muscle memory. As the learner moves towards expert status, pattern learning of particular game patterns and situations could also form a way to study tactical learning associated with how Act-R theory is used to study chessboard moves. (Anderson, 1990).

Act-R and batting

Most beginning players from SARS find hitting a complex skill because it involves hitting a moving ball travelling at about 16 kilometers an hour with a 5.7cm in diameter bat. This gives you less between two to three seconds to judge if it is within your hit zone. Expert hitters in major league baseball who hit .300 or three-out of-ten at-bats are considered competent. As such, proceduralisation and automacity are important processes in the act of hitting a ball (Lebiere, Salvucci, Gray & West, 2003). Explicit instruction and ‘batting practice’ is therefore carried out

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by certain players to accelerate learning of this skill and corresponds to the Act-R theory’s notion of improving ‘speed and accuracy’ through ‘tuning’ (Anderson, 1990). This explains why some players from the SARS community take batting practice before and after the game to hone their batting skills. Players with a cricket or golfing background also usually take a relatively short time learning how to spray the ball across different parts of the field because this positive transfer is related to Act-R theory’s associative stage of skill acquisition where learners have advanced to the point where they can ‘associate’ the softball hitting technique as a similar pattern to cricket or golf.

According to Anderson’s Power Law (Anderson, 1990), learning can have high levels of retention and can be maintained over years with little or no retention loss. This explains why Contrary, a Canadian who had not played softball in two years went 4 for 5 and was able to put the ball in play after just a couple of at-bats in October 2012. This principle also explains why those who are familiar with the ‘rules’ and situations of the game seldom make base-running errors or ‘mental fielding errors1’ even though they may not have played in years (Of course, depending on their level of proficiency attained). According to Anderson (1990), performance of a skill improves as a power function of practice and has modest declines over long retention intervals.

Hitting to the opposite field is an unnatural but very valuable skill for baseball and softball. As such, some players from SARS team who are proficient in opposite-field batting reported that at the initial learning stage, they were coached to verbalize their thoughts to have executive control of their bodily functions by saying aloud, “Keep your head down, eye on the ball, drill it the other way”. Some players were trained using various drills and practices which involved using a batting tee and side flips to isolate functions linked to the visual, goal and manual modules elucidated in Anderson’s Act-R information processing approach (Anderson, 2007).

Act-R and game situations

Act-R’s procedural system of ‘if-then’ rules is also very applicable to game situations. At an informal discussion on game situations over drinks one day, professor at NUS shared that experienced players compute the following questions in their head before a fielding play is made, “What’s the score? What inning is it? Who and where are the runners? Who’s the batter? What’s the pitcher throwing? Where are the outfielders? Who’s the catcher? Where do I hit it? These ‘if-then’ rules operate in very complex ways for an expert player to decide where he throws the ball after fielding it. This is similar to chessboard expert patterns where the variables represent ‘recognisable chunks in problems’ which are ‘patterns of elements that repeat over problems’ and represent a tactical form of learning (Anderson, 1990, p. 298). Baseball coaches and aficionadi call such skills ‘fundamentals’ and players improve such skills when there is isolated and explicit practice on these game situations and problems. The game rules and specific situation is cognitive, not necessarily declarative, but its flawless execution relies on proceduralisation and automacity.

Act-R limitations and implications

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There are however aspects of Act-R theory which do not fit with SARS. Even though automacity and proceduralisation are important game skills, procedural knowledge does not necessarily have its origins and co-exist from declarative knowledge. Several players like Gino, an international student from China at NUS, was a very competent in the field without naming the different kinds of batting stance or hitting philosophies associated with the likes of Walt Hriniak, Ted Williams or Tony Gwynn2 as a philosophy. Neither does it explain why this community has sustained itself for such a long time.

In retrospect, Act-R Theory is useful in understanding cognitive acquisition of objective knowledge and skill. It suggests explicit skill training sessions and rehearsed game situations to improve automacity and proceduralisation associated with individual skill improvement. However, Act-R fails to view learning as contextualised in group action and practice and as such fails to link it closely with identity formation, intrinsic motivation and the sustained nature of the SARS community.

Situated Learning

Because of Act-R Theory’s limitations, we will pursue the premise that skill learning among SARS members is a situated activity which involves not only specific skills learnt by the players but also more importantly, the experience of meaning and identity formation in the players participating in SARS (Lave & Wenger, 1991). In such situations, the way the players get involved and take part in the community of practice is influenced by the actual physical and social organisation of the activity and explains how SARS members learn through participation in specific social practices (eg. skill learning), and how the they ‘stay there’ (Holt and Mitchell, 2006).

According to the social theory of learning, learning takes place in a social context, or to be more specific, in a community of practice comprised of ‘a set of relations among persons, activity, and world, over time and in relation with other tangential and overlapping communities of practice’ (Lave and Wenger 1991, p. 98; Wenger 1998). Knowing and learning is situated in activities and trajectories of apprentices whose new skills are developed (Lave, 1991). Learning is integrated into the generative social practice in the lived world and not an independent reifiable process that just happen to be located somewhere. (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998; Contu & Willmott, 2003). According to Wenger (1998), participation and reification are complementary in learning as a community. Participation, in time to come, leads to the production of artifacts such as documents to reify certain aspects of practice in a community (see Figure 1). An example of this happening in SARS would be the blog that was set up to try to document its historical beginnings and profile its core members. In this way, learning is a process of deconstruction and reconstruction as well as a participatory process, rather than the mere acquisition of knowledge, skills or abilities (Hodkinson & Hodkinson, 2004).

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Figure 1. The duality of participation and reification (Wenger, 1998, p. 63).

Wenger (1998) also identifies the main components of communities of practice as:

a. A shared area of interest;b. A shared practice; andc. An engagement in discussion and activities that allows members to share knowledge

with one another.

Shared interest and practice as mediated space for skill development

Shared interest and practice is evident in SARS because of the routinisation and regularity of how members practice learning in the community. Even after the ‘pick-up’ games are concluded, players continue with batting and fielding practice for an hour on their own before leaving the field. This mediated and regular space allows some members to periodically form their own teams as ‘temporal’ communities to participate in SARS games and on occasion, local softball tournaments. Some examples of local tournaments include the Softball Mania Co-ed Tournament (2011 and 2012), Singapore Baseball and Softball Association (SBSA) Slow Pith Carnival (2012) and the Montfort Secondary Invitation Tournament (2006).

This explains how shared interest and practice provide mediated ‘practice opportunities’ and ‘space’ for individual skill and social capital to form tournament-based teams (Bourdieu & Wacquat, 1992).

Forms of engagement in discussion and sharing knowledge

According to Lave (1990), learning derives from the socially and culturally structured world which is situated in the historical development of ongoing activity. An analysis of how SARS share game knowledge and build social relations is highlighted in two phases which overlap each other.

Phase 1: Face-to-face routine social interactions after games over dinner and drinks (1993-2012)

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Phase 2: Online communication through social media platforms (2002 – 2012).In the first phase, an important postgame ritual was to gather at the University Faculty

lounge for dinner and drinks where informal talk about how the game was played, watching videos of members at bat (2004-2005) and talking about the week’s major league baseball highlights or other matters provided for informal forms of learning. This social and cultural activity-based informal learning system fits in with how communities of practice are defined as a group of individuals who foster individual growth through collaborative relationships and activities with its members having similar goals, meaning and common histories, located within a larger system (Barab & Duffy, 2000; Buysse, Sparkman & Wesley, 2003).

In the second phase, advances in the communication technologies led to the expansion of learning into social media platforms. The postings in the group page may summarised as a typology of speech acts as shown in Table 2 (Searle, 1969; Carr, Shrock and Dauterman, 2012). Social media was also used for historical recall or moment making, discussion, sharing of knowledge and social purposes, even across geographical boundaries, as shown in Table 3.

Table 2

Coding Scheme for Analysing Speech Acts and Quotations in Facebook messages

Speech Act Properties of Speech Act Example (s)Assertive Statement of fact, getting

viewer to form a beliefThe right lesson to take away from Rule 6.06 is that the batter’s box isn’t a safety zone. Eric was out!

Directive Sender gets receiver to do something

And definitely want Mingwoo back every week – as long as he is playing softball!

Commisive Sender commits himself to do something

There’s a tournament next week. Let’s meet at the field and move to west coast park if necessary.

Expressive Sender expresses feeling towards receiver

Had a great return to the ball diamond. Thanks to all the old-timers who showed up.

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Table 3

Purpose and Activities on SARS Facebook

Purpose Activity exampleHistorical recall Scores, line-ups, playoff-the-day and discussion about the game.

Discussion Discussion of game rules and interpretation of controversial game rules. Resolution over such rules as a ‘safety zone’ to avoid player injuries.

Sharing Snippets and photographs of SARS player at-bats and fielding. Sharing of baseball news and highlights

Social Group photographs, photographs of social activities (Eg. barbecues, bowling events, overseas SARS trips, barbecues. Tagging of names, likes and dislikes functions.

According to Lave and Wenger (1991), a community of practice moves beyond a ‘primordial culture-sharing entity’ (p. 98) with participants having different viewpoints (Cox, 2004). This is seen in social media debates over rule interpretations even after the game was over for several days. .

P : We were discussing Eric’s play. I have put the MLB rules here, and it seems that there is NO discussion of judgement on such a play or even of intent. The batter does not have to make any effort to get out of the way.

Danger : Who are you fooling? There is no batter’s box drawn in our game.

Ke : I face a dilemma. I don’t want people to know that I spend more than five minutes researching this. The right lesson to take away from Rule 6.06 is that the batter’s box isn’t a safety zone. But rule 7/09 is relevant too. “It is interference by a batter or a runner.” So, a batter would have to get out of the way. Eric was out, QED.

Beyond Socially Visible Boundaries

Lave and Wenger (1991) argues that community is loosely defined and does not neces-sarily imply co-presence and a well-defined, identifiable group with socially visible boundaries. Instead, it is ‘participation in an activity system’ with participants ‘sharing understandings con-cerning what they are doing both in the past and present which adds meaning to the participants’ lives and for their communities’ (p.98) (Cox, 2004). This is seen in past core members of SARS who have left Singapore geographically but who at times, purposefully travel to Singapore at least once in four years to participate in Saturday Softball as shown in Table 3.

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These individuals demonstrate that learning about and learning to be are intertwined with practice, which in turn shapes participant dispositions, belief systems and identity (Bruner, 1986, 1996).Table 3

Examples of SARS Players who have returned Every Four Years

Member Place of origin Current residenceContrary Saskatoon, Canada Butuan, Mindanao, Philippines

Joyce Chicago, Illinois Washington DC

Rube Donnellson,, Illinois Houston, Texas

The Generalissimo Venezuela Venezuela

Kitty Kyle Kansas City, Kansas Afghanistan

Daniel Crosswell St Catharine’s, Ontario Columbus, Georgia

Legitimate Peripheral Participation (LPP)

Another important aspect of situated learning is distinguishing between ‘legitimate peripheral participation’ and ‘full participation’, which implies power differences among members (Lave and Wenger, 1991). In LPP, newcomers to a community of practice at first participate on the periphery and engage in minimal conversations through which they learn about how the community is organised. With time, their participation increases and they become more central to the community of practice (Lave, 1991; Huzzard, 2004). This process sustains and regenerates the community with periphery members becoming core participants. By engaging in meaningful activities, periphery members make ongoing contributions, whether in direct actions or in contributing to the understanding of the actions and ideas of others so that there is mutual appropriation of ideas and learning.

The changing cast of SARS core players attests to this because current NUS students and recent graduates increasingly make up the bulk of the members of the SARS team. Without them, there would be insufficient players to keep SARS going. However, among current players, not all learners move from peripheral to full participation (Lave & Wenger, 1991). Core members also move to the periphery for a variety of reasons – geographical distance, family or career commitments over different life-stages, changing members and as a result being absent from SARS for so long, or social and cultural dissonance when they do return.

Situated Learning limitations and implications

One issue involved in situated learning theory involves the questions of ‘Who is perceived as legitimately belonging?’ and ‘Who has influence?’ LPP highlights the power-

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invested process of bestowing a degree of legitimacy upon newcomers as a normal condition of participation in the learning process but ‘hegemony over resources for learning and alienation from full participation are inherent in the shaping of the legitimacy and peripherality of participation in its historical realisations’ (Lave & Wenger, 1991, p. 42; Contu & Willmott, 2003). Lave and Wenger (1991) stated that LPP is both ‘a source of power or powerlessness, in affording or preventing articulation and interchange among communities of practice’ (p. 36). .At its worst, core members construct discourses and impose them on the group through individual sense-making, and this risks removing the possibility of alternative interpretations or options for consideration and action which are critical for generativity (Huzzard, 2004).

According to Bourdieu (1984), power is culturally and symbolically re-legitimised through a habitus. In the SARS community, this habitus involves participation in post-game rituals, online involvement and SARS social activities which develops and maintains long term community memory and identity but at the same time, embeds habitus which periphery members can sometimes feel culturally uncomfortable with. As a result, core members enjoy certain status within the community and evident from their heightened level of online discussion engagement and participation in social activities. Such periphery-core inequalities can also slowly become entrenched in how teams are formed and reported in social media:

Aug 25 :Young ‘uns won by 11-10 in bottom of 9. Oldies went out to early lead but age caught up with them.

Oct 6 :Young'uns + Lloyd & Kids beat the Oldies (again). 17-13.

This trend can over prolonged periods, result in a community identifying itself too strongly with just its core, making it susceptible to group-think, closed forms of thinking and stagnation, possibly community fissure, factionalization and taken to extremes, fragmentation.

Another major drawback of SARS and situational learning is that it takes for granted that existing SARS processes makes for effective individual learning. It also assumes that periphery participants have the same kinds of needs as shown in Table 4. Closer analysis shows that SARS as a community can be inefficient and unresponsive to the peripheral individual needs in terms of skill development for beginning players and integrating periphery players who may have a different culture or habitus. SARS also lack formal induction, curriculum or codified rules because membership only entails full engagement in the game for the whole 9 innings every Saturday. Its simplicity is also its weakness as a learning community.

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Table 4

Periphery Archetypes, needs and SARS Community Processes

Periphery archetype Needs SARS community process/response

Challenges

Beginner player Basic skills Regular games, pre-game and post-game practice/

Knowing someone who is already in the community who will work with you at an individual level.

Novice player Socialisation Regular games, post-game rituals, online involvement.

Comfort level with habitus of SARS community

Ex-core player Socialisation Regular games, post game rituals, online contact

Meeting familiar SARS ex-core players

In summary, situated learning deals with learners as a social and ‘whole’ person where learning is a reconstructive and participatory process, unlike Act-R which focuses is on the individual acquisition of knowledge, skills or abilities (Hodkinson & Hodkinson, 2004). It is a useful learning ‘lens’ for understanding how communities of practice are sustained and takes place in ‘situatedness’. However, situated learning also involves core participants having ‘hegemony over resources for learning’ within ‘unequal relations of power’ which requires an understanding of how practices are embedded in history and language (Lave & Wenger, 1991, p. 42). Situated learning is also limited in its response and effectiveness in improving the individual skills of players and especially for beginner players who have little knowledge of the game.

Discussion and Recommendations

Based on the strengths and limitations which Act-R and situated learning theories present, this portion proposes some improvements to be made to make learning more effective and meaningful for the members in SARS and suggests principles which may be applicable to other learning communities.

Role of Tournaments

A key feature of putting learning ideas into practice is to adapt them to local circumstances and to include the people for whom the programs are designed for, as contributors in the planning as well as implementation of the programs (Rogoff, 2011). Friendly tournaments have a means to keep SARS teams cohesive as a unit, yet sensitive and attuned to the self-esteem needs of periphery players.

The last tournament in which SARS participated as a unified team was in 2006. This tournament was organised based on a co-sharing of responsibilities principle. It was a community event with SARS sending in two teams (One team comprising of core players and another a mixed team of NTU/NUS students) and three secondary school teams (comprised of coaches, parents, students and teachers). The school teams played with a10-0 score advantage because they were not regular expert players. The event also involved the sharing of costs and

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umpiring duties and was supposed to be celebrated with a barbecue in the evening. This event made the SARS team train hard as a team to hone individual and game situation ‘fundamentals’ which Act-R proceduralisation and automacity highlights. Friendly tournaments as such, have a cohesive impact and yet keep SARS core participants sensitive and attuned to the self-esteem needs of others.

Communities of Practice also exist within broader community system with their own historical development (Wenger, 1998) and SARS is not an exception. During the 2011 and 2012 tournaments, such teams as the ‘Headhunters’, ‘Dark Side’ and ‘LucasFilms’ are other such groups which exist. Routine participation in local tournaments which bring these like-minded communities together in friendly competition is also a means to redress the inefficient and individualized learning which is needed for SARS as a community of learners.

Cultural Practices as Learning Strategies

SARS habitus developed in the trajectory it has is because its social origins lay in giving a sense of familiarity, belonging and identity for those who had migrated or lived abroad as expatriates or international students. As a sport with western origins, it is dominated by white Anglo-Saxon and the occasional Latin American core participant rather than Asians. Its origins and resultant habitus as such, explain why few Asians participate in the post-game rituals and social activities of the SARS community.

There are, however, several core participants who have ‘agency’ as ‘boundary objects’ because they have social capital as core SARS players with social networks which extend to peripheral participants. According to Bandura (1989), this agency is a ‘temporally embedded process of social engagement which is shaped and informed by the past, oriented through evaluation of present towards future possibilities’. By identifying boundary core participants as important social nodal points for coordinating and routinising exchanges across boundaries (between SARS players) and co-organising joint activities, it creates multiple opportunities for boundary crossings, and facilitate dialogical collaborative learning and participation (Akkerman & Baker, 2011).

One practical example involves an Asian core member’s use of whatsapp social networking device to keep both periphery and core members informed on which members are coming for games. Its discourse also involves comments on plays in the field, upcoming events or even just routine ‘social talk’. It is also a means through which ex-core players or peripheral members can stay keep connected to the SARS community.

On the field, as is usually already embedded as a practice, attention is also placed on encouraging, cheering and praising beginner and peripheral players as a means to help them find hidden richer and layered aspects of the game and to put them in the driver’s seat of their own learning. It is also means to help them overcome angst associated with beginner learning and helps build the social connectivity needed for pre-game or post-game practice.

Periphery to Core Participation

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According to Lave (1990), forming an identity with the community involves newcomers bringing with them their own experience of practice and learning which entails finding equilibrium between self and the community. How do you bring people from periphery to core more effectively and efficiently? When a newcomer enters a community, it is mostly competence that is pulling the experience along, until the learner’s experience reflects the competence of the community (Wenger, 1998). Conversely, a new experience can also ‘pull a community’s competence along’ because when a newcomer brings in new elements into practice, it has to negotiate whether the community will embrace their contribution as a new element of competence or reject it. One way of encouraging the community to embrace such contributions would be to provide the opportunity for newcomers to share their competence and beliefs with the community through shared team building activities embedded in the learning of the skills in tournament-based situations. These could involve the use of artifacts such as the use of SKLZ practice nets3, popup playback trainers4 and station-based tournament training.

Accountability and Self-directed Learning

How does one be accountable for one’s learning? How do you to instill a form of self-directed learning for individuals in the community? Anderson’s (1980) idea that ‘perfect practice makes perfect’ would help an individual move from novice to an expert learner. Tournaments would provide the context for discipline and mandated drills and help an individual practise with contemplation and strife for ‘mindful practic’e. After such tournament games, a social process which involves analysing or discussing how one played would also help the player to be mindful of learning points and move his player capacity beyond his current levels. Meaningful learning in social contexts requires both participation and reification to be in a dynamic interplay (Wenger, 1998).

Outreach to More People

Learning as the production of practice creates divisive boundaries because sharing a common history of learning ends in distinguishing those who were involved from those who were not and not because members of the community are trying to isolate others (Wenger, 1998). How do you expand the community to reach out to more people? Boundaries of practice are not geographical and not necessarily visible or explicit (Wenger, 1998). Leveraging on technology, media, social nodal points and boundary core players are means to promote this community by extending the boundaries of practice and also more periphery participants to the core so that the community can have generativity.

Reflection and Conclusion

Act-R and situated learning theories have limitations in their application to the SARS community experience. One limitation of the situated learning theory, in particular LLP, is that it does not effectively explain the learning of more experienced members in the community as they move from core to periphery (Lave & Wenger, 1991). In other words, do experienced members get displaced as more newcomers move from peripheral to core? (Hodkinson & Hodkinson, 2004). A limitation of the Act-R theory would be that it does not take into account what skills individuals need to practise in order to realize their learning goals given that ‘imperfect practice

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makes for imperfect skills’. Act-R theory assumes that so long as an individual practices, he or she will be practising the right skills to reach their learning goals. If one is to practise the wrong skills and form bad habits, then it would be ‘practice’ disabling and limiting effective skill development.

Learning can be viewed as a process of realignment between socially defined competence and personal experience. This process can cause positive identification or dissonant identification within the community. The focus on identity adds a human dimension to the notion of practice. It is not just about individual learning techniques and dispositions. According to Wenger (1998), learning involves becoming. For him, knowledge and the knower are not separated. Only with this perspective can practice be enabling. In this way, gaining a competence is transformed into becoming someone for whom the competence is a meaningful way of living in the world. The history of practice, the importance of what drives the community, the relationships that shape it, and the identities of members in the community all provide resources for learning – both for newcomers and oldtimers alike (Wenger, 1998).

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Footnotes1Mental fielding errors take the form of throwing to the wrong base or failing to throw the ball to the correct fielder.2Hriniak proposed hitting the ball up the middle, to swing down on the ball, or to take the upper hand off the bat at the

end of their swing. Williams looked at it as a science and advocated an inside-out stroke and taking the first pitch to improve your statistical advantage of hitting. Gwynn proposed a balanced stance, pulling the bottom hand and hitting for average.

3SKLZ practice nets are sturdy and portable batting safety nets.4Defensive trainers to allow players to throw hard at small wired targets and to judge line-dri9ve returns and pop-ups.